TERMS STARTING WITH
preferences, fancies, phantasies, strong insistences and to elimi- nate the mental and vital ego’s pressure which sets the conscious- ness to work in the service of its o^vn claims and desires. Other- wise these things will come io with force and claim to be intui- tions, inspirations and the rest of it or if any intuitions come, they can be twisted and spoiled by the mixture of these forces of the Ignorance.
TERMS ANYWHERE
Argumentum ad populum: An argument attempting to sway popular feeling or to win people's support by appealing to their sentimental weaknesses; it may avail itself of patriotism, group interests and loyalties, and customary preferences, rather than of facts and reasons. -- R.B.W.
Arrow's impossibility theorem - A mathematical result showing that, under certain assumed conditions, there is no scheme for aggregating individual preferences into a valid set of social preferences
preferences, fancies, phantasies, strong insistences and to elimi- nate the mental and vital ego’s pressure which sets the conscious- ness to work in the service of its o^vn claims and desires. Other- wise these things will come io with force and claim to be intui- tions, inspirations and the rest of it or if any intuitions come, they can be twisted and spoiled by the mixture of these forces of the Ignorance.
carita. (T. spyod pa; C. xing; J. gyo; K. haeng 行). In Sanskrit and PAli, "conduct," "behavior," or "temperament"; an alternative form is Sanskrit caryA (P. cariyA). As "behavior," carita is typically bifurcated into either good (sucarita) or bad (S. duscarita; P. duccarita) conduct. As "temperament," carita is used to indicate six general character types, which are predominantly biased toward the negative temperaments of greedy (RAGA), hateful (S. DVEsA; P. dosa), and deluded (MOHA), or the more positive temperaments of faithful (S. sRADDHA; P. saddhA), intelligent (BUDDHI), and discursive (S. VITARKA; P. vitakka), a taxonomy found in the VISUDDHIMAGGA. The first three types of temperaments are negative and thus need to be corrected. (1) A greedy temperament is constantly searching out new sensory experiences and clings to things that are not beneficial. (2) A hateful temperament is disaffected, always finding imaginary faults in others; along with the intelligent temperament, he is less prone to clinging than the other character types. (3) A deluded temperament is agitated and restless, because he is unable to make up his mind about anything and follows along with others' decisions. The latter three types of temperaments are positive and thus need to be enhanced. (4) A faithful temperament is like a greedy type who instead cultivates wholesome actions and clings to what is beneficial. (5) An intelligent temperament is like a hateful type who performs salutary actions and points out real faults; along with the hateful temperament, he is less prone to clinging than the other character types. (6) A discursive temperament is characterized by a restlessness of mind that constantly flits from topic to topic and vacillates due to his constant conjecturing; if these discursive energies can be harnessed, however, that knowledge may lead to wisdom. The Visuddhimagga also provides detailed guidelines for determining a person's temperament by observing their posture, their preferences in food, and the sort of mental concomitants with which they are typically associated. This knowledge of temperaments is important as a tool of practice (BHAVANA), because in the Visuddhimagga's account of visualization (P. KASInA) exercises, the practitioner is taught to use an appropriate kasina device or meditation topic (P. KAMMAttHANA) either to mitigate the influence of the negative temperaments or enhance the influence of the positive ones. Thus, a practitioner with a greedy temperament is advised to emphasize the cemetery contemplations on foulness (S. AsUBHABHAVANA; P. asubhabhAvanA) and mindfulness of the body (S. KAYANUPAsYANA; P. kAyAnupassanA; see also SMṚTYUPASTHANA); the hateful temperament, the four divine abidings (BRAHMAVIHARA) and the four color kasinas (of blue, yellow, red, white); the deluded temperament, mindfulness of breathing (S. ANAPANASMṚTI; P. AnApAnasati); the discursive temperament, also mindfulness of breathing; the faithful temperament, the first six recollections (S. ANUSMṚTI; P. anussati), viz., of the Buddha, the DHARMA, the SAMGHA, morality, generosity, and the divinities; and the intelligent temperament, the recollections of death and peace, the analysis of the four elements, and the loathsomeness of food. Suitable to all six temperaments are the other six kasinas (viz., of earth, water, fire, air, light, and empty space) and the immaterial absorptions (S. ARuPYAVACARADHYANA; P. arupAvacarajhAna). ¶ In the MAHAYANA, caryA, carita, and related terms (e.g., Sanskrit compounds such as duscara) refer specifically to the difficult course of action that a BODHISATTVA pursues in order to reach the goal of enlightenment. These actions include the unending search or pilgrimage for a teacher, the sacrifices required to meet with an authentic teacher who can teach MahAyAna doctrines (see SADAPRARUDITA, SUDHANA), and the difficult practices of charity, such as giving away all possessions, including family members and even one's body (see DEHADANA; SHESHEN). The JATAKAMALA of sura, the BODHICARYAVATARA of sANTIDEVA, and to a certain extent the BUDDHACARITA of AsVAGHOsA set forth a model of the authentic bodhisattva's behavior for aspirants to emulate. In Buddhist TANTRA, caryA refers to a code of ritual purity, and to an esoteric practice called "yoga with signs" (SANIMITTAYOGA) followed by CARYATANTRA practitioners.
C+- ::: (language) (C More or Less) A subject-oriented language (SOL). Each C+- class instance, known as a subject, holds hidden members, known as prejudices, agendas or undeclared preferences, which are impervious to outside messages; as well as public members, known as boasts or claims.The following C operators are overridden as shown: > better than worse than why-not interactions are aided by the special conditional EVENIFNOT X THEN Y.C+- supports information hiding and, among friend classes only, rumor sharing. Borrowing from the Eiffel lexicon, non-friend classes can be killed by arranging contracts. Note that friendships are intransitive, volatile and non-Abelian.Operator precedence rules can be suspended with the directive
C+- "language, humour" (C More or Less) A subject-oriented language (SOL). Each C+- {class} instance, known as a subject, holds hidden {members}, known as prejudices, agendas or undeclared preferences, which are impervious to outside messages; as well as public members, known as boasts or claims. The following {C} {operators} are overridden as shown: " better than " worse than "" way better than "" forget it ! not on your life == comparable, other things being equal !== get a life, guy! C+- is {strongly typed}, based on stereotyping and self-righteous logic. The {Boolean} {variables} TRUE and FALSE (known as constants in other, less realistic languages) are supplemented with CREDIBLE and DUBIOUS, which are fuzzier than Zadeh's traditional {fuzzy logic} categories. All Booleans can be declared with the modifiers strong and weak. Weak implication is said to "preserve deniability" and was added at the request of the DoD to ensure compatibility with future versions of {Ada}. Well-formed falsehoods (WFFs) are {assignment}-compatible with all Booleans. What-if and why-not interactions are aided by the special conditional EVENIFNOT X THEN Y. C+- supports {information hiding} and, among {friend classes} only, rumor sharing. Borrowing from the {Eiffel} lexicon, non-friend classes can be killed by arranging contracts. Note that friendships are {intransitive}, {volatile} and non-{Abelian}. {Operator precedence} rules can be suspended with the dwim {pragma}, known as the "{Do what I mean}". {ANSIfication} will be firmly resisted. C+-'s slogan is "Be Your Own Standard." [{Jargon File}] (1999-06-15)
Condorcet paradox - The failure of majority rule to produce transitive preferences for society constant returns to scale the property whereby long run average total cost stays the same as the quantity of output changes.
Despite the best efforts of the king of Tibet more than a thousand years ago, it has always been difficult for scholars of Buddhism to agree on translations. That difficulty persists in the present work for a variety of reasons, including the different ways that Buddhist scholiasts chose to translate technical terms into their various languages over the centuries, the preferences of the many modern scholars whose works we consulted, and the relative stubbornness of the authors. As a result, there will inevitably be some variation in the renderings of specific Buddhist terminology in the pages that follow. In our main entries, however, we have tried to guide users to the range of possible English translations that have been used to render a term. In addition, a significant effort has been made to provide the original language equivalencies in parentheses so that specialists in those languages can draw their own conclusions as to the appropriate rendering.
Either sort of enquiry involves an investigation into the meaning of ethical statements, their truth and falsity, their objectivity and subjectivity, and the possibility of systematizing them under one or more first principles. In neither case is ethics concerned with our conduct or our ethical judgments simply as a matter of historical or anthropological record. It is, however, often said that the first kind of enquiry is not ethics but psychology. In both cases it may be said that the aim of ethics, as a part of philosophy, is theory not practice, cognition not action, even though it be added at once that its theory is for the sake of practice and its cognition a cognition of how to live. But some mornlists who take the second approach do deny that ethics is a cognitive discipline or science, namely those who hold that ethical first principles are resolutions or preferences, not propositions which may be true or false, e.g., Nietzsche, Santayana, Russell.
Financial planner - A professional engaged in providing personal financial planning services to individuals. A financial planner assists a client in the following ways: (1) assesses a client's financial history, such as tax returns, investments, retirement plan, wills, and insurance policies; (2) helps decide on a financial plan, based on personal and financial goals, history, and preferences; (3) identifies financial areas where a client may need help, such as building up retirement income or improving investment return; (4) prepares a financial plan based on the individual situation and discusses it thoroughly; (5) helps implement the financial plan, including referring the client to specialists, such as lawyers or accountants, if necessary; and (6) reviews the situation and financial plan periodically and suggests changes when needed.
global index ::: (filename extension) (gid) The filename extension of a Windows 95 global index file. .gid files are created by the help browser internal to Windows 95 (also available for other Windows versions) for WinHelp files (hlp), as well as for storing user preferences, such as window position. (1997-01-30)
global index "filename extension" (gid) The filename extension of a {Windows 95} "global index" file. .gid files are created by the help {browser} internal to Windows 95 (also available for other Windows versions) for WinHelp files ({hlp}), as well as for storing user preferences, such as window position. (1997-01-30)
"One starts by an intense idea and will to know or reach the Divine and surrenders more and more one"s ordinary personal ideas, desires, attachments, urges to action or habits of action so that the Divine may take up everything. Surrender means that, to give up our little mind and its mental ideas and preferences into a divine Light and a greater Knowledge, our petty personal troubled blind stumbling will into a great, calm, tranquil, luminous Will and Force, our little, restless, tormented feelings into a wide intense divine Love and Ananda, our small suffering personality into the one Person of which it is an obscure outcome.” Letters on Yoga
“One starts by an intense idea and will to know or reach the Divine and surrenders more and more one’s ordinary personal ideas, desires, attachments, urges to action or habits of action so that the Divine may take up everything. Surrender means that, to give up our little mind and its mental ideas and preferences into a divine Light and a greater Knowledge, our petty personal troubled blind stumbling will into a great, calm, tranquil, luminous Will and Force, our little, restless, tormented feelings into a wide intense divine Love and Ananda, our small suffering personality into the one Person of which it is an obscure outcome.” Letters on Yoga
opinions and mental preferences may build a wall of arguments against the spiritual truth that has to be realised and refuse to accept it if it presents itself in a form which does not conform to its own previous ideas ::: so also it may prevent one from recog- nising the Divine if the Divine presents himself in a form for whidi the intellect is not prepared or which in any detail runs counter to its prejudgements and prejudices. One can depend on one’s reason in other matters provided the mind tries to be open and impartial and free from undue passion and is prepared to concede that it is not always right and may err ; but it is not safe to depend on it alone In matters which escape its jurisdiction, specially in spiritual realisation and in matters of yoga which belong to a different order of knowledge.
REJECTION. ::: The jjersonal effort required is a itficdon of the movements of the lower nature — rejection of the mind’s ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind ; rejection of
“Self-will in thought and action has, we have already seen, to be quite renounced if we would be perfect in the way of divine works; it has equally to be renounced if we are to be perfect in divine knowledge. This self-will means an egoism in the mind which attaches itself to its preferences, its habits, its past or present formations of thought and view and will because it regards them as itself or its own, weaves around them the delicate threads of I-ness’’ andmy-ness’’ and lives in them like a spider in its web. It hates to be disturbed, as a spider hates attack on its web, and feels foreign and unhappy if transplanted to fresh view-points and formations as a spider feels foreign in another web than its own. This attachment must be entirely excised from the mind.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Sellers' preferences - Allocation of commodities in excess demand by decisions of the sellers.
session "networking" 1. A lasting connection between a user (or user agent) and a {peer}, typically a {server}, usually involving the exchange of many packets between the user's computer and the server. A session is typically implemented as a layer in a network {protocol} (e.g. {telnet}, {FTP}). In the case of protocols where there is no concept of a session layer (e.g. {UDP}) or where sessions at the {session layer} are generally very short-lived (e.g. {HTTP}), {virtual} sessions are implemented by having each exchange between the user and the remote host include some form of {cookie} which stores state (e.g. a unique session ID, information about the user's preferences or authorisation level, etc.). See also {login}. 2. A lasting connection using the {session layer} of a networking protocol. (1997-08-03)
session ::: (networking) 1. A lasting connection between a user (or user agent) and a peer, typically a server, usually involving the exchange of many packets between the user's computer and the server. A session is typically implemented as a layer in a network protocol (e.g. telnet, FTP).In the case of protocols where there is no concept of a session layer (e.g. UDP) or where sessions at the session layer are generally very short-lived (e.g. unique session ID, information about the user's preferences or authorisation level, etc.).See also login.2. A lasting connection using the session layer of a networking protocol. (1997-08-03)
Taste: The faculty of judging art without rules, through sensation and experience. The ensemble of preferences shown by an artist in his choice of elements from nature and tradition, for his works of art.
"To have the true intuition one must get rid of the mind"s self-will, and the vital"s also, their preferences, fancies, fantasies, strong insistences and eliminate the mental and vital ego"s pressure which sets the consciousness to work in the service of its own claims and desires.” Letters on Yoga*
“To have the true intuition one must get rid of the mind’s self-will, and the vital’s also, their preferences, fancies, fantasies, strong insistences and eliminate the mental and vital ego’s pressure which sets the consciousness to work in the service of its own claims and desires.” Letters on Yoga
user-unctuous "jargon" (By analogy with {user-friendly} and {user-obsequious}) User-interfaces that attempt to soothe (or, some would say, stupify) users instead of cooperating with them. Common "features" of user-unctuous systems include: icons of happy faces; mellow colors; melodic sound effects or even mood music; help tips appearing unbidden and at unhelpful moments; and a cloying tone either in system messages ("Oops! I couldn't seem to find my old preferences file! I do think I'll have to make a new one! Please press OK to continue!") or in labelling of system components (such as the main hard drive being labelled "Your Hard Drive" -- or, with infantile pronoun-reversal, "My Hard Drive"). (1999-06-27)
will, self ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Self-will in thought and action has, we have already seen, to be quite renounced if we would be perfect in the way of divine works; it has equally to be renounced if we are to be perfect in divine knowledge. This self-will means an egoism in the mind which attaches itself to its preferences, its habits, its past or present formations of thought and view and will because it regards them as itself or its own, weaves around them the delicate threads of I-ness'' andmy-ness"" and lives in them like a spider in its web. It hates to be disturbed, as a spider hates attack on its web, and feels foreign and unhappy if transplanted to fresh view-points and formations as a spider feels foreign in another web than its own. This attachment must be entirely excised from the mind.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
KEYS (10k)
8 The Mother
2 Sri Aurobindo
1 Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
1 Taoist proverb
1 Carl Sagan
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9 The Mother
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9 Carl Sagan
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1:The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
~ Taoist proverb,#KEYS
2:Logic can serve any turn proposed to it by the mind's preferences. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Russell, Eddington, Jeans, #KEYS
3:To understand the Divine we must have no more preferences.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, The Ways of Working of the Lord, 25, [T5],#KEYS
4:Tolerance is only the first step towards wisdom.
The need to tolerate indicates the presence of preferences.
He whose consciousness is one with the Supreme Consciousness meets all things with a perfect equanimity. ~ The Mother,#KEYS
5:We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. ~ Carl Sagan,#KEYS
6:There are four conditions for knowing the divine Will:
The first essential condition: an absolute sincerity.
Second: to overcome desires and preferences.
Third: to silence the mind and listen.
Fourth, to obey immediately when you receive the order. If you persist, you will perceive the Divine Will more and more clearly. But even before you know what it is, you can make an offering of your own will and you will see that all circumstances will be so arranged as to make you do the right thing
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951,#KEYS
7:It is here upon earth, in the body itself, that you must acquire a complete knowledge and learn to use a full and complete power. Only when you have done that will you be free to move about with entire security in all the worlds. Only when you are incapable of having the slightest fear, when you remain unmoved, for example, in the midst of the worst nightmare, can you say, "Now I am ready to go into the vital world." But this means the acquisition of a power and a knowledge that can come only when you are a perfect master of the impulses and desires of the vital nature. You must be absolutely free from everything that can bring in the beings of the darkness or allow them to rule over you; if you are not free, beware!
No attachments, no desires, no impulses, no preferences; perfect equanimity, unchanging peace and absolute faith in the Divine protection: with that you are safe, without it you are in peril. And as long as you are not safe, it is better to do like little chickens that take shelter under the mother's wings. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#KEYS
8:keep faith :::
We must have faith that always what is for the best happens. We may for the moment not consider it as the best because we are ignorant and also blind, because we do not see the consequences of things and what will happen later. But we must keep the faith that if it is like that, if we rely on the Divine, if we give Him the full charge of ourselves, if we let Him decide everything for us, well, we must know that it is always what is best for us that happens. This is an absolute fact. To the extent to which you surrender, the best happens to you. This may not be in conformity with what you would like, your preferences or desire, because these things are blind: it is the best from thespiritual point of view, the best for your progress, your development, your spiritual growth, your true life. It is always that. And you must keep this faith, because faith is the expression of a trust in the Divine and the full self-giving you make to the Divine. And when you make it, it is something absolutely marvellous. That's a fact, these are not just words, you understand, it is a fact. When you look back, all kinds of things which you did not understand when they happened to you, you realise as just the thing which was necessary in order to compel you to make the needed progress. Always, without exception. It is our blindness which prevents us from seeing it. ~ The Mother,#KEYS
9:In all that is done in the universe, the Divine through his Shakti is behind all action but he is veiled by his Yoga Maya and works through the ego of the Jiva in the lower nature.
In Yoga also it is the Divine who is the Sadhaka and the Sadhana; it is his Shakti with her light, power, knowledge, consciousness, Ananda, acting upon the adhara and, when it is opened to her, pouring into it with these divine forces that makes the Sadhana possible. But so long as the lower nature is active the personal effort of the Sadhaka remains necessary.
The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender, -
an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing - the mind's will, the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature;
rejection of the movements of the lower nature - rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind, - rejection of the vital nature's desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, - rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may establish itself in a body growing always more divine;
surrender of oneself and all one is and has and every plane of the consciousness and every movement to the Divine and the Shakti.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother,#KEYS
10:Sweet Mother, how can we cut the knot of the ego?
How to cut it? Take a sword and strike it (laughter), when one becomes conscious of it. For usually one is not; we think it quite normal, what happens to us; and in fact it is very normal but we think it quite good also.So to begin with one must have a great clear-sightedness to become aware that one is enclosed in all these knots which hold one in bondage. And then, when one is aware that there's something altogether tightly closed in there - so tightly that one has tried in vain to move it - then one imagines one's will to be a very sharp sword-blade, and with all one's force one strikes a blow on this knot (imaginary, of course, one doesn't take up a sword in fact), and this produces a result. Of course you can do this work from the psychological point of view, discovering all the elements constituting this knot, the whole set of resistances, habits, preferences, of all that holds you narrowly closed in. So when you grow aware of this, you can concentrate and call the divine Force and the Grace and strike a good blow on this formation, these things so closely held, like that, that nothing can separate them. And at that moment you must resolve that you will no longer listen to these things, that you will listen only to the divine Consciousness and will do no other work except the divine work without worrying about personal results, free from all attachment, free from all preference, free from all wish for success, power, satisfaction, vanity, all this.... All this must disappear and you must see only the divine Will incarnated in your will and making you act. Then, in this way, you are cured.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#KEYS
11:Sweet Mother, how can we cut the knot of the ego?
How to cut it? Take a sword and strike it (laughter), when one becomes conscious of it. For usually one is not; we think it quite normal, what happens to us; and in fact it is very normal but we think it quite good also.So to begin with one must have a great clear-sightedness to become aware that one is enclosed in all these knots which hold one in bondage. And then, when one is aware that there's something altogether tightly closed in there - so tightly that one has tried in vain to move it - then one imagines one's will to be a very sharp sword-blade, and with all one's force one strikes a blow on this knot (imaginary, of course, one doesn't take up a sword in fact), and this produces a result. Of course you can do this work from the psychological point of view, discovering all the elements constituting this knot, the whole set of resistances, habits, preferences, of all that holds you narrowly closed in. So when you grow aware of this, you can concentrate and call the divine Force and the Grace and strike a good blow on this formation, these things so closely held, like that, that nothing can separate them. And at that moment you must resolve that you will no longer listen to these things, that you will listen only to the divine Consciousness and will do no other work except the divine work without worrying about personal results, free from all attachment, free from all preference, free from all wish for success, power, satisfaction, vanity, all this.... All this must disappear and you must see only the divine Will incarnated in your will and making you act. Then, in this way, you are cured.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#KEYS
12:THE FOUR FOUNDATIONAL PRACTICES
Changing the Karmic Traces
Throughout the day, continuously remain in the awareness that all experience is a dream. Encounter all things as objects in a dream, all events as events in a dream, all people as people in a dream.
Envision your own body as a transparent illusory body. Imagine you are in a lucid dream during the entire day. Do not allow these reminders to be merely empty repetition. Each time you tell yourself, "This is a dream," actually become more lucid. Involve your body and your senses in becoming more present.
Removing Grasping and Aversion
Encounter all things that create desire and attachment as the illusory empty, luminous phenomena of a dream. Recognize your reactions to phenomena as a dream; all emotions, judgments, and preferences are being dreamt up. You can be certain that you are doing this correctly if immediately upon remembering that your reaction is a dream, desire and attachment lessen.
Strengthening Intention
Before going to sleep, review the day and reflect on how the practice has been. Let memories of the day arise and recognize them as memories of dream. Develop a strong intention to be aware in the coming night's dreams. Put your whole heart into this intention and pray strongly for success.
Cultivating Memory and joyful Effort
Begin the day with the strong intention to maintain the practice. Review the night, developing happiness if you remembered or were lucid in your dreams. Recommit yourself to the practice, with the intention to become lucid if you were not, and to further develop lucidity if you were. At any time during the day or evening it is good to pray for success in practice. Generate as strong an intention as possible. This is the key to the practice, ~ Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep,#KEYS
13:I have already told you this several times. When you are in a particular set of circumstances and certain events take place, these events often oppose your desire or what seems best to you, and often you happen to regret this and say to yourself, "Ah! how good it would have been if it were otherwise, if it had been like this or like that", for little things and big things.... Then years pass by, events are unfolded; you progress, become more conscious, understand better, and when you look back, you notice―first with astonishment, then later with a smile―that those very circumstances which seemed to you quite disastrous or unfavourable, were exactly the best thing that could have happened to you to make you progress as you should have. And if you are the least bit wise you tell yourself, "Truly, the divine Grace is infinite."
So, when this sort of thing has happened to you a number of times, you begin to understand that in spite of the blindness of man and deceptive appearances, the Grace is at work everywhere, so that at every moment it is the best possible thing that happens in the state the world is in at that moment. It is because our vision is limited or even because we are blinded by our own preferences that we cannot discern that things are like this.
But when one begins to see it, one enters upon a state of wonder which nothing can describe. For behind the appearances one perceives this Grace―infinite, wonderful, all-powerful―which knows all, organises all, arranges all, and leads us, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, towards the supreme goal, that is, union with the Divine, the awareness of the Godhead and union with Him.
Then one lives in the Action and Presence of the Grace a life full of joy, of wonder, with the feeling of a marvellous strength, and at the same time with a trust so calm, so complete, that nothing can shake it any longer. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1956, 8 August 1956,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:There are as many preferences as there are men. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 2:The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. ~ jianzhi-sengcan, @wisdomtrove 3:One's sanctions for truth and goodness are established largely by individual preferences. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 4:Be free from predilections and preferences and the mind with its burden of sorrow will be no more. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 5:Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about - you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 6:Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 7:When you put your preferences on the altar of your life and say: THIS. THIS is what compels me. The real you emerges. ~ danielle-laporte, @wisdomtrove 8:The great way is not difficult if you don't cling to good or bad. Just let go of your preferences; and everything will become perfectly clear. ~ jianzhi-sengcan, @wisdomtrove 9:But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 10:Every Child Has a Thinking Style: A Guide to Recognizing and Fostering Each Child's Natural Gifts and Preferences - to Help Them Learn, Thrive, and Achieve. Book by Lanna Nakone, April 4, 2006. ~ denis-waitley, @wisdomtrove 11:To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 12:The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences... I f you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind. ~ jianzhi-sengcan, @wisdomtrove 13:Two and two make four. Nature doesn't ask your advice. She isn't interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 14:You didn't come forth to align the world, to unite the world. You didn't come forth to do anything other than have your experience give birth to your preferences, align with your own preferences, and live happily ever after. ~ esther-hicks, @wisdomtrove 15:The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. ~ jianzhi-sengcan, @wisdomtrove 16:When social forces press for the rejection of age-old Truth, then those who reject it will seek meaning in their own truth. These truths will rarely be Truth at all; they will be only collections of personal preferences and prejudices. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 17:Have intentions but don't have expectations, and certainly don't have requirements. Do not become addicted to a particular result. Do not even prefer one. Elevate your Addictions to Preferences, and your Preferences to Acceptances. ~ neale-donald-walsch, @wisdomtrove 18:The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 19:The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind. ~ jianzhi-sengcan, @wisdomtrove 20:Harmony, liberal intercourse with all Nations, are recommended by policy, humanity and interest. But even our Commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand: neither seeking nor granting exclusive favours or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of Commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing with Powers so disposed; in order to give trade a stable course. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 21:I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove 22:Tranquility… involves not acting based on the feeling tone. For example, you don’t automatically move toward something just because it is pleasant. In the words of the Third Zen Patriarch: ‘The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences’. Set aside a period of your day—even just a minute long—to consciously release preferences for or against anything. Then extend this practice to more and more of your day. Your actions will be guided increasingly by your values and virtues, not by desires that are reactions to positive or negative feeling tones. ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 23:Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:To have preferences, but not exclusions. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
2:There are as many preferences as there are men. ~ Horace, #NFDB
3:...our preferences do not determine what's true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
4:Have strong preferences and Be easy to please ~ Danielle LaPorte, #NFDB
5:declared preferences and revealed preferences.) ~ Steven D Levitt, #NFDB
6:a person with unusual sexual preferences. ~ Oxford University Press, #NFDB
7:I don't have acknowledged preferences of characters. ~ Christian Bale, #NFDB
8:We learn our sexual preferences and orientations. ~ Virginia E Johnson, #NFDB
9:The expression of preferences is the essence of love. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
10:To understand the Divine we must have no more preferences. ~ The Mother, #NFDB
11:Darling, I have a penis. Ergo I have no preferences. ~ MaryJanice Davidson, #NFDB
12:The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. ~ Sengcan, #NFDB
13:suitable. As such, she wasn’t yet accustomed to his preferences, which ~ J C Reed, #NFDB
14:Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences. ~ Steven D Levitt, #NFDB
15:The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
~ Taoist proverb,#NFDB
16:God has no forms, no limbs, no qualities, no preferences, no prejudices. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
17:When the pressure comes, preferences give way while convictions hold firm. ~ Edwin Louis Cole, #NFDB
18:We take simple preferences and turn them into conditions for our own happiness. ~ Richard Carlson, #NFDB
19:In fact, when it comes to TV, I'm not even sure what my real, true preferences are. ~ Hank Stuever, #NFDB
20:I’m a novelist,” Ruth said. “I can’t help it. My narrative preferences are all I’ve got. ~ Ruth Ozeki, #NFDB
21:One's sanctions for truth and goodness are established largely by individual preferences. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
22:There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory. ~ Pauline Kael, #NFDB
23:Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion. ~ Alberto Manguel, #NFDB
24:I think the American people should express their preferences and we'll accept their choice. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
25:Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
26:My reading preferences are kind of all over the board - I read nonfiction, I read graphic novels. ~ Dav Pilkey, #NFDB
27:A true gentleman doesn’t prefer blondes. A true gentleman doesn’t have any preferences whatsoever. ~ Matt LeBlanc, #NFDB
28:[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite. ~ Paul Krugman, #NFDB
29:Every person professes to love good and hate evil, but in his actions his real preferences emerges. ~ Piers Anthony, #NFDB
30:Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same. ~ David Epstein, #NFDB
31:Scholars are beginning to understand that segregation does not reflect the preferences of whites alone. ~ Jared Taylor, #NFDB
32:One has to respect the preferences of another creature, no matter its size, and I did so gladly. ~ Elisabeth Tova Bailey, #NFDB
33:We overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability. ~ Dan Gilbert, #NFDB
34:Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes. tail. They can't help but have preferences. ~ Chris Bohjalian, #NFDB
35:the Founders were concerned that the will of the people could easily become the preferences of the mob. ~ Condoleezza Rice, #NFDB
36:When people change their irrational beliefs to undogmatic flexible preferences, they become less disturbed. ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
37:For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is—a hopeless mirage ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
38:No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
39:Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about - you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
40:These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
41:To see a thing uncolored by one’s own personal preferences and desires is to see it in its own pristine simplicity. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
42:For when moral convictions are reduced to arbitrary preferences, then they can no longer be debated rationally. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
43:Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves. ~ Alan Hirsch, #NFDB
44:If we demand things in worship that can't be in every culture, then we're demanding cultural preferences, not biblical. ~ Ed Stetzer, #NFDB
45:God knows, as a minority, gay people have taken serious lumps for their sexual preferences. As has every minority. ~ William Friedkin, #NFDB
46:Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
47:We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
48:Logic can serve any turn proposed to it by the mind’s preferences. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Russell, Eddington, Jeans, #NFDB
49:Lots of data gets collected through the latest technology today, and not all of it is about people's consumer preferences. ~ Lisa Randall, #NFDB
50:Your being is real and it gets to have everything. It gets to have your preferences, your person, and all of your plans. ~ John de Ruiter, #NFDB
51:God tells us not to judge one another, no matter what anyone's sexual preferences are or if they're black, brown or purple. ~ Dolly Parton, #NFDB
52:To understand the Divine we must have no more preferences.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, The Ways of Working of the Lord, 25, [T5],#NFDB
53:I don't think your God has ever advised you otherwise. You hear only what you want. He only ever commands your preferences. ~ Philippa Gregory, #NFDB
54:When rights become merely legal claims attached to interests and preferences, the stage is set for political and social conflict. ~ David Boaz, #NFDB
55:Love means giving up - yielding my preferences, comfort, goals, security, money, energy, or time for the benefit of someone else. ~ Rick Warren, #NFDB
56:As companies compete to embrace customer preferences through finer segmentation, they often risk creating too-small target markets. ~ W Chan Kim, #NFDB
57:China cares about its reputation and doesn't want to be known as the nation whose preferences drove the extinction of elephants. ~ Wayne Pacelle, #NFDB
58:I never thought I’d fall in love with someone like Troy Brennan. As it turned out, love didn’t give a damn about personal preferences. ~ L J Shen, #NFDB
59:We have to be careful not to elevate our preferences to moral standards and judge others by them. We only do so to feel superior. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
60:But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
61:just watch without evaluating, investing worth in, or editorializing, commenting, and having preferences about what is witnessed. ~ David R Hawkins, #NFDB
62:Many people concluded that morality does not qualify as objective truth. It consists of merely personal feelings and preferences. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
63:people’s “declared preferences” — what they say they want — are far different from their “revealed preferences” — what they actually do. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
64:It's important for a couple to talk about their sexual preferences. On the other hand, the aura of the mysterious should be preserved. ~ Volkmar Sigusch, #NFDB
65:Members of the dying churches really didn’t want growth unless that growth met their preferences and allowed them to remain comfortable. ~ Thom S Rainer, #NFDB
66:The great way is not difficult if you don't cling to good or bad. Just let go of your preferences; and everything will become perfectly clear. ~ Sengcan, #NFDB
67:We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today. ~ Sandra Day O Connor, #NFDB
68:When morality is reduced to personal preferences and when no one can be held morally accountable, society quickly falls into disorder. ~ Charles W Colson, #NFDB
69:The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. ~ Keith Giles, #NFDB
70:Democrats single out glaring examples of tax preferences or spending priorities that favor the wealthy and Republicans cry 'class warfare!' ~ Dee Dee Myers, #NFDB
71:The only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
72:When asked direct questions about their interests and preferences, people tend to give answers they believe the questioner wants to hear. ~ Clotaire Rapaille, #NFDB
73:framing effects: the large changes of preferences that are sometimes caused by inconsequential variations in the wording of a choice problem. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
74:One must be humble, one must keep personal preferences and antipathies in the background, if one wishes to discover the realities of the world. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
75:I like it when people know my preferences up front and shape the world to my liking. It’s the perfect thing the morning after a gunshot wound.” She ~ Lauren Dane, #NFDB
76:They entrenched themselves in their preferences, their beliefs, their prejudices, and closed ranks against everything that was different ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
77:what consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated, and this means that consumers don’t in fact have a good handle on their own preferences ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
78:If the gospel is reduced because of our preferences or misunderstandings, we leave ourselves open to heresies and to attacking our brothers-in-arms. ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
79:The worship to which we are called in our renewed state is far too important to be left to personal preferences, whims, or marketing strategies. Pleasing ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
80:You'll often find that people's declared preferences - what they say they want - are far different from their revealed preferences - what they actually do. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
81:As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
82:I want judges on the Supreme Court who will not use that position to impose their personal policy preferences or political agenda on the American people. ~ John Cornyn, #NFDB
83:All of your desires, wants, or preferences emanate from you naturally and constantly, for you stand at the Leading Edge of a Universe that makes that so. ~ Esther Hicks, #NFDB
84:I am puzzled that Conway Morris apparently doesn't grasp the equally strong (and inevitable) personal preferences embedded in his own view of life. ~ Simon Conway Morris, #NFDB
85:Tom's [Brady] personal preferences on his footballs are something he can take about in much better detail and information than I could possibly provide. ~ Bill Belichick, #NFDB
86:Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted. ~ Dave Eggers, #NFDB
87:My best advice for someone considering adopting a pet is to take the time to really consider your lifestyle, home environment and personal preferences. ~ Elizabeth Holmes, #NFDB
88:Having a highly homogeneous background, education, values, preferences, etc, in the very early team is better than not - cuts down on time-wasting arguments. ~ Max Levchin, #NFDB
89:'Live and let life' used to be a noble approach to life. Now you're considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others. ~ John Stossel, #NFDB
90:Reading books in the genre you write is incredibly important when it comes to understanding the rules of your genre and the preferences of your target audience. ~ Emlyn Chand, #NFDB
91:We're making far too big a deal out of our sexual preferences. It's just another form of narcissism, and I think it can be a big problem and a tremendous obstacle. ~ Andrew Cohen, #NFDB
92:For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant! ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
93:Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences. ~ Gary Becker, #NFDB
94:Life is the will to power; our natural desire to dominate and reshape the world to fit our own preferences and assert our personal strength to the fullest degree. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
95:In daily terms, the work of listening is to be constantly worn free of our preconceptions and preferences so that nothing stands in the way of our direct experience of life. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
96:The only thing required of you is to allow all your raging desires to relax into preferences. Then everything will be done through you and for you, not by you. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
97:Often, the journey to greatness begins the moment our preferences for comfort and certainty are overruled by a greater purpose that requires challenge and contribution. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
98:For future reference, Harry, it is raspberry...although of course, if I were a Death Eater, I would have been sure to research my own jam preferences before impersonating myself. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
99:Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences-all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
100:Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
101:in order to find truth, one must be ready to give up those subjective preferences in favor of objective facts. And facts are best discovered through logic, evidence, and science. ~ Norman L Geisler, #NFDB
102:It seems to me that a lot of churches never even consider change because they care more about their own preferences than they do making the gospel accessible to the outside world. They ~ J D Greear, #NFDB
103:In truth, Jude suspected that Danny had no particular musical preferences, no strong likes or dislikes, and that the radio was just background sound, the auditory equivalent of wallpaper. ~ Joe Hill, #NFDB
104:But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
105:Ethics is an objective science, one that seeks to determine concrete standards of right and wrong. Values, on the other hand, refers to preferences. They are, in large measure, subjective. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
106:I'm about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
107:It is true that religions could not exist if the whole human race understood that God doesn’t have preferences, because a religion purports to be a statement of God’s preferences. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
108:I think we all know that quarterbacks, kickers, specialists have certain preferences on footballs. They know a lot more about it than I do. They're a lot more sensitive to it than I am. ~ Bill Belichick, #NFDB
109:...now the whole fucking world is different."
"It's about to get worse," Steve said.
"Then I'll call for food," Vincent said. "Mirren, this might be our last meal. Any preferences? ~ Erin Kellison,#NFDB
110:The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
111:productive and happy as possible. “And if I only indulge my preferences, I will never be able to replace myself with anyone other than another owner, someone just like me, someone with ~ Michael E Gerber, #NFDB
112:Compromising choices, preferences, and wants to be in a relationship are one thing, compromising who you are - the things ingrained in you, your beliefs, and your morals - are non-negotiable. ~ K Bromberg, #NFDB
113:Race and sexual preferences are two different things. One is a behavior-related and preference-related and one is something inherently - skin color, something obvious, that kind of stuff. ~ James Lankford, #NFDB
114:The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
115:Your personality is a result of your preferences, such as your inclination to introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can’t be used to predict emotional intelligence. ~ Travis Bradberry, #NFDB
116:What is more, as I mentioned before, I do not believe in love as a kind of spell, but I do believe in a series of pacts and mutual understandings, of shared amusements and of preferences. ~ Guadalupe Nettel, #NFDB
117:The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
118:This set of choices has a lot to tell us about the limits of human rationality. For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is—a hopeless mirage. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
119:As a cartoonist I do what I find funny. As an editor I have a broader approach realizing that humor is inherently subjective and I don't want my preferences to rule out what others might like. ~ Robert Mankoff, #NFDB
120:To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
121:I always prefer to start from a place of reality, not from my own projections and preferences. Humility is clearer-eyed than ego—and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
122:When a person speculates about my identity, it reveals something about their own background and preferences. If the canvas is blank; the only thing people can see on its surface is themselves. ~ John Twelve Hawks, #NFDB
123:Although you should not let your emotional responses dictate your allocation, you do need to sleep at night, and your personal preferences are an important part of your asset class structure. ~ William J Bernstein, #NFDB
124:We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are fundamentally different--cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences, and consciousness--but because our perception of them is different. ~ Melanie Joy, #NFDB
125:She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit—not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
126:The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors; and finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
127:My child's first word was "more," but and it's all about, "I want." "I'm going to tell you what I want and what I don't want." It's about my desire to express my preferences. And that is really innate. ~ Sheena Iyengar, #NFDB
128:Allan Bloom, in his book The Closing oftheAmerican Mind, chronicled the epidemic rise of moral relativism that reduces ethics to personal preferences rather than to objective norms for what is right and wrong. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
129:Strive for a life well lived. Each one with their own aims, preferences, and meaning. Always, of course, without harming other persons or preventing others from being able to form a good life for themselves. ~ Jose Gonzalez, #NFDB
130:The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences...I f you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind. ~ Sengcan, #NFDB
131:A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one’s personal history and that of one’s friends, interwoven with one’s tastes, preferences and character and constitutes a sort of unwritten autobiography. ~ Alfred Austin, #NFDB
132:In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
133:the greater the gender equity of a country, the smaller the gender gap in the importance of the financial resources of a partner (as well as in the importance of other preferences, like chastity and good looks).36 ~ Cordelia Fine, #NFDB
134:They all had their personal preferences when it came to guns, but they all adhered to the motto that many was sufficient but more was even better. If the zombie apocalypse ever occurred, they were definitely prepared. ~ Maya Banks, #NFDB
135:They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences. ~ James G March, #NFDB
136:In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish. A ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
137:This book offers many deep and powerful insights into optimizing your day-to-day rhythms. You’ll likely find that your work habits have drifted to accommodate your surroundings rather than to meet your preferences. ~ Jocelyn K Glei, #NFDB
138:Good humor, Jefferson added, “is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment’s consideration; ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
139:Luke is a wonderful man. He’s decent and kind. I’m more concerned about the sleazy women, and their S&M preferences, you’ll subject Kimmie to. Now, it’s time for you to get out of my house and out of my life.” “It’s ~ Nesly Clerge, #NFDB
140:In everyday speech, we call people reasonable if it is possible to reason with them, if their beliefs are generally in tune with reality, and if their preferences are in line with their interests and their values. The ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
141:Question thirty-five: Do you eat kidneys? Correct answer is (c) occasionally. Testing for food problems. If you ask directly about food preferences, they say, ‘I eat anything,’ and then you discover they’re vegetarian. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
142:The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself. You must turn the issues over in your mind at leisure, consider the many arguments, let them simmer, and after a long time turn your preferences into convictions. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
143:Tolerance is only the first step towards wisdom.
The need to tolerate indicates the presence of preferences.
He whose consciousness is one with the Supreme Consciousness meets all things with a perfect equanimity. ~ The Mother,#NFDB
144:Two and two make four. Nature doesn't ask your advice. She isn't interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
145:As Wilson puts it, what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preferences to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
146:We all have our particular preferences. Mine is gentle sex, the kind in which a man takes forever before he touches you down there. But most people are so guilty about sex that they want the crime and the punishment built in. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
147:I believe that if you go and ask a chief executive of a Goldman Sachs or a BP, and they answer you honestly they want monopolies, they want government subsidies, they want preferences - they're not interested in free markets. ~ Ian Bremmer, #NFDB
148:Let go of any conceptual associations you have regarding visual impressions. Let go of preferences or judgments...Your likes and dislikes...Just be present with the shapes and colors...focusing on them with bare attention. ~ B Alan Wallace, #NFDB
149:In Asia, the nation state still is extremely vital, and of course, then in Africa, a whole new pattern is emerging because the states in Africa reflected the preferences of the colonial powers when they were established. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
150:Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
151:It doesn't matter to me whether I go back to outer space or not [while acting]. The job's the same and I don't have any sort of genre preferences. I'm looking for a good story and a good character, whether earthbound or not. ~ Harrison Ford, #NFDB
152:The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When like and dislike are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction however and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. ~ Sengcan, #NFDB
153:Two and two do make four. Nature doesn't ask your advice. She isn't interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
154:Either we must give up the hope that societal preferences could be rational [in the economics sense] ... or we must accept dictatorship.” (Microeconomic Theory by Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael D. Whinston, and Jerry R. Green). ~ Presh Talwalkar, #NFDB
155:here's what making is-ness your business means: engage in your life with enthusiasm exactly as it is, regardless of your likes and dislikes, your preferences, ideas, beliefs, and opinions about how things should be or could be. ~ Marie Forleo, #NFDB
156:The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
157:Algorithms in our search engines and social media platforms shape what we receive based on our previous preferences and choice, confirming our natural inclinations to read things that confirm our beliefs rather than challenge them. ~ Ben Sasse, #NFDB
158:A preference for extraversion (seeing life in terms of the external world) or introversion (greater interest in the inner world of ideas) is independent of your preferences for sensing, thinking, intuition, and feeling. You ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
159:If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does that translate into?” “I hope I’ll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman.” “Wrong!” Avi said. “Sex is more complicated than that, Randy. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
160:as Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
161:I've found that little kids show a more distinct reaction when the songs are ones that everyone can enjoy together. Because people's preferences change with the different countries I visit, I go through trial and error to figure things out. ~ Yunho, #NFDB
162:When social forces press for the rejection of age-old Truth, then those who reject it will seek meaning in their own truth. These truths will rarely be Truth at all; they will be only collections of personal preferences and prejudices. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
163:Few endeavors, if any at all, I find to be inherently mature or inherently immature. Maturity is neither defined by one's particular preferences nor by one's particular activities; rather, it is defined by the strength of one's character. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
164:The more intense the competition is, the greater, on average, is the resulting customization of offerings. As companies compete to embrace customer preferences through finer segmentation, they often risk creating too-small target markets. ~ W Chan Kim, #NFDB
165:The evidence from behavior genetics and twin studies indicating that 40
to 50 percent of the variance among people in temperament,
personality, and many political, economic, and social preferences are
accounted for by genetics. ~ Michael Shermer,#NFDB
166:The growth mindset is the belief that abilities can be cultivated. But it doesn’t tell you how much change is possible or how long change will take. And it doesn’t mean that everything , like preferences or values, can be changed. ~ Carol S Dweck, #NFDB
167:Disaster doesn't sort us out by preferences; it drags us into emergencies that require we act, and act altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save the neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
168:had had no communication by letter or message with the outer world: school-rules, school-duties, school-habits and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies—such was what I knew of existence. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
169:Christians have a way of crouching in their own culture instead of penetrating the one they live in with the gospel. Too many migrate to a faith that elevates issue debate and substitutes a set of personal preferences for the glorious gospel. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
170:beliefs create or constrain possibilities, desires lead to preferences among them, and intentions represent commitments to specific courses of action. Each of the primitive elements can evolve in time, which is why mental models have momentum. ~ Venkatesh G Rao, #NFDB
171:Career goals that once felt safe and certain can appear ludicrous, to use Darwin’s adjective, when examined in the light of more self-knowledge. Our work preferences and our life preferences do not stay the same, because we do not stay the same. ~ David Epstein, #NFDB
172:Let us each grasp a new idea this year. Let us grasp the awareness of what it is that makes us truly happy. Let us consider our personal preferences and learn how to recognize, then embrace, moments of happiness that are uniquely our own. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, #NFDB
173:Give ten children a toy box, and watch them select ten different toys, regardless of gender or religion or parental expectations. Children have preferences. The danger comes when they, as with any human, are denied those preferences for too long. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
174:It was like his beauty had been tailored to fit my preferences. I’d never even known I’d had any, but I knew now that if God had called me up to heaven, and told me that I was allowed to build a man to belong to me, I would have built myself a Kayden. ~ H D Gordon, #NFDB
175:The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
176:for believers in persecuted countries. We champion their sacrifice and willingness to stand for Christ, even at the cost of their own lives. Yet we consider laying aside our traditions and cultural preferences as an unreasonable expectation. ~ Erwin Raphael McManus, #NFDB
177:Together, maybe you and your new friend will discover that certain things have intrinsic value, and are not simply defined by their ability to maximise utility based on personal preferences — i.e. making the maximum number of our wishes come true. ~ Svend Brinkmann, #NFDB
178:you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
179:I have felt more passion with less comfort elsewhere: the mysterious deep half-blind preferences of human beings for each other, the quick probing tentacles that seek in the dark, why one inexplicably and yet certainly loves A and is indifferent to B. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
180:Should we play Twenty Questions?"
"How would that work in this situation?"
"I could try to guess your preferences."
"My preferences in a kiss?"
I nodded, our faces still very close together.
"My preference is simple—you. ~ Kasie West,#NFDB
181:So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
182:Give ten children a toy box, and watch them select ten different toys, regardless of gender or religion or parental expectations. Children have preferences. The danger comes when they, as with any human, are denied those preferences for too long. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
183: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, #NFDB
184:I've weeded out some past conditioning that dictates my preferences and prejudices; right now these people are as beautiful as I make them, things are as scary as I allow them to be, and as ugly and nasty as I create them. The world's a beautiful place. ~ Sarah Macdonald, #NFDB
185:She told me that after a lifetime “in service”—living in other people’s houses, taking care of other people’s things, and making no judgments—when the time came for her to buy a couch, or a lamp, or dishes, she discovered that she had no tastes or preferences. ~ Mia Farrow, #NFDB
186:When you decide to like something, I mean, you may feel you're sort of innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you're delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that, you know, you'd essentially like to be advertised to by this company. ~ Tim Wu, #NFDB
187:We must rouse in our people the unanimous wish for power in this sense, together with the determination to sacrifice on the altar of patriotism, not only life and property, but also private views and preferences in the interests of the common welfare. ~ Friedrich von Bernhardi, #NFDB
188:An election goes on every minute of the business day across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores and shops where the customers state their preferences and determine which company and which product shall be the leader today and which shall lead tomorrow. ~ Bruce Barton, #NFDB
189:We really become one—we might wear different clothes or have different sexual preferences or lifestyles than the person next to us, but really those are just details. The person inside is looking for the same thing as their neighbor—freedom, expression, acceptance, love. ~ Jewel, #NFDB
190:Many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
191:People think Biblical submission means you no longer have opinions, preferences and things like that—totally not true. It’s about preferring others over ourselves. All Christians are called to do that. I choose to give up my rights in order to bless another person. ~ Chautona Havig, #NFDB
192:Almost unknowingly, we all have a tendency to redefine Christianity according to our own tastes, preferences, church traditions, and cultural norms. Slowly, subtly, we take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into someone with whom we are a little more comfortable. We ~ David Platt, #NFDB
193:I am a man of cultivation; I have studied various remarkable books, but I cannot fathom the direction of my preferences; do I want to live or do I want to shoot myself, so to speak? But in order to be ready for all contingencies, I always carry a revolver in my pocket. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
194:In short, we should always ask ourselves how the other person's point of view might differ from our own. We should give weight to what we know about their priorities and preferences, to the history of the relationship between us, and to the context of the current situation. ~ Guy Winch, #NFDB
195:[after guard dogs frozen mid-attack] 'How long are the dogs going to stay hanging there like that?' ask Yulia. 'I want to make friends with them. Otherwise, i'll be left with a latent psychological complex that's bound to affect my personality and sexual preferences. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko, #NFDB
196:Both Bast and Sekhmet were often combined with the names and forms of other gods and goddesses to produce composite deities. This might have been to do with regional preferences, when the major local deity was desired to have the qualities of a number of other deities. ~ Storm Constantine, #NFDB
197:What these studies show is that when people are asked to give reasons for their preferences, they may struggle to find the words. Sometimes aspects of their reaction that are not the most important determinants of their overall feeling are nonetheless easiest to verbalize. ~ Barry Schwartz, #NFDB
198:Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
199:Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
200:It would take some time, Helen thought, for Quincy to become familiar with his new employer’s habits, preferences, and quirks. Fortunately Quincy had spent decades in the practice of managing volatile temperaments. Winterborne certainly couldn’t be any worse than the Ravenels. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
201:You know, it's so funny that the internet's become a series of traps where you do sort of innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference, I like this thing, and then therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences. ~ Tim Wu, #NFDB
202:Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn, one a political scientist and the other an economist, argue that “approval voting” allows voters to express their true preferences without concern for electability.8 Under approval voting, each voter may vote for as many candidates as he wishes. ~ Avinash K Dixit, #NFDB
203:Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
204:She had grown up knowing you cared for the one who had fallen and couldn’t get up. She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit—not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
205:The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
206:She had grown up knowing you cared for the one who had fallen and couldn't get up. She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit - not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
207:She had grown up knowing you cared for the one who had fallen and couldn’t get up. She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit – not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
208:I think fans are just obsessed with the 'Twilight' saga and then within it they might have preferences between if they're Team Jacob, Team Edward or Team Jasper. It just comes down to them loving the whole thing, and if they can get any of the boys from the book they are fine with that. ~ Kellan Lutz, #NFDB
209:Stereotypes are the mind's shorthand for dealing with complexities. They have two aspects: they are much blunter than reality; they are shaped to fit a man's preferences or prejudgments. Thus two principles are involved: differentiation or its lack, and biased preferential perception. ~ Robert E Lane, #NFDB
210:The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers’ dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima beans and eggplant (which seems about right to me, at least as far as the lima beans go). ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
211:When you are inhabiting a self that is fixed and set in place, you may think that you have attained something positive. As people say, “Now I know who I am.” What they really know is an imitation of a real self, a collection of habits, labels, and preferences that is entirely historical. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
212:You may concentrate on appearances all through the rest of your house, but in the bedroom comfort should be supreme. I think that bedrooms should also be very intimate rooms-they should express your personal preferences in every way...Of all the rooms in the house your bedroom is yours. ~ Dorothy Draper, #NFDB
213:My mind drifts back to the afternoon. Given what I understand of his preferences, I think he's been easy on me. Would I do it again? I can't even pretend to put up an argument against that. Of course I would, if he asked me—as long as he didn't hurt me and if it's the only way to be with him. ~ E L James, #NFDB
214:And yet in only a few hours we managed to erase her almost entirely. All of her things - bought, received, painstakingly selected; her tastes and preferences; all the random stuff accumulated over the years - all of it sorted, trashed, or packed up in less than a day. How easily we get erased. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
215:Can you be a little baby? The baby howls all day, yet its throat never gets hoarse - harmony at its height! The baby makes fists all day, yet its fingers never get cramped - virtue is all it holds to. The baby stares all day without blinking its eyes - it has no preferences in the world of externals. ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
216:And yet in only a few hours we've managed to erase her almost entirely. All of her things - bought, received, painstakingly selected; her tastes and preferences; all the random stuff accumulated over the years - all of it sorted, trashed, or packed up in less than a day. How easily we get erased. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
217:Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity). ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
218:Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. ~ George Will, #NFDB
219:Egoic consciousness is the one we all normally operate with, until we are told there is something else! Every culture teaches egoic consciousness in different ways. At that level it is all about me, my preferences, my choices, my needs, my desires and me and my group as the central reference point. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
220:The impact has been so profound that when Amazon engineer Greg Linden originally introduced doppelganger searches to predict readers’ book preferences, the improvement in recommendations was so good that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got to his knees and shouted, “I’m not worthy!” to Linden. ~ Seth Stephens Davidowitz, #NFDB
221:... the mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationalize subjective preferences, but to recognize objective reality and to help the heart revel in God. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
222:Our values are preferences. We hold them because we love them, enjoy them, and get pleasure from them. If we hold them in that context, we will be left in peace to enjoy them. The reason that pride arouses attack is because of the inference of being “better than,” which is part and parcel of pride. ~ David R Hawkins, #NFDB
223:Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values. ~ Kenneth E Boulding, #NFDB
224:We will never find joy in church membership when we are constantly seeking things our way. But paradoxically, we will find the greatest joy when we choose to be last. That's what Jesus meant when He said the last will be first. True joy means giving up our rights and preferences and serving everyone else. ~ Thom S Rainer, #NFDB
225:Because we each have a unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and sensitivities, it is impossible to prescribe a single approach that will work for everyone. The right solution for you will always be personal—an idiosyncratic combination of strategies based on your own work demands, habits, and preferences. ~ Jocelyn K Glei, #NFDB
226:Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole. ~ John Maynard Keynes, #NFDB
227:Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others. ~ Douglas Rushkoff, #NFDB
228:Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
229:Because we each have a unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and sensitivities, it is impossible to prescribe a single approach that will work for everyone. The right solution for you will always be personal—an idiosyncratic combination of strategies based on your own work demands, habits, and preferences. So ~ Jocelyn K Glei, #NFDB
230:By judicial conservative, I mean a judge who does not advance any political or policy preferences, but whose approach to constitutional and statutory interpretation involves fidelity to the text of the Constitution and adherence to the original understanding of that document or to the intent of its drafters. ~ Antonin Scalia, #NFDB
231:If Americans loved judicial activism, liberals wouldn't be lying about what it is. Judicial activism means making up constitutional rights in order to strike down laws the justices don't like based on their personal preferences. It's not judicial activism to strike down laws because they violate the Constitution. ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
232:The observation that women have identifiable preferences in reading matter was, of course, not original with Victorian entrepreneurs; since the eighteenth century, magazines written for men had angled for female readers with special departments. A few ephemera apart, the first periodical explicitly addressed to women. ~ Peter Gay, #NFDB
233:If you are observing someone you naturally dislike, or who reminds you of someone unpleasant in your past, you will tend to see almost any cue as unfriendly or hostile. You will do the opposite for people you like. In these exercises you must strive to subtract your personal preferences and prejudices about people. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
234:If you are antisocial, far northern Maine is the place for you. Of course, other preferences and characteristics besides not liking to have people around would help as well. You should be rugged, like living off the land, not care very much about eating out and cable TV, and have a healthy disdain for paved roads. ~ David Rosenfelt, #NFDB
235:One kind of feedback loop is the single-user feedback loop. This involves an algorithm built into the platform infrastructure that analyzes user activity, draws conclusions about the user’s interests, preferences, and needs, and recommends new value units and connections that the user is likely to find valuable. ~ Geoffrey G Parker, #NFDB
236:Trying to do good to people without God's help is no easier than making the sun shine at midnight. You discover that you've got to abandon all your own preferences, your own bright ideas, and guide souls along the road our Lord has marked out for them. You mustn't coerce them into some path of your own choosing. ~ Saint Therese of Lisieux, #NFDB
237:That's an incredibly serious thing if people think that the president of the United States can tell heads of law enforcement agencies, based on his own whim or his own personal preferences or friendships, that they should or should not pursue particular criminal cases against individuals. That's not how America works. ~ Preet Bharara, #NFDB
238:Men love a naked woman. But more than that, they love a confident naked woman. Now, everyone has a type, of course, and preferences about how tall or short, athletic or voluptuous, and there’s no discounting that. But a woman who loves her body, and knows what she wants? There’s nothing sexier than that. To a real man. ~ Alice Clayton, #NFDB
239:Imagine what our world would be like if everyone loved themselves so much that they weren’t threatened by other people’s opinions or skin colors or sexual preferences or talents or education or possessions or lack of possessions or religious beliefs or customs or their general tendency to just be whoever the hell they are. ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
240:Imagine what our world would be life if everyone loved themselves so much that they weren’t threatened by other people’s opinions or skin colours or sexual preferences or talents or education or possessions or lack of possessions or religious beliefs or customs or their general tendency to just be whoever the hell they are. ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
241:Personalization. Instruction is paced to learning needs, tailored to learning preferences, and tailored to the specific interests of different learners.Differentiation. Instruction is tailored to the learning preferences of different learners.Individualization. Instruction is paced to the learning needs of different learners. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
242:They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarrelled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care - yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
243:Trying to do good to people without God's help is no easier than making the sun shine at midnight. You discover that you've got to abandon all your own preferences, your own bright ideas, and guide souls along the road our Lord has marked out for them. You mustn't coerce them into some path of your own choosing. ~ Saint Therese of Lisieux, #NFDB
244:The goal...is not to change your desires and wishes but to persuade you to stop demanding that you absolutely must have what you wish-from yourself, from others, and from the world. You can by all means keep your wishes, preferences, and desires, but unless you prefer to remain needlessly anxious, not your grandiose demands. ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
245:A useful decision or choice is to decide to stop mentally talking about everything and refrain from interjecting comments, opinions, preferences, and value statements. It is therefore a discipline to just watch without evaluating, investing worth in, editorializing, commenting, or having preferences about what is witnessed. ~ David R Hawkins, #NFDB
246:The worship to which we are called in our renewed state is far too important to be left to personal preferences, whims, or marketing strategies. Pleasing God is at the heart of worship. Therefore, our worship must be informed at every point by the Word of God as we seek God’s own instructions for worship that is pleasing to Him. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
247:As a biblical Christian, I must not only affirm the inspiration of God’s Word; I must also consciously critique everything else in light of Scripture (otherwise all else will unconsciously conform my mind to the world, the flesh and the devil). I must make an effort to evaluate my beliefs and lifestyle preferences by God’s Word. ~ Randy Alcorn, #NFDB
248:Compassion is an astoundingly, frustratingly affirming force. It Loves the other enough to find beauty and meaning in what the rest of us lazily judge as good or bad. Ahava Love, the brand that has the other’s interests more in view than its own preferences being perfectly tended to, searches and finds the thing to celebrate. ~ Steve Daugherty, #NFDB
249:Miss Worthing wanted something fit for a duchess.” “That gown,” he said, “is fit for a bawdy-house chandelier.” “Well, your intended had . . . extravagant preferences.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I can’t even take the whole thing in. It looks like unicorn vomit. Or the pelt of some snow beast rumored to menace the Himalayas. ~ Tessa Dare, #NFDB
250:Superficially it's a problem if homosexuality is genetic - if the difference between people's sexual preferences is genetic - because at least a pure homosexual would be unlikely to reproduce and therefore pass on the genes. So the first question you ask is, is it actually genetic, and the answer is probably to some extent yes. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
251:Effectiveness in life does not come from focusing on what is automatic, easy, or natural for us. Rather, it is the result of how we consciously strive to meet life’s harder challenges, grow beyond our comforts, and deliberately work to overcome our biases and preferences, so that we may understand, love, serve, and lead others. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
252:I’ve always believed that as an author, I do 50% of the work of storytelling, and the reader does the other 50%. There’s no way I can control the story you tell yourself from my book. Your own experiences, preferences, prejudices, mood at the moment, current events in your life, needs and wants influence how you read my every word. ~ Shannon Hale, #NFDB
253:One of the great rules of life is that we all establish 'policies', although we call them habits or preferences or beliefs or techniques, which are useful to us, but which we continue to use after the reason for them has evaporated. We have a hard time seeing things as they are because we can never get what they were out of our heads. ~ Bill James, #NFDB
254:Love is love and shouldn’t upset anyone. So what else are they thinking about when they get upset at your partner preferences?” she asked reasonably, and then answered the question herself. “Their minds are in your pants and on what you do. And while they’re welcome to bury their brain in their own pants, they have no business in yours. ~ Lynsay Sands, #NFDB
255:Evidence that [feminine aesthetic preferences and ways of expressing oneself] may be hardwired comes from the fact that they typically appear early in childhood and often in contradiction to one's socialization. […] This indicates that some aspects of feminine verbal and aesthetic expression precede and/or supersede gender socialization. ~ Julia Serano, #NFDB
256:Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill. ~ Cyril Connolly, #NFDB
257:He would study any number of topics and had no real preferences, his many eyes enthusiastically moving back and forth as he read the pages at a steady clip. I don't believe he needed light, or eyes, to read, but I know he liked to mimic what he saw me doing. Perhaps he even thought it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
258:The surface level explanations of how things work, and the surface opinions and preferences, are created by the environment in which the person operates—like the waves on the surface of a lake. You’re not after these explanations, nor preferences or opinions. You’re interested in plumbing the depths to understand the currents flowing in her mind. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
259:I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me it was that first fall term in Hampden. So many things remain with me from that time, even now: those preferences in clothes and books and even food - aquired then and largely I must admit in adolescent emulation of the rest of the Greek class... ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
260:The worship to which we are called in our renewed state is far too important to be left to personal preferences, to whims, or to marketing strategies. It is the pleasing of God that is at the heart of worship. Therefore, our worship must be informed at every point by the Word of God as we seek God’s own instructions for worship that is pleasing to Him. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
261:According to the consumer mentality that epitomises our era, the customer is always right — so only I know what is good and bad for me. The coach's job is to help me learn about myself and my preferences, but not to dictate them to me. They must reflect my wishes and help me realise my goals. The coach asks questions, but the answers come from within me. ~ Svend Brinkmann, #NFDB
262:I had begun to realise how much I'd adapted to Keith's needs and preferences. Just small stuff: what time we went to bed, which side I slept on, not cooking cauliflower. Allowances and adaptions anyone in a long-term relationship has to make, accumulating over time. But I wasn't in a relationship anymore. I wanted to know what of myself needed to be reclaimed. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
263:There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes. ~ Kenneth Grahame, #NFDB
264:What we call the market is really a democratic process involving millions, and in some markets billions, of people making personal decisions that express their preferences. When you hear someone say that he doesn't trust the market, and wants to replace it with government edicts, he's really calling for a switch from a democratic process to a totalitarian one. ~ Walter E Williams, #NFDB
265:Although people’s preferences will change, God’s desire for us won’t. Others might not think we’re good enough, but God always will. And even if someone decides they don’t desire us anymore, God most certainly does! The truth is, when we belong to Jesus we are loved and accepted forever. We are covered in His goodness, and it’s His goodness that makes us good enough! ~ Renee Swope, #NFDB
266:Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promises of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
267:.« Nik has obviously spoken to Nat about my candy preferences.
Written in raspberry bullets is ‘I’m sorry’.
Written in green apple jellybeans is ‘I miss you’.
Written in cherry jellybeans is ‘I love you’.
My heart skips a beat at the last line.
Written in gummy bears is ‘Marry me’.
Did Nik just propose using candy?
Why, yes, brain. Yes, he did. » ~ Belle Aurora,#NFDB
268:[D]uring the twentieth century, as people became wealthier and the producer society turned gradually into the mass consumption society, an alternative vision of the self arose - a vision centered on the idea of individual preferences and personal fulfillment. The intrinsically moral term "character" fell out of favor and was replaced by the amoral term "personality. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
269:If voters are systematically mistaken about what policies work, there is a striking implication: They will not be satisfied by the politicians they elect. A politician who ignores the public’s policy preferences looks like a corrupt tool of special interests. A politician who implements the public’s policy preferences looks incompetent because of the bad consequences. ~ Bryan Caplan, #NFDB
270:Well, the world is vastly counted in favour of men at every level - except if you live in a civilised country and you’re sort of educated and middle-class, because then you’re almost certainly junior in your relationship and in a state of permanent, crippled apology. Your preferences are routinely mocked. There’s a huge, unfortunate lack of respect for anything male. ~ Steven Moffat, #NFDB
271:When the average child is now spending nearly eight hours a day in front of some kind of screen, many of their opinions and preferences are being shaped by the marketing campaigns you all create. And that’s where the problem comes in.. ... And I’m here today with one simple request - and that is to do even more and move even faster to market responsibly to our kids. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
272:Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
273:The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind. ~ Sengcan, #NFDB
274:The Italian-owned Benetton label, for example, manufactures its entire clothing line in white. Once the clothes are delivered to distribution centers, Benneton’s analysts assess what color or length is in vogue, at which point workers dye and cut the company’s shirts, jackets, pants and infant apparel to replicate the style and color preferences popular at the time. ~ Martin Lindstrom, #NFDB
275:By making book selections and sharing past favorites the first activity in which we engage as a class, I emphasize the prominence that reading will hold all year. I also reveal to students that I am knowledgeable about books and that I value their prior reading experiences and preferences. The book frenzy sets the tone for my class. Everyone reads every day, all year long. ~ Donalyn Miller, #NFDB
276:We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
277:The moment you realize that you aren't creating a cut-and-paste version of yourself, but rather nurturing a stunningly unique individual with thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears and opinions and preferences and plans and interests of their own is the moment parenting becomes an adventure instead of a challenge. It's a simple shift in perspective that creates a world of difference. ~ L R Knost, #NFDB
278:As we cannot afford to squander our natural resources of minerals, food, and beauty, so we cannot afford to discard any human resources of brains, skills, and initiative, even though it is women who possess them...a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
279:No, you are not because I am going to,” Roxbury said darkly, probably still angry about those pesky rumors about his preferences. “How could you deny me that satisfaction?” she asked. “Very well, my dear wife, we shall seek and destroy the Man About Town together,” Roxbury agreed. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” Julianna said sweetly, and her husband grinned. ~ Maya Rodale, #NFDB
280:It is important and vital is to keep that education for critical consciousness around intersectionalities, so that people are able to not focus on one thing and blame one group, but be able to look holistically at the way intersectionality informs all of us: whiteness, gender, sexual preferences, etc. Only then can we have a realistic handle on the political and cultural world we live within. ~ Bell Hooks, #NFDB
281:He asked whether Quincy knew what church his mother belonged to. He asked whether he himself had any religious preferences. Quincy said his mother belonged to the Christian Church of Fallen Angels. Or no, maybe it had another name. He couldn’t remember. You’re right, said Mr. Lawrence, it does have a different name, it’s the Christian Church of Angels Redeemed. That’s the one, said Quincy. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
282:Patriarchal ideology enlists a long list of mechanisms in service of this goal—including women’s internalization of the relevant social norms, narratives about women’s distinctive proclivities and preferences, and valorizing depictions of the relevant forms of care work as personally rewarding, socially necessary, morally valuable, “cool,” “natural,” or healthy (as long as women perform them). ~ Kate Manne, #NFDB
283:Over the past decade Stallman created a powerful editing program called Gnu-Emacs. But Gnu’s much more than just a text editor. It’s easy to customize to your personal preferences. It’s a foundation upon which other programs can be built. It even has its own mail facility built in. Naturally, our physicists demanded Gnu; with an eye to selling more computing cycles, we installed it happily. ~ Clifford Stoll, #NFDB
284:Donaldson believes that we owe it to our companions to respect their boundaries and to remember that some level of aggression is essential for any animal’s survival. Therefore it’s our job to learn their limits, control our expectations, and, if it comes to it, admit when we are in over our heads, seeking help from trained professionals. Every dog has individual quirks and preferences. Donaldson ~ Bronwen Dickey, #NFDB
285:In short, here's what making is-ness your business means: engage in your life with enthusiasm exactly as it is, regardless of your likes and dislikes, your preferences, ideas, beliefs, and opinions about how things should be or could be. Unconditionally allow things to be the way they are. When you deal with what is, or your is-ness, you can then choose who you'd like to be in relationship to that. ~ Marie Forleo, #NFDB
286:an essay in the Human Rights Reader, Rorty suggested that the basis for human rights is not rationality or moral law but “what Baier calls ‘a progress of sentiments.’…It is the result of what I have been calling ‘sentimental education.’”17 So the basis for morality, in Rorty’s view, is “sentiment.” We are back to preferences and tastes. But whose sentiments? Rorty’s? A Nazi’s? Or someone else’s? ~ Francis S Collins, #NFDB
287:Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
288:The Way of the Superior Man is a book written explicitly for people who have already achieved respect for other genders and sexual preferences, and who consider men and women to be social, economic, and political equals. Now, we are ready to move to the next stage, grounded in this mutual respect and equality, but celebrating the sexual and spiritual passions inherent in the masculine/feminine polarity. ~ David Deida, #NFDB
289:As living stones, we are part of something God is doing that is bigger than we are as individuals, more important than our own agendas and preferences. Christianity is not so much about God saving a large number of individuals (although he will!). It is about what he is building us into together —his church. We are living stones that God is using to build his spiritual house —the people he wants to live inside. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
290:Too often the result of affirmative action has been an artificial diversity that gives the appearance of parity between blacks and whites that has not yet been achieved in reality...Preferences tend to attack one form of discrimination with another...Affirmative action encourages a victim-focused identity, and sends the message that there is more power in our past suffering than in our present achievements. ~ Shelby Steele, #NFDB
291:Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
292:If love is real, it’s simply a comfort level in a relationship built on a network of dually respected qualities and preferences. It’s two people that both acknowledge they like most of the same things and enjoy being with the other person and, eventually, they agree to just do those things together. They have a different capacity for feelings for that person over most others. Maybe that’s what everyone calls love. ~ Adriana Locke, #NFDB
293:There’s also the inconvenient truth that I am friends with many millennials and they are actually quite nice and very smart. They also have a nonchalant and unselfconscious acceptance of all kinds of different cultures and races and sexual preferences; in terms of equality and tolerance they are the most enlightened generation yet. But on the other hand, they have beards and understand technology, so fuck them. ~ Frank Conniff, #NFDB
294:But the shock wears off, more quickly for some, but eventually for most. Fast food and alcohol are seductive, and I didn’t fight too hard. Your old routine is easy to fall back into, preferences and tastes return. It’s not hard to be a fussy, overstuffed American. After a couple of months, home is no longer foreign, and you are free to resume your old life. I thought I did. Resume my old life, that is. I was wrong. ~ Brian Castner, #NFDB
295:Differentiated Instruction is a teaching philosophy based on the premise that teachers should adapt instruction to student differences. Rather than marching students through the curriculum lockstep, teachers should modify their instruction to meet students' varying readiness levels, learning preferences, and interests. Therefore, the teacher proactively plans a variety of ways to 'get it' and express learning. ~ Carol Ann Tomlinson, #NFDB
296:Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero,#NFDB
297:They don't need the support of the majority. Sometimes all that's needed is a group of people loud enough and influential enough to to change the world and make it the way they want it to be. It doesn't even have to be a huge group, as long as some of them establish their own personal preferences as the only real truth and make enough noise to give the impression that the forgotten, neglected masses are behind them. ~ Johanna Sinisalo, #NFDB
298:If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove instead of going to McDonald’s, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old. We are reducing the options of others as we attempt to impose our elite culinary preferences on the rest of the population. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
299:We don't always know what makes us happy. We know, instead, what we think SHOULD. We are baffled and confused when our attempts at happiness fail...We are mute when it comes to naming accurately our own preferences, delights, gifts, talents. The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people's expectations. The tongue of the original self is the language of the heart. ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
300:our social needs for intimacy, belonging, and acceptance. Mate preferences for status can explain our esteem needs for recognition, fame, and glory. Mate preferences for intelligence, knowledge, skills, and moral virtues can explain our cognitive needs to learn, discover, and create, and our self-actualization needs to fulfill our potential (for example, to display the highest possible mate value given our genetic quality). ~ Geoffrey Miller, #NFDB
301:Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem: What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual’s own circumstances and preferences. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
302:I’ll read to you,” Elizabeth said. “Any preferences?” “Evelyn Waugh.” “Really? How strange.” “That’s what Konrad said. He said Waugh is for readers who know the English and understand what’s being satirised. And I told him that maybe the books are better when you don’t know it’s satire and just think it’s comedy.” Elizabeth considered this. “You’re probably right. I find him much too cruel. And almost unbearably sad.” Hiroko’s ~ Kamila Shamsie, #NFDB
303:Strategic culture is an integrated “system of symbols” (e.g., argumentation structures, languages, analogies, metaphors) which acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing these conception with such an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efficacious. ~ C Christine Fair, #NFDB
304:The assertion that 'culture' explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parent cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other. ~ John Tooby, #NFDB
305:If the omnivore’s dilemma is to determine what is good and safe to eat amid the myriad and occasionally risky choices nature puts before us, then familiar flavor profiles can serve as a useful guide, a sensory signal of the tried and true. To an extent, these familiar blends of flavor take the place of the hardwired taste preferences that guide most other species in their food choices. They have instincts to steer them; we have cuisines. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
306:Harmony, liberal intercourse with all Nations, are recommended by policy, humanity and interest. But even our Commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand: neither seeking nor granting exclusive favours or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of Commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing with Powers so disposed; in order to give trade a stable course. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
307:The assertion that "culture" explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age, and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other. ~ John Tooby, #NFDB
308:To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
309:I need to put forward more encouraging terms for my students than the negative popular terminology struggling and reluctant. Where is the hope in these terms? I prefer to use positive language to identify the readers in my classes. Peeking into my classroom, I see sixty different readers with individual reading preferences and abilities, but I consistently recognize three trends: developing readers, dormant readers, and underground readers. ~ Donalyn Miller, #NFDB
310:Imagine what our world would be like if everyone loved themselves so much that they weren’t threatened by other people’s opinions or skin colors or sexual preferences or talents or education or possessions or lack of possessions or religious beliefs or customs or their general tendency to just be whoever the hell they are. Imagine how different your reality would be (and the reality of everyone surrounding you) if you woke up every morning certain ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
311:REBT, then, helps you not only to understand what you “are” but to change what you harmfully think, feel, and do. It accepts your desires, wishes, preferences, goals, and values, then tries to help you achieve them. But REBT shows you how to separate your preferences from your insistences—and thus keep from sabotaging your own goals. It gives you insight into what you are now doing rather than into what you (and your damned parents!) have done. ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
312:It is sometimes suggested that the [Nazi economic] recovery was a product of a specific fascist economic strategy, which distinguished it from the recovery efforts of other capitalist states. While few would disagree that the Nazi regime had a number of clear ideological preferences when it came to the economy, the policies pursued in 1933 had much in common with those adopted in other countries, and with the policies of the pre-Hitler governments. ~ Richard Overy, #NFDB
313:Freedom is essential to the pursuit of happiness.
Freedom is essential to artistic evolution and expression.
Freedom is essential to the expansion of the human mind.
Freedom is essential to the development and application of basic humanitarianism.
Freedom is essential to the creation of an individual's will, motivations, preferences, and unique talents.
In essence, freedom is essential to the success and progress of humanity. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,#NFDB
314:We are incessant narrators of stories about almost anything in our lives, mostly about the important things but not only, and we happily color our narratives with all the biases of our past experiences and of our likes and dislikes. There is nothing fair and neutral about our narratives unless we go to the effort of reducing our preferences and prejudices, which we are well advised to do on things that matter for our lives and the lives of others. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
315:I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen, #NFDB
316:To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay. ~ Kathleen Norris, #NFDB
317:According to Wilson, when you are faced with a decision in which you are forced to think about your rationale, you start to turn the volume in your emotional brain down and the volume in your logical brain up. You start creating a mental list of pros and cons that would never have been conjured up if you had gone with your gut. As Wilson noted in his research, “Forming preferences is akin to riding a bicycle; we can do it easily but cannot easily explain how ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
318:The basic idea behind self-signaling is that despite what we tend to think, we don’t have a very clear notion of who we are. We generally believe that we have a privileged view of our own preferences and character, but in reality we don’t know ourselves that well (and definitely not as well as we think we do). Instead, we observe ourselves in the same way we observe and judge the actions of other people—inferring who we are and what we like from our actions. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
319:The knowledge of the ancients was perfect. How perfect? I will tell you. At first they did not yet know that there were things. This is the most perfect knowledge; nothing can be added. Next they knew things but did not yet make distinctions between them. Next they made distinctions between them but did not yet pass judgements upon them. When judgement was passed, Tao was destroyed. With the destruction of Tao, individual preferences come into being. ~ Raymond M Smullyan, #NFDB
320:Leif and Tom found that, in general, when asked about their preferences for breaking up experiences, people want to disrupt annoying experiences but prefer to enjoy pleasurable experiences without any breaks. But following the basic principles of adaptation, Leif and Tom suspected that people’s intuitions are completely wrong. People will suffer less when they do not disrupt annoying experiences, and enjoy pleasurable experiences more when they break them up. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
321:One suspects that the conservatives of left and right don’t much like the “mass” and its badly informed preferences. Let us take care of you, they cry. Let tradition celebrated by wise elders, or planning implemented by wise experts, guide you, oh you sadly misled mass. (The ruling lords and the monopolists view the clerisy’s conservative theorizing with delight, resting assured that the elders and the planners will inadvertently shield their rents.) ~ Deirdre N McCloskey, #NFDB
322:The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it. We are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors. And finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance. In sum, our tendencies lead to a mental process known as rationalization whereby we change our attitudes and beliefs to psychologically adapt. Rationalization helps us give reasons for our behaviors, even when those reasons might have been designed by others. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
323:When I had to work Shea Stadium for a Mets-Braves game – Atlanta pitcher John Rocker had recently given an interview in which he denounced New Yorkers of all Colors and preferences – I was assigned to a parking lot, where numerous drivers asked me for directions to various highways. When my first answer – “I have no idea” – seemed to invite denunciation and debate, I revised it to “Take the first left.” For all I know, those people are still lost in Queens. ~ Edward Conlon, #NFDB
324:When I had to work Shea Stadium for a Mets-Braves game – Atlanta pitcher John Rocker had recently given an interview in which he denounced New Yorkers of all Colors and preferences – I was assigned to a parking lot, where numerous drivers asked me for directions to various highways. When my first answer – “I have no idea” – seemed to invite denunciation and debate, I revised it to “Take the first left.” For all I know, those people are still lost in Queens. ~ Edward Conlon, #NFDB
325:Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They’re individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences. They have something to contribute. They want to be a part of things.
It’s up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work. ~ Lori McWilliam Pickert,#NFDB
326:The basic idea behind self-signaling is that despite what we tend to think, we don’t have a very clear notion of who we are. We generally believe that we have a privileged view of our own preferences and character, but in reality we don’t know ourselves that well (and definitely not as well as we think we do). Instead, we observe ourselves in the same way we observe and judge the actions of other people—inferring who we are and what we like from our actions. For ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
327:There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ' holistic ' views as some sort of cure-all... Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain... there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment. ~ Francisco Varela, #NFDB
328:The ideal of logical consistency, as this example shows, is not achievable by our limited mind. Because we are susceptible to WYSIATI and averse to mental effort, we tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. We have neither the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
329:What do we really want from religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such thoughts into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe -- which seems truly pointless -- but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
330:Do musical preferences predict political inclinations? Not long ago, an official with Pandora said that its predictions about those inclinations, based on zip code as well as musical choices, are between 75 and 80 percent accurate. And with that level of accuracy, it developed an advertising service “that would enable candidates and political organizations to target the majority of its 73 million active monthly Pandora listeners based on its sense of their political leanings. ~ Cass R Sunstein, #NFDB
331:Scientific and religious beliefs are important to people; but they are (usually) neither foundational premises, backing one outcome in advance against all others, nor ex post facto rationalizations, disguising personal preferences in the language of impersonal authority. They are only tools for decision making, one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to reach a decision. ~ Louis Menand, #NFDB
332:Sinclair chuckled. “I did rather wonder,” he admitted. “And I don’t blame you for warning me off, Murdo. He’s awfully fetching, this one.” A hot flash of colour invaded David’s cheeks as he absorbed the captain’s words and his gaze snapped to Murdo, his heart beginning to race. Murdo held up a hand. “Don’t worry,” he said quietly. “Captain Sinclair shares our preferences. And he’s not as reckless as he appears—I’ve known him a long time. You can trust him.” You can trust him. That ~ Joanna Chambers, #NFDB
333:We have made some collective mistakes as a species, it’s true – invested too much power in things we can’t see, let alone control. But look at the world we have, Chiku. For all its failings, things could be a great deal worse. No one’s died in any wars lately, or been murdered, or left to rot in a prison, or been denied the basic allocation of fresh food and drinking water. No one’s been tortured for their beliefs or made to feel like a pariah because of their sexual preferences. ~ Alastair Reynolds, #NFDB
334:The problem is that while some incentives are obvious, many aren’t. And simply asking people what they want or need doesn’t necessarily work. Let’s face it: human beings aren’t the most candid animals on the planet. We’ll often say one thing and do another—or, more precisely, we’ll say what we think other people want to hear and then, in private, do what we want. In economics, these are known as declared preferences and revealed preferences, and there is often a hefty gap between the two. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
335:California, like anywhere else on Earth, should have the right to secede whether the United States likes it or not. The preferences of the other 49 states and Washington DC is not relevant. That was the position of the United States government on Yugoslavia and other places around the world but not on Ukraine. However, morality and the law as I understand it are that any people should have the right to leave, just as explained in the initial words of the US Declaration of Independence. ~ David Swanson, #NFDB
336:Concert Hall versus Banquet Hall My friend Isaac Wardell, a pastor of worship and founder of Bifrost Arts, asks whether we think of gathered worship as being more like a concert hall or a banquet hall.6 If it’s a concert hall, we show up as passive observers and critics, eager to have the itches of our preferences and felt needs scratched. A banquet hall, by contrast, is a communal gathering. We come hungry and in community, ready to participate and share the experience with one another. ~ Mike Cosper, #NFDB
337:But as the views of the people are trending illiberal and the preferences of the elites are turning undemocratic, liberalism and democracy are starting to clash. Liberal democracy, the unique mix of individual rights and popular rule that has long characterized most governments in North America and Western Europe, is coming apart at its seams. In its stead, we are seeing the rise of illiberal democracy, or democracy without rights, and undemocratic liberalism, or rights without democracy. ~ Yascha Mounk, #NFDB
338:Whoever you are and wherever you come from, you grew into your present shape and form in the garden of your early childhood. In other words, your orientation to life and the world around you—your psychogenic framework—was already in place before you were old enough to leave the house without parental supervision. Your biases and preferences, where you are stuck and where you excel, how you circumscribe your happiness and where you feel your pain, all of this precedes you into adulthood, ~ A S A Harrison, #NFDB
339:When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it, and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, “I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you, and this confuses my understanding of my masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.” It is not my job to please them with my body. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
340:Political scientists followed up on Todorov’s initial research by identifying a category of voters for whom the automatic preferences of System 1 are particularly likely to play a large role. They found what they were looking for among politically uninformed voters who watch a great deal of television. As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
341:Part of our problem is that we use the term “decision” so loosely that it has come to describe our wishes, not our commitments. Instead of making decisions, we state our preferences. The word “decide” comes from the Latin decidere—the roots de-, meaning “off,” and caedere, meaning “to cut”—therefore, making a decision means cutting off from any other possibility. A true decision, then, means you are committed to achieving a result, and then cutting yourself off from any other possibility. After ~ Bob Proctor, #NFDB
342:This post-Christian confusion—MacIntyre calls it “emotivism”—now shapes American public life. In such an environment, the purpose of moral discourse, he writes, “[becomes] the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences and choices of another with its own.” Other people become instruments to be dominated and used. They’re means to achieve our ends, not ends in themselves.6 As a result, most of our moral debates about public policy never get near the truth of an issue. ~ Charles J Chaput, #NFDB
343:Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else’s intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses, promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as social creatures in the world. ~ Karen Joy Fowler, #NFDB
344:The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life-different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability-mingle so freely. ~ Tom Vanderbilt, #NFDB
345:Human beings are not comparable. You can't compare us any more than you can compare roses and oranges, or mountains and the sea. You might prefer living by the sea to living in the mountains. You certainly like some people better than you like others. Preferences are perfectly valid...they're just your style asserting itself again. But you'd feel pretty silly saying 'The sea is better than the mountains.' It's every bit as silly to go around saying 'I'm better than Mary, but Joe is better than me.' ~ Barbara Sher, #NFDB
346:Much of the Constitution is remarkably simple and straightforward - certainly as compared to the convoluted reasoning of judges and law professors discussing what is called 'Constitutional law,' much of which has no basis in that document....The real question [for judicial nominees] is whether that nominee will follow the law or succumb to the lure of 'a living constitution,' 'evolving standards' and other lofty words meaning judicial power to reshape the law to suit their own personal preferences. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
347:One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder—that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
348:The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
349:Political scientists followed up on Todorov’s initial research by identifying a category of voters for whom the automatic preferences of System 1 are particularly likely to play a large role. They found what they were looking for among politically uninformed voters who watch a great deal of television. As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television. Evidently, ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
350:It is somewhat ironic to have us so deeply disturbed over a program where race is an element of consciousness, and yet to be aware of the fact, as we are, that institutions of higher learning, albeit more on the undergraduate than the graduate level, have given conceded preferences up to a point to those possessed of athletic skills, to the children of alumni, to the affluent who may bestow their largess on the institutions, and to those having connections with celebrities, the famous, and the powerful. ~ Derrick A Bell, #NFDB
351:Once a new social stage appears in a culture, it will spread its instructional codes and life-priority messages throughout that culture's surface-level expressions: religion, economic and political arrangements, psychological and anthro-pological theories, and views of human nature, our future destiny, globalization, and even architectural patterns and sports preferences. We all live in flow states; there is always new wine, always old wineskins. We, indeed, find ourselves pursuing a neverending quest. ~ Don Edward Beck, #NFDB
352:Peace is one of the most obvious earmarks of the authority of Christ. A sense of peace will virtually always accompany His will and direction—even when the direction might not have been our personal preference. On the other hand, a lack of peace will often accompany a mistaken path—even when the direction is definitely our personal preference. As we grow in Christ, we will learn how to appreciate peace over personal preferences. Remember, Christ is the Prince of Peace. His peace will accompany His authority. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
353:Morpheus’s gaze flashes to mine, then back to the chess piece wrapped in his magic. “Stop crying,” his quirky voice scolds. “Queens don’t cry. I taught you better than that.”
I bite my quivering lip, and tiny Alice strokes the caterpillar’s face. “But you’re crying . . .”
Morpheus lowers a wing and shades his cheek along with the transparent glimmer of his jeweled markings. “Well”—his shrill voice cracks slightly—“contrary to my preferences for lace and velvet, I’m not the queen. So I can cry all I like. ~ A G Howard,#NFDB
354:The fact/value split has taught most people to put religion in the same category. This explains why Christians are often accused of imposing their views, no matter how gentle and polite they may be in person. Christians intend to communicate life-giving, objective truths about the real world. But their statements are interpreted as attempts to impose personal preferences. For the secularist, then, Christians are not merely wrong or mistaken. They are violating the rules of the game in a democratic society. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
355:Judicial activists are nothing short of radicals in robes--contemptuous of the rule of law, subverting the Constitution at will, and using their public trust to impose their policy preferences on society. In fact, no radical political movement has been more effective in undermining our system of government than the judiciary. And with each Supreme Court term, we hold our collective breath hoping the justices will do no further damage, knowing full well they will disappoint. Such is the nature of judicial tyranny. ~ Mark Levin, #NFDB
356:Whenever you have strong negative feelings because unfortunate things are actually happening to you or you imagine that they might occur, see whether these feelings healthfully follow from your wishes and desires to have better things occur. Or are you creating them by going beyond your preferences and inventing powerful shoulds, oughts, musts, demands, commands, and necessities? If so, you are turning concern and caution into overconcern, severe anxiety, and panic. Observe the real difference in your feelings! ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
357:Judicial activists are nothing short of radicals in robes--contemptuous of the rule of law, subverting the Constitution at will, and using their public trust to impose their policy preferences on society. In fact, no radical political movement has been more effective in undermining our system of government than the judiciary. And with each Supreme Court term, we hold our collective breath hoping the justices will do no further damage, knowing full well they will disappoint. Such is the nature of judicial tyranny. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
358:When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded word, we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don’t quite fit our preferences and presuppositions. In an attempt to simplify, we force the Bible’s cacophony of voices into a single tone and turn a complicated, beautiful, and diverse holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
359:Human individuals and human organizations typically have preferences over resources that are not well represented by an "unbounded aggregative utility function". A human will typically not wager all her capital for a fifty-fifty chance of doubling it. A state will typically not risk losing all its territory for a ten percent chance of a tenfold expansion. [T]he same need not hold for AIs. An AI might therefore be more likely to pursue a risky course of action that has some chance of giving it control of the world. ~ Nick Bostrom, #NFDB
360:A second, less well-known decision was based on his simple calculation “More people, more power.” Copying a Soviet system of the same name, Mao created policy preferences for Hero Mothers, women who had many children. At a time when much of the rest of the world, including most of the developing world, saw reductions in population growth, China’s average remained at around six children per woman. Over the next two decades, China added the population of South America, even as they’d hampered their agricultural system. ~ Clay Shirky, #NFDB
361:According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as “preference-satisfying behavior.” About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government “nudgers” but by those who want to monetize our attention. ~ Matthew B Crawford, #NFDB
362:Giving people favors is a time-honored way of gaining loyalty. Pharmaceutical reps do it. The salespeople manning cosmetic counters do it. Lobbyists do it. Men with big crushes on impossibly beautiful women do it. Gifts work on our feelings in a couple of ways: they change the way we experience something, and they push our "reciprocate!" button. When we have the mandate to be objective and an incentive not to be, our biases often win the day-even if we don't think they will. Favors deeply affect our preferences and our loyalties. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
363:There are four conditions for knowing the divine Will:
The first essential condition: an absolute sincerity.
Second: to overcome desires and preferences.
Third: to silence the mind and listen.
Fourth, to obey immediately when you receive the order. If you persist, you will perceive the Divine Will more and more clearly. But even before you know what it is, you can make an offering of your own will and you will see that all circumstances will be so arranged as to make you do the right thing
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951,#NFDB
364:In Lareau's words, the middle-class children learn a sense of "entitlement." That word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the term: "They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
365:Amazon engineer Greg Linden originally introduced doppelganger searches to predict readers’ book preferences, the improvement in recommendations was so good that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got to his knees and shouted, “I’m not worthy!” to Linden. But what is really interesting about doppelganger searches, considering their power, is not how they’re commonly being used now. It is how frequently they are not used. There are major areas of life that could be vastly improved by the kind of personalization these searches allow. ~ Seth Stephens Davidowitz, #NFDB
366:A study of interactions between women and obstetricians offers an explanation. It described three levels of increasing power imbalance: In the first, you fight and lose; in the second you don't fight because you know you can't win. However, in the highest level of power differential, your preferences are so manipulated that you act against your own interests, but you are content. Elective [meaning requested for no medical reason, not to be confused with needed surgery planned in advance] repeat cesarean exemplifies that highest level. ~ Henci Goer, #NFDB
367:Since the birth control pill affects the menstrual cycle, it’s not surprising that it may affect a woman’s patterns of attraction as well. Scottish researcher Tony Little found women’s assessment of men as potential husband material shifted if they were on the pill. Little thinks the social consequences of his finding may be immense: “Where a woman chooses her partner while she is on the Pill, and then comes off it to have a child, her hormone-driven preferences have changed and she may find she is married to the wrong kind of man. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
368:The world over, people seem to be greatly interested in moralizing, regulating, and generally monitoring other people’s behaviors. This is of course very much the case in small-scale groups, where one lives under the tyranny of the cousins, as some anthropologists described it. But in large, modern societies, we also see that people are greatly interested in others’ mores, sexual preferences, the way they marry or what drugs they take. This certainly goes beyond self-interest and raises the question, Is it part of human nature to meddle? ~ Pascal Boyer, #NFDB
369:Niles actually didn't care about me. Once he had me, he thought he had me and that was it. The world revolved around him, his wants, his preferences, his habits, and everything around him fit into that world. He didn't have to work at it, as partners always had to work at it. He didn't care enough to work at it. It was up to me to care, to fit, to revolve around him, his wants, his preferences, his habits. He didn't listen to me because what I said didn't matter. It didn't fit into his world and thus it didn't mean a single thing to him. ~ Kristen Ashley, #NFDB
370:Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face. ~ Brian Christian, #NFDB
371:I had wondered for a long time why God had preferences and why all souls did not receive an equal amount of grace [...] Jesus saw fit to enlighten me about this mystery. He set the book of nature before me and I saw that all the flowers He has created are lovely. The splendor of the rose and whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. I realized that if every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness and there would be no wild flowers to make the meadows gay. ~ Saint Therese of Lisieux, #NFDB
372:I had wondered for a long time why God had preferences and why all souls did not receive an equal amount of grace [...] Jesus saw fit to enlighten me about this mystery. He set the book of nature before me and I saw that all the flowers He has created are lovely. The splendor of the rose and whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. I realized that if every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness and there would be no wild flowers to make the meadows gay. ~ Saint Therese of Lisieux, #NFDB
373:The only gay people who remain in the closet are those who choose to, who don't want to publicly declare their sexuality, which is true of heterosexual people as well. I don't walk around with a button or a T-shirt that says "I am a heterosexual." I don't think sexuality defines a person. It's one small part of who you are, in my view. You are many things, and I never felt that people were defined by their sexuality solely. Although God knows, as a minority, gay people have taken serious lumps for their sexual preferences. As has every minority. ~ William Friedkin, #NFDB
374:Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
375:Nevertheless, that Obama was a movement leftist with ambitions to be a transformative president was information available, without great effort, to anyone who wanted to be informed. His statist policy preferences, his class warfare tactics, and the disconnect between his rhetoric and our reality have long been readily apparent. Yet he was elected and, after four years of his governance, reelected (albeit by a much narrower margin and with markedly diminished support). This may tell us as much about contemporary America as it does about the president. ~ Andrew McCarthy, #NFDB
376:Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself. The message about the nature of framing is stark: framing should not be viewed as an intervention that masks or distorts an underlying preference. At least in this instance—and also in the problems of the Asian disease and of surgery versus radiation for lung cancer—there is no underlying preference that is masked or distorted by the frame. Our preferences are about framed problems, and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
377:Awakening involves mind training. Step back and pay attention to the thoughts that come into awareness. Feel your desire for healing. Preferences are judgments, and as the mind yields to the nonjudgmental Perspective of the Holy Spirit, the Awakening is obvious. Observe that as long as appetites seem to exist there are the ego defenses of indulgence and repression. Neither is better or worse than the other, for they are the same illusion. The miracle offers a real alternative and when one is consistently miracle-minded, defenses are no longer needed. ~ David Hoffmeister, #NFDB
378:Tip #2: Set Clear Expectations Beyond having the right message at the right time, this first one-on-one touchpoint can shape your customers expectations for how they’ll be treated overall – including expectations about the type of content they’ll receive and how frequently they’ll receive it. Forrester found 77 percent of consumers say they should be able to decide how, when, and where marketers communicate with them, yet according to Experian, 60 percent of marketers do not give customers the option to communicate their preferences. The sign-up confirmation ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
379:In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue. It is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society, all the little inconveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment's consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions, which will conciliate others, and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another! ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
380:Leaders need to be able to reconcile opposing viewpoints without giving offense or compromising principle. A leader should be able to project into the life and heart and mind of another, then setting aside personal preferences, deal with the other in a fashion that fits the other best. These skills can be learned and developed.
A leader needs the ability to negotiate differences in a way that recognizes mutual rights and intelligence and yet leads to a harmonious solution. Funadmental to this skill is understanding how people feel, how people react. ~ J Oswald Sanders,#NFDB
381:You can figure out by sheer logic that if you were only—and I mean only—to stay with your desires and preferences, and if you were never—and I mean never—to stray into unrealistic demands that your desires have to be fulfilled, you could very rarely disturb, really disturb, yourself about anything. Why? Because your preferences start off with, “I would very much like or prefer to have success, approval, or comfort,” and then end with the conclusion, “But I don’t have to have it. I won’t die without it. And I could be happy (though not as happy) without it. ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
382:They didn't need the support of the majority. Sometimes all that's needed is a group of people loud enough and influential enough to change the world and make it the way they want it to be. It doesn't even have to be a huge group, as long as some of them establish their own personal preferences as the only real truth, and make enough noise to give them the impression that the forgotten, neglected masses are behind them. Even for a person who's satisfied with things the way they are, it's easy to give support to an idea if it's going to personally benefit you. ~ Johanna Sinisalo, #NFDB
383:Shame is a difficult thing. People certainly try to shame me for being fat. When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it, and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, 'I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you, and this confuses my understanding of my masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world'. It is not my job to please them with my body. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
384:Shame is a difficult thing. People certainly try to shame me for being fat. When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it, and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, “I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you, and this confuses my understanding of my masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.” It is not my job to please them with my body. It ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
385:The thing that always impresses me about human beings is our diversity. Even when we are brought up in similar environments, we still somehow gravitate toward very different careers, hobbies. politics, manners of speaking and acting, aesthetic preferences, and so forth. Maybe this diversity is due to genetic variation. Or maybe, being naturally curious and adaptive creatures, we invariably tend to scatter all over the place, exploiting every niche we can possibly find. Either way, it's fairly obvious that we also end up all over the map when it comes to gender and sexuality. ~ Julia Serano, #NFDB
386:The only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
387:The government’s Intelligence Assessment Department is a very small federal agency with very large computers, located in Sterling, Virginia. The IAD’s purpose is to maintain files of names, faces, physical attributes and personal preferences of national security threats and to analyze data about all of the above. If anybody’s ever wondered why the CIA or the military can be so certain that one bearded thirty-year-old on the streets of Kabul is an innocent businessman and, to our Western eyes, an identical one a block away is an al Qaeda operative, IAD is the reason. However, ~ Jeffery Deaver, #NFDB
388:Humans can maintain only so many functioning relationships; when group size exceeds about 150 members, it becomes impossible to remember not only their individual preferences and peculiarities, but also the complexities of the group’s internal dynamics. Thus, with group sizes larger than 150, direct, face-to-face interaction no longer produces adequate social control, and members tend to drift off and form new tribes. Among behavioral scientists, the 150-person limit is known as “Dunbar’s number,” after the anthropologist/evolutionary psychologist who first proposed it.35 ~ William J Bernstein, #NFDB
389:But this analogy with the members of the Trinity is very important for another reason, it warns us against thinking that union with Christ will ever swallow up our individual personalities. Even though the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have perfect and eternal unity, yet they remain distinct persons. In the same way, even though someday we shall attain perfect unity with other believers and with Christ, yet we shall forever remain distinct persons as well, with our own individual gifts, abilities, interests, responsibilities, circles of personal relationships , preferences and desires ~ Wayne Grudem, #NFDB
390:Although we don't tend to think of libraries as media technologies, they are. The public library is, in fact, one of the most important and influential informational media ever created—and one that proliferated only after the arrival of silent reading and movable-type printing. A community's attitudes and preferences toward information take concrete shape in its library's design and services. [...] The library provides, as well, a powerful symbol of our new media landscape: at the center stands the screen of the Internet-connected computers; the printed word has been pushed to the margins. ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
391:it might be possible to design a superintelligence whose enslavement is morally superior to human or animal slavery: the AI might be happy to be enslaved because it’s programmed to like it, or it might be 100% emotionless, tirelessly using its superintelligence to help its human masters with no more emotion than IBM’s Deep Blue computer felt when dethroning chess champion Garry Kasparov. On the other hand, it may be the other way around: perhaps any highly intelligent system with a goal will represent this goal in terms of a set of preferences, which endow its existence with value and meaning. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
392:Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity. ~ Don Paterson, #NFDB
393:The Minister’s Burden From the beginning of his ministry to the very end Paul was acutely conscious of the burden that Christ had put upon him as an apostle of God’s gospel. He knew that his duty was to communicate the full counsel of God. That burden has been shared by every earnest minister of the gospel ever since. The pulpit is not a place for the minister to orate or opine on his personal preferences or insights. The pulpit is where the Word of God is to be pro-claimed, and the burden of everyone who stands in it is to make sure that the whole counsel of God is to be given to the people of God. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
394:In those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced -- all without much harm. But under varied and changing environmental or biological circumstances, simply copying the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist their preferences on to the physical or social Universe, are open to what the Universe teaches. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
395:Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition. Grades themselves allow precise measurement of each student’s competitiveness; pupils with the highest marks receive status and credentials. We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
396:The almanac cut her and her babies adrift; she and they fell into the vast ocean of ordinary people, whose births and deaths and marriages are, like their loves and fears and breakfast preferences, too insignificant to be worth recording for posterity. Charlie, though, was a male. The almanac could stretch itself—just—to include him, though the dimness of insignificance was already casting its shadow. Information was scant. His name was Charles Angelfield. He had been born. He lived at Angelfield. He was not married. He was not dead. As far as the almanac was concerned, this information was sufficient. ~ Diane Setterfield, #NFDB
397:n those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced -- all without much harm. But under varied and changing environmental or biological or political circumstances, simply copying the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist their preferences on to the physical or social Universe, are open to what the Universe teaches. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
398:In those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced -- all without much harm. But under varied and changing environmental or biological or political circumstances, simply copying the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist their preferences on to the physical or social Universe, are open to what the Universe teaches. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
399:In Greek society, sexual relationships between an older man and a youth were part of the fabric of society, accepted, even idealised. But Hadrian, whatever he might be coming to believe, was a Roman emperor, and Romans were less tolerant and more cynical about the beauty of homosexual passion. Nevertheless, it was commonplace in the army, and more widely it was not unusual for a man to have a variety of partners of either sex. There was no question of a man being defined, as now, by his sexual preferences, nor, as long as he was the dominant party, was there any conflict between homosexual practice and virility. ~ Elizabeth Speller, #NFDB
400:Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about politics from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land. The great Central Valley region does not prefer English over Spanish or Japanese or Hmong. If it had any preferences at all, it might best like the languages it has heard for thousands of years, such as Maidu or Miwok, simply because it is used to them. Mythically speaking, it will welcome whomever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there. ~ Gary Snyder, #NFDB
401:The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change. ~ Dan Gilbert, #NFDB
402:We're like the teenager who "will die" if he or she can't go to a certain rock concert or see a certain friend. Because we tell ourselves it's absolutely crucial that [things should be a certain way right now] we create turmoil and anxiety. It's not [the way things are] that causes pain, it's the meaning we give to these events and our demand that such things not happen. While we can have preferences, the minute we start insisting that people and situations be different, we create internal turmoil - anger, hostility, sadness, and so on. It's our attachments that lead us to donning a mask, blaming others, or feeling incomplete. ~ Charlotte Kasl, #NFDB
403:Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer’s biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals. As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
404:The erasure of the personality is the fatal accompaniment to an existence which is concretely submissive to the spectacle’s rules, ever more removed from the possibility of authentic experience and thus from the discovery of individual preferences. Paradoxically, permanent self-denial is the price the
individual pays for the tiniest bit of social status. Such an existence demands a fluid fidelity, a succession of continually disappointing commitments to false products. It is a matter of running hard to keep up with the inflation of devalued signs of life. Drugs help one to come to terms with this state of affairs, while madness allows one to escape from it. ~ Guy Debord,#NFDB
405:For the remaining animals in research and the agricultural industry, I place my hopes on transparency. It's up to society to decide what kind of relations we'll have with animals, and what kind of uses we'll permit, but it is absolutely essential to bring animals out of the shadows. We barely know what is going on at many places, which makes it easy to act as if nothing is the matter. We need research facilities with open-door policies and farms with an obligation to show how they keep their animals . . . . If we made all locations with captive animals as public as zoos, matters would improve in a hurry. Public pressure and consumer preferences would do the job. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
406:Relativists can't accuse others of wrongdoing. I Say Relativism makes it impossible to criticize the behavior of others, because relativism ultimately denies such a thing as wrongdoing. If you believe morality is a matter of personal definition, then you surrender the possibility of making moral judgments about others' actions, no matter how offensive they are to your intuitive sense of right or wrong. You may express your emotions, tastes, and personal preferences, but you can't say they are wrong. Nor may you critique, challenge, praise, or fault them. It would be like trying to keep score in a game with no rules or putting a criminal on trial when there are no laws. ~ Gregory Koukl, #NFDB
407:The trouble with denying children the freedom to be themselves—with forcing them into an idea of what they should be, not allowing them to choose their own paths—is that all too often, the one drawing the design knows nothing of the desires of their model. Children are not formless clay, to be shaped according to the sculptor’s whim, nor are they blank but identical dolls, waiting to be slipped into the mode that suits them best. Give ten children a toy box, and watch them select ten different toys, regardless of gender or religion or parental expectations. Children have preferences. The danger comes when they, as with any human, are denied those preferences for too long. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
408:Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
409:As we stepped inside, I waited for it to get strange, now that I could see him clearly again—his brown eyes, his reddish hair, his freckles. But it didn’t. And I didn’t understand why until I’d gotten back into the car and Frank had waved at me from the door and I’d turned in the direction of home. It seemed that somewhere between the arguments about the merits of ninja movies, he’d stopped being Frank Porter, class president, unknowable person. He’d stopped being a stranger, a guy, someone I didn’t know how to talk to. That night, in the darkness, sharing our secrets and favorite pizza-topping preferences, he’d moved closer to just being Frank—maybe, possibly, even my friend. ~ Morgan Matson, #NFDB
410:Parents with dependents are somehow thought to count for more. If, for example, there is some scarce resource—a donor kidney perhaps—and of the two potential recipients one is a parent of young children and one is not, the parent, all things being equal, will likely be favoured. To let a parent die is not only to thwart that person’s preference to be saved, but also the preferences of his or her children that their parent be saved. It is quite true, of course, that the death of the parent will harm more people, but there is nonetheless something to be said against favouring parents. Increasing one’s value by having children might be like increasing one’s value by taking hostages. ~ David Benatar, #NFDB
411:Fortunately, I knew the cardinal rule of getting on with one’s fellow cooks. It applies in any kitchen and can be summed up in two short words: bust ass. Restaurant kitchens are the ultimate levelers. When you’re slammed and orders are starting to back up, you could care less about the color of the hands of the cook who is working next to you, as long as they are moving fast and effectively. Personal life, sexual preferences, accent, addictions, criminal record—none of them matter. Conversely, if he isn’t holding up his end, he could be your blood brother and you’d fire him in a second. That I had been chef at the “French White House” didn’t mean anything to these HoJo line chefs. ~ Jacques P pin, #NFDB
412:that I played a part in building. We needed a safe way for the Submissives and the Dominants to learn. This club isn’t a free-for-all. Although each Dominant has their own way of doing things, their own preferences and kinks, and we encourage the variety. Dressed in leathers, the trainers are lined up and waiting for the women to choose instruments from the extensive collection. Their sole purpose is to provide a means for the women to explore their limits. One woman, I believe her name is Lisa, is concerned about her positioning. Although she’s dressed in a simple cream chiffon romper, she’s on the waxed floor of the stage, practicing with a trainer offering advice. She’s not very ~ Lauren Landish, #NFDB
413:Paradoxically, many Western-oriented Islamic countries that are praised in the West for having “secularist” governments do not allow Western-style democratic practices; if they did in the sense of allowing people to really express their preferences, the result would be a much more Islamic government as far as the rule of the Sharī‘ah is concerned. This is because the vast majority of all Muslims, even in the most Westernized and modernized countries, would like to live according to the Sharī‘ah and to have their own freedom and democracy on the basis of their own understanding of these concepts and ideals rather than on how they are understood in the modern and postmodern West. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
414:In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
415:But art is the most unnatural minion of the state. Not only is it created by fanciful people who tire of repetition even more quickly than they tire of being told what to do, it is also vexingly ambiguous. Just when a carefully crafted bit of dialogue is about to deliver a crystal-clear message, a hint of sarcasm or the raising of an eyebrow can spoil the entire effect. In fact, it can give credence to a notion that is the exact opposite of that which was intended. So, perhaps it is understandable that governing authorities are bound to reconsider their artistic preferences every now and then, if for no other reason than to keep themselves fit. Sure enough, at the Moscow premiere of Rosotsky’s ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
416:In evolutionary terms, these explanations of course have it back to front. We do not like sugar because it tastes good and abhor vomit because it is foul smelling. Rather, one is delicious and the other repulsive because we were designed to seek the former and avoid the latter. We evolved in environments in which sugar was rare enough that taking all you could was a good strategy, and vomit was certainly full of toxins and pathogens. Individuals who showed these preferences, a bit more than others, would extract more calories and fewer dangerous substances from their environments. On average, these individuals would have an ever so slightly better chance of having offspring than those others. ~ Pascal Boyer, #NFDB
417:It is neither judgment nor judgment according to the status quo with which we have a problem, but rather judgment according to God's Word. We sharply dress ourselves, go out into the world, shape ourselves, our personalities according to the world's standards and preferences, allow ourselves to be made dull by the world and its desires in order to appear successful and happy and attractive in the eyes of the world: we love the world's judgment but we hate God's judgment. Absurdly enough, the one which really matters, the one out of the purest of loves rather than that of a mere contract in hopes of mutual gain, is the one from which we so adamantly try to cut off, shut off, and distance ourselves. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
418:The very word denomination points to one of the main characteristics of the Protestant Christianity resulting from the North American experience. The word itself indicates that the various churches are seen as denominations, that is, as different names given to Christians. In a religiously pluralistic society where tolerance was necessary for political survival, and in view of the bloodshed that dogmatism had caused elsewhere, North American Protestants tended to think of the church as an invisible reality 323 consisting of all true believers, and of the visible churches or denominations as voluntary organizations that believers create and join according to their convictions and preferences. ~ Justo L Gonz lez, #NFDB
419:Though widely used in the 1892 Columbus Day ceremonies, Bellamy’s pledge did not officially become the pledge until after the Second World War. Indeed, at the turn of the century, a number of different pledges competed for the loyalty of American schoolchildren. In New York State, schools that held flag ceremonies had a choice of five pledges, none of which made any reference to a deity. In San Francisco, the sixty different public schools followed their own preferences, resulting in a considerable range of pledges. Only after the First World War was there any real effort to select a single pledge for the entire nation, a movement that peaked with a pair of National Flag Conferences in 1923 and 1924. ~ Kevin M Kruse, #NFDB
420:we must believe that we can bend reality to our own preferences, crafting the lives we desire through disciplined learning and initiative. We mustn’t wait for permission or perfect timing any longer. Instead we must be courageous and self-reliant, moving forward at a moment’s notice. We must see struggle as positive and necessary for our growth and ability to innovate and serve. And we must know all that we need is accessible in the Now—there is abundance in this world to be had, and everything we need to begin the great quest toward a free and fulfilling life is already within us. Should we live from these beliefs, then we shall reach levels of motivation and happiness undreamed of by the timid masses. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
421:We often fail to consider accurate information that could potentially provide insight into another person's point of view (such as his or her facial expressions) but happily consider inaccurate information (such s broad stereotypes or gossip). For example, when evaluating preferences of people we perceive as similar to us, we tend to use ourselves as reference points. But when we perceive others as less similar, we are more likely to resort to stereotypes to assess their preferences. Once we consider how this dynamic might play out in gift-giving scenarios, it becomes clear why Grandpa ended up with twenty-three pairs of woolen socks for Christmas but without the Kindle he'd been hinting at since Thanksgiving. ~ Guy Winch, #NFDB
422:The legislature, once the most important political organ, has lost much of its power to courts, to bureaucrats, to central banks, and to international treaties and organizations. Meanwhile, the people who make up the legislature have in many countries become less and less similar to the people they are meant to represent: nowadays, few of them have strong ties to their local communities and even fewer have a deep commitment to a structuring
ideology. As a result, average voters now feel more alienated from politics than they ever have before. When they look at politicians, they don’t recognize themselves—and when they look at the decisions taken by them, they don’t see their preferences reflected in them. ~ Yascha Mounk,#NFDB
423:Today, we are not just inmates or victims in a foreign-controlled digital panoptic. Originally, the Panoptikum was a prison-like building designed by Jeremy Bentham. The prisoners in the outer ring are guarded by a central surveillance tower. In the digital panoptic, we are not just caught. We are ourselves perpetrators. We are actively involved in the digital panopticon. We even entertain it by cableing ourselves to the body like the millions of quantified self-movements and voluntarily putting our body-related data into the web. The new rule does not silence us. Rather, she is constantly calling on us to communicate, to share, to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences, to tell our lives. ~ Byung Chul Han, #NFDB
424:Through social pressure, implicit and explicit value systems perpetuate the very destructiveness that they were originally set up to control in primitive communities. Because people tend to conform to external standards and norms, society is able to place prohibitions on spontaneity and sexuality, which in turn creates hostility and tension. By reinforcing moral lessons learned in the family, social institutions help to maintain and perpetuate the toxic effects of neurotic family interactions. Children and, later, adults are bound by conventional thinking and conformity which influences them to act out of “shoulds,” form, and obligation, generally denying their real preferences, due to feelings of guilt. ~ Robert W Firestone, #NFDB
425:The path of the norm is the path of least resistance; it is the route we take when we're on auto-pilot and don't even realize we're following a course of action that we haven't consciously chosen. Most people who eat meat have no idea that they're behaving in accordance with the tenets of a system that has defined many of their values, preferences, and behaviors. What they call 'free choice' is, in fact, the result of a narrowly obstructed set of options that have been chosen for them. They don't realize, for instance, that they have been taught to value human life so far above certain forms of nonhuman life that it seems appropriate for their taste preferences to supersede other species' preference for survival. ~ Melanie Joy, #NFDB
426:When trouble arose between 'All and Mu'awiyah as a necessary consequence of group feeling, they were guided in (their dissensions) by the truth and by independent judgment. They did not fight for any worldly purpose or over preferences of no value, or for reasons of personal enmity. This might be suspected, and heretics might like to think so. However, what caused their difference was their independent judgment as to where the truth lay. It was on this matter that each side opposed the point of view of the other. It was for this that they fought. Even though 'Ali was in the right, Mu'awiyah's intentions were not bad ones. He wanted the truth, but he missed (it). Each was right in so far as his intentions were concerned. ~ Ibn Khaldun, #NFDB
427:Most people who eat meat have no idea that they're behaving in accordance with the tenets of a system that has defined many of their values, preferences, and behaviors. What they call “free choice” is, in fact, the result of a narrowly constructed set of options that have been chosen for them. They don't realize, for instance, that they have been taught to value human life so far above certain forms of nonhuman life that it seems appropriate for their taste preferences to supersede other species' preference for survival. And by carving out the path of least resistance, norms obscure alternative paths and make it seem as if there is no other way to be; as I mentioned in chapter 2, meat eating is considered a given, not a choice. ~ Melanie Joy, #NFDB
428:In that moment, I wanted to tell this stranger, this Merle, this girl from the tiny island of Montserrat, that I had commensurate preferences too, but I couldn’t be a brave warrior like her.
I wanted to tell her about Morris.
I wanted to sing his name out into the night.
His name is Morris. He is my Morris and he always been my Morris. He’s a good-hearted man, a special man, a sexy man, a history-loving man, a loyal man, a man who appreciates a good joke, a man of many moods, a drinking man, and a man with whom I can be myself completely.
Yes, I was in the throes of a Malibu-and-Coke-soaked madness, a madness that could lead to the demise of my life as I’d hitherto known it. But I was on the verge. ~ Bernardine Evaristo,#NFDB
429:Jesus said we must be last of all and servant of all. That doesn’t sound like all the church members we may know. Many church members demand their preferences, their desires, and the way they’ve always done it. But Jesus said we are to serve. Paul said it as well. After he became a Christian, the apostle declared, “I was made a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace that was given to me by the working of His power” (Eph. 3:7). We will never find joy in church membership when we are constantly seeking things our way. But paradoxically, we will find the greatest joy when we choose to be last. That’s what Jesus meant when He said the last will be first. True joy means giving up our rights and preferences and serving everyone else. ~ Thom S Rainer, #NFDB
430:There are several predictable thinking errors people commonly make that lead them to incorrectly predict their own future emotions in general, and future happiness in particular:
1 Focusing on a single salient feature or period of time in a choice, rather than looking at the big picture.
2 Overestimating the long-term impact of our choices.
3 Forgetting that happiness is an ongoing process, not a destination.
4 Paying too much attention to external information while overlooking personal preferences and experience.
5 Trying to maximize decisions rather than focusing on personal satisfaction.
6 Confusing wanting something for liking it later, and forgetting to evaluate whether we will enjoy the choice once its novelty wears off. ~ Ed Diener,#NFDB
431:Thus, when Paul says, "Praise the Lord all you nations, and let all the peoples extol him" (Rom. 15:11), he is saying that there is something about God that is so universally praiseworthy and so profoundly beautiful and so comprehensively worth and so deeply satisfying that God will find passionate admirers in every diverse people group in the world. His true greatness will be manifest in the breadth of the diversity of those who perceive and cherish his beauty. His excellence will be shown to be higher and deeper than the parochial preferences that make us happy most of the time. His appeal will be to the deepest, highest, largest capacities of the human soul. Thus, the diversity of the source of admiration will testify to his incomparable glory. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
432:An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate. ~ Matthew Walker, #NFDB
433:Reparenting Affirmations I am so glad you were born. You are a good person. I love who you are and am doing my best to always be on your side. You can come to me whenever you’re feeling hurt or bad. You do not have to be perfect to get my love and protection. All of your feelings are okay with me. I am always glad to see you. It is okay for you to be angry and I won’t let you hurt yourself or others when you are. You can make mistakes - they are your teachers. You can know what you need and ask for help. You can have your own preferences and tastes. You are a delight to my eyes. You can choose your own values. You can pick your own friends, and you don’t have to like everyone. You can sometimes feel confused and ambivalent, and not know all the answers. I am very proud of you. ~ Pete Walker, #NFDB
434:Legionnaire’s disease hit a group of predominantly white, heterosexual, middle-aged members of the American Legion. The respectability of the victims brought them a degree of attention and funding for research and treatment far greater than that made available so far to the victims of Kaposi’s sarcoma.
I want to emphasize the contrast, because the more popular Legionnaire’s disease affected fewer people and proved less likely to be fatal. What society judged was not the severity of the disease but the social acceptability of the individuals affected with it…. I intend to fight any effort by anyone at any level to make public health policy regarding Kaposi’s sarcoma or any other disease on the basis of his or her personal prejudices regarding other people’s sexual preferences or life-styles ~ Randy Shilts,#NFDB
435:Disagreements are inevitable. There will always be opposing viewpoints and a variety of perspectives on most subjects. Tastes differ as well as preferences. That is why they make vanilla and chocolate and strawberry ice cream, why they build Fords and Chevys, Chryslers and Cadillacs, Hondas and Toyotas. That is why our nation has room for Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals - and moderates. The tension is built into our system. It is what freedom is all about, including religious freedom.
I am fairly firm in my theological convictions, but that doesn't mean you (or anyone) must agree with me. All this explains why we must place so much importance on leaving "wobble room" in our relationships. One's theological persuasion may not bend, but one's involvement with others must. ~ Charles R Swindoll,#NFDB
436:Traders and quants are genuinely different species. Traders pride themselves on being tough and forthright while quants are more circumspect and reticent. These differences in personality are reflections of deeper cultural preferences. Traders are paid to act. All day long they watch screens, assimilate economic information, page frantically through spreadsheets, run programs written by quants, enter trades, talk to salespeople and brokers, and punch keys. It’s hard to have an extended conversation with a trader during the business day; it takes an hour of standing around to have five minutes of punctuated repartee. Part of what traders do has a video game quality. In consequence, they learn to be opinionated, visceral, fast-thinking, and decisive, though not always right. They thrive on interruption. Quants ~ Emanuel Derman, #NFDB
437:If some day we build machine brains that surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. And, as the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species would depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. We do have one advantage: we get to build the stuff. In principle, we could build a kind of superintelligence that would protect human values. We would certainly have strong reason to do so. In practice, the control problem—the problem of how to control what the superintelligence would do—looks quite difficult. It also looks like we will only get one chance. Once unfriendly superintelligence exists, it would prevent us from replacing it or changing its preferences. Our fate would be sealed. ~ Nick Bostrom, #NFDB
438:The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than the vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
439:Infants devote more visual fixation to novel than to previously exposed targets, thereby indicating both discriminative ability and recognition memory. Since the earliest demonstrations of infants' preferences for novel visual stimulation (Fantz 1964; Saayman, Ames, & Moffett 1964), a number of explorations of infant recognition memory have been conducted. Variables studied have included age (Fagan, Fantz, & Miranda 1971; Wetherford & Cohen 1973), dcegree and type of stimulus variation (Cohen & caron 1968; Fagan 1970, 1971, 1973; Pancratz & Cohen 1970), sources of forgetting (Fagan 1973), and conceptual development (Caron, Caron, Caldwell, & Weiss 1973; Fagan 1972). ~ Fagan, J.F. (June 1974). "Infant recognition memory: the effects of length of familiarization and type of discrimination task". Child Dev. 45 (2): 351–356. PMID 4837713., #NFDB
440:Just as athletes never quit training, high performers never stop consciously conditioning and strengthening their habits. Real success—holistic, long-term success—doesn’t come from doing what’s natural, certain, convenient, or automatic. Often, the journey to greatness begins the moment our preferences for comfort and certainty are overruled by a greater purpose that requires challenge and contribution. The skills and strengths you have now are probably insufficient to get you to the next level of success, so it’s absurd to think you won’t have to work on your weaknesses, develop new strengths, try new habits, stretch beyond what you think your limits or gifts are. That’s why I’m not here to sell you the easy solution of just focusing on what is already easy for you. Just so we’re clear: There’s a lot of work ahead. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
441:Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined? ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
442:4. Investment The last phase of the Hook Model is where the user does a bit of work. The investment phase increases the odds that the user will make another pass through the hook cycle in the future. The investment occurs when the user puts something into the product of service such as time, data, effort, social capital, or money. However, the investment phase isn’t about users opening up their wallets and moving on with their day. Rather, the investment implies an action that improves the service for the next go-around. Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all investments users make to improve their experience. These commitments can be leveraged to make the trigger more engaging, the action easier, and the reward more exciting with every pass through the hook cycle. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
443:Will you like living in London, Quincy?”
“I expect so, my lady. I will view it as an adventure. Perhaps it will be just the thing to blow the cobwebs out.”
She had given him a tremulous smile. “I will miss you, Quincy.”
The valet had remained composed, but his eyes had turned suspiciously bright. “When you visit London, my lady, I trust you will remember that I’m always at your service. You have only to send for me.”
“I’m glad that you’re going to take care of Mr. Winterborne. He needs you.”
“Yes,” Quincy had said feelingly. “He does.”
It would take some time, Helen thought, for Quincy to become familiar with his new employer’s habits, preferences, and quirks. Fortunately Quincy had spent decades in the practice of managing volatile temperaments. Winterborne certainly couldn’t be any worse than the Ravenels. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
444:Sometimes critics decry spirituality as individualism, but they miss the point. Spirituality is personal, yes. To experience God’s spirit, to be lost in wonder, is something profound that we can all know directly and inwardly. That is not a problem. The real problem is that, in the last two centuries, religion has actually allowed itself to become privatized. In the same way that our political and economic concerns contracted from “we” to “me,” so has our sense of God and faith. In many quarters, religion abandoned a prophetic and creative vision for humanity’s common life in favor of an individual quest to get one’s sorry ass to heaven. And, in the process, community became isolated behind the walls of buildings where worship experiences corresponded to members’ tastes and preferences and confirmed their political views. ~ Diana Butler Bass, #NFDB
445:The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance-- no matter how improved-- as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
446:We inherently know that, when controlled by others, life loses its flair and we are cast into melancholy and mediocrity. Without such striving for individual freedom, what becomes of us? We relinquish our free will to a society of strangers that speaks not of liberty and courage but of conformity and caution. Our true self is subjugated and a pseudo self emerges, a mere reflection of a society that has lost its way. “They” start running our lives and soon we are not “us” anymore, just walking zombies filled with the commands of others’ preferences and expectations. We become those masked souls who spend their time wandering in a wildernesses of sameness and sadness. We become tired and weak. We lose our nature. And then we see the worst of human behavior—a mass of people who do not speak up for themselves or others but rather do only what they are told. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
447:Well, this was predictable. House Republicans last week acceded to an extension of the Export-Import Bank for at least the next nine months. The Export-Import Bank is far from the worst example of government-business cronyism. I just completed a history of American political corruption and actually had to leave Ex-Im on the cutting room floor. Its cronies are pikers compared with the corporate moguls that take advantage of tax preferences like the G.E. and Apple loopholes. They also cannot hold a candle to the American Medical Association, which is basically free to write the reimbursement rates for Medicare Part B. And nothing compares to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from 1991-2008. The two mortgage giants kept the entire D.C. political class bent over a barrel for almost 20 years as its top executives reaped enormous bonuses while putting the broader economy at risk. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
448:Xi Jinping, who took over as China’s leader in 2012, has shown even less inclination than his predecessors to let citizens express their preferences through the ballot box. Yet the public has become ever more vocal on a wide variety of issues—online, through protests, and increasingly via responses to opinion polls and government-arranged consultations over the introduction of some new laws. The party monitors this clamour to detect possible flashpoints, and it frequently censors dissent. But the government is also consulting people, through opinion polls that try to establish their views on some of the big issues of the day as well as on specific policies. Its main aim is to devise ways to keep citizens as happy as possible in their daily lives. It avoids stickier subjects such as political reform or human rights. But people are undoubtedly gaining a stronger voice. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
449:If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathise and understand? We long to be here for a purpose even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident. The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for our parents to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Our common sense intuitions can be mistaken. Our preferences don’t count. We do not live in a privileged reference frame. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
450:As is jalapeño—though according to psychologist Paul Rozin, Mexican dogs, unlike American dogs, enjoy a little heat. Rozin’s work suggests animals have cultural food preferences too. Rozin was not the first academic to feed ethnic cuisine to research animals. In “The Effect of a Native Mexican Diet on Learning and Reasoning in White Rats,” subjects were served chili con carne, boiled pinto beans, and black coffee. Their scores at maze-solving remained high, possibly because of an added impetus to find their way to a bathroom. In 1926, the Indian Research Fund Association compared rats who lived on chapatis and vegetables with rats fed a Western diet of tinned meat, white bread, jam, and tea. So repellent was the Western fare that the latter group preferred to eat their cage mates, three of them so completely that “little or nothing remained for post-mortem examination. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
451:Two-thirds of the terminal cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did have discussions were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive care unit. Most of them enrolled in hospice. They suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. In addition, six months after these patients died, their family members were markedly less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
452:Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than the vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change. Pluralist ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
453:The Conservative may ask the following questions: If words and their meaning can be manipulated or ignored to advance the Statist’s political and policy preferences, what then binds allegiance to the Statist’s words? Why should today’s law bind future generations if yesterday’s law does not bind this generation? Why should judicial precedent bind the nation if the Constitution itself does not? Why should any judicial determination based on a judge’s notion of what is “right” or “just” bind the individual if the individual believes the notion is wrong and unjust? Does not lawlessness beget lawlessness? Or is not the Statist really saying that the law is what he says it is, and that is the beginning and end of it? And if judges determine for society what is right and just, and if their purpose is to spread democracy or liberty, how can it be said that the judiciary is coequal with the executive or legislative branch? ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
454:Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that teach competitor has to pick not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judgement are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees. ~ John Maynard Keynes, #NFDB
455:The phenomenon of symmetry breaking reveals something deeply significant about the workings of the universe. The laws of Nature are unerringly symmetrical. They do not have preferences for particular times, places and directions. Indeed, we have found that one of the most powerful guides to their forms is precisely such a requirement. Einstein was the first to recognise how this principle had been used only partially by Galileo and Newton. He elevated it to a central requirement for the laws of Nature to satisfy: that they appear the same to all observers in the Universe, no matter how they are moving or where they are located. There cannot be privileged observers for whom everything looks simpler than it does for others. To countenance such observers would be the ultimate anti-Copernican perspective on the Universe. This democratic principle is a powerful guide to arriving at the most general expression of Nature's laws. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
456:The merely conscious being does not have a preference for continued life. Perhaps while having a pleasurable experience it has a preference for that experience to continue, or while having a painful experience it has a preference for that experience to end, but it will not have any preferences for the long-term future, and the desires it has do not survive periods of sleep or temporary unconsciousness, because unlike a self-aware being, it has no conception of its own future existence after a period of sleep. Thus if we are concerned only about the thwarting of preferences, for a merely conscious being, painless killing and administering an anesthetic seem to be equivalent. Killing does not thwart any more desires than putting the being to sleep. The being will be able to continue to satisfy its preferences after it awakes, but from the being's subjective perspective it is as if a new being, with new preferences, came into existence. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
457:Effect Shrewd Preferences
the screed seen here blesses
the sweet, the meek, the gentle,
the serene. let eyes ensembled
peep the news sheets: ere
december descends, we'll elect
the next pres, reps, etc. when
we welter, cede the wheel,
we let greed-questers enter
(well-dressed jerks!). they send
themselves the green we need,
help themselves fleece the sheep
we be. we're the perfect prey!
the press sleeps the sleep we
deserve, then bleeds berserk
text between celeb tweets. we'd
best reject the mess, steer
the fleet between these repellent
hells. veer! swerve! reverse!
here's the pledge: we'll expect
better press. elect the decent
men, the keenest shes. revere
sense. never feed spleen lest
we weep endless weeks, redeyed, bereft. let excellent pens
represent the experts' ken, help
peeps remember key elements.
let's select well. we'll revel yet.
~ Evie Shockley,#NFDB
458:In proportion as the ideas and sentiments succeed one another and as the mind and heart are trained, the human race continues to be tamed, relationships spread, and bonds tightened. People grew accustomed to gather in front of their huts or around a large tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle men and women who had flocked together. Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded. And this was the first step towards inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other. And the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
459:We change our attitudes, our careers, our relationships. Even our age changes minute by minute. We change our politics, our moods, and our sexual preferences. We change our outlook, we change our minds, we change our sympathies. Yet when someone changes hir gender, we put hir on some television talk show. Well, here’s what I think: I think we all of us do change our genders. All the time. Maybe it’s not as dramatic as some tabloid headline screaming “She Was A He!” But we do, each of us, change our genders. In response to each interaction we have with a new or different person, we subtly shift the kind of man or woman, boy or girl, or whatever gender we’re being at the moment. We’re usually not the same kind of man or woman with our lover as we are with our boss or a parent. When we’re introduced for the first time to someone we find attractive, we shift into being a different kind of man or woman than we are with our childhood friends. We all change our genders. ~ Kate Bornstein, #NFDB
460:There is, in fact, no recognized principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business, while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil rather than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any particular case, according to this general direction of their sentiments, or according to the degree of interest which they feel in the particular thing which it is proposed that the government should do, or according to the belief they entertain that the government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer; but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a government. And ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
461:Many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens; young men subject to the draft are not more opposed to military escalation than men too old to be drafted; and people who lack health insurance are not more likely to support government-issued health insurance than people covered by insurance.35 Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: “In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’ ”36 Political opinions function as “badges of social membership.”37 ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
462:You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in our road and their lives were not the chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning known that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
463:When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what’s more, you reflect what you worship not only to the object itself but also outward to the world around. Those who worship money increasingly define themselves in terms of it and increasingly treat other people as creditors, debtors, partners, or customers rather than as human beings. Those who worship sex define themselves in terms of it (their preferences, their practices, their past histories) and increasingly treat other people as actual or potential sex objects. Those who worship power define themselves in terms of it and treat other people as either collaborators, competitors, or pawns. These and many other forms of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and of those whose lives they touch. ~ N T Wright, #NFDB
464:Voltaire was so engrossed in the struggle against ecclesiastical tyranny that during the later decades of his life he was compelled almost to withdraw from the war on political corruption and oppression. “Politics is not in my line: I have always confined myself to doing my little best to make men less foolish and more honorable.” He knew how complex a matter political philosophy can become, and he shed his certainties as he grew. “I am tired of all these people who govern states from the recesses of their garrets”;95 “these legislators who rule the world at two cents a sheet; . . . unable to govern their wives or their households they take great pleasure in regulating the universe.”96 It is impossible to settle these matters with simple and general formulae, or by dividing all people into fools and knaves on the one hand, and on the other, ourselves. “Truth has not the name of a party”; and he writes to Vauvenargues: “It is the duty of a man like you to have preferences, but not exclusions.”97 ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
465:When the faculty of desire is affected by feelings, we speak of what the person •prefers, which always also indicates a •need. When a contingently determinable will is affected by principles of reason, we say that it has an •interest. Interests are to be found only in a dependent will, one that isn’t of itself always in accord with reason; we can’t make sense of the idea of God’s will’s having interests. But even the human will can have an interest without acting on it. The interest that one merely has is a practical interest in the •action; the interest on which one acts is a pathological interest in the •upshot of the action. [See the note on ‘pathological’ on page 9.] Whereas the former indicates only the effect on the will of principles of reason •in themselves, the latter indicates the effect on it of the principles of reason •in the service of the person’s preferences, since ·in these cases· all reason does is to provide the practical rule through which the person’s preferences are to be satisfied. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
466:Accept everything just the way it is.
Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
Be detached from desire your whole life long.
Do not regret what you have done.
Never be jealous.
Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.
Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.
Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
In all things have no preferences.
Be indifferent to where you live.
Do not pursue the taste of good food.
Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.
Do not act following customary beliefs.
Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
Do not fear death.
Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
Respect God without counting on help.
You may abandon your own body, but you must preserve your honor.
Last- Never stray from the Way. ~ Miyamoto Musashi,#NFDB
467:Are you ready to go home, Catherine?” he asked. “It’s warm inside the house. I kept a fire going for you.”
I continued looking at him, unsure how to respond. “Thanks,” I managed to say and then glanced in the direction of his house—our house.
“Well, you are my wife. And I know you don’t like the cold.”
I’m his wife, I thought to myself. He had said the words as if that simple fact made it necessary to be both thoughtful and kind. As if having gained a wife or husband meant having also gained her or his concerns, and hence the need to consider the person’s needs, wants, and preferences as strongly as one’s own. It struck me as a perfect description of what marriage ought to be. An agreeable notion that had not entered into my petty way of viewing matrimony. I would have assumed it to be above Thaddeus’ egotistical mindset as well.
“Catherine?” he said again, watching me regard him with a quizzical expression. “Are you ready to go home?”
I nodded, which made him smile. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,#NFDB
468:The phenomena we encountered in the previous chapters, from e-mail usage to travel patterns, hint that burstiness is deeply linked to human will and intelligence. Prioritizing only reinforces this impression, since it is our preferences that determine whether an action item is seen to immediately or indefinitely be postponed. This would suggest that bursts require the ability to set priorities. But from this perspective, the results discussed above are rather humbling. They indicate that burstiness is not something we invented but was in use well before intelligent life ever emerged on Earth. There's nothing smooth or random int he way life expresses itself, but bursts dominate at all time scales, from milliseconds to hours in our cells; from minutes to weeks in our activity patterns; from weeks to years when it comes to diseases; from millenia to millions of years in evolutionary processes. Bursts are an integral part of the miracle of life, signatures of the continuous struggle for adaptation and survival. ~ Albert L szl Barab si, #NFDB
469:You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy.
You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.
If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way. ~ Julien Smith,#NFDB
470:please find a summation of the core argument for morality. Reality is objective and consistent. “Logic” is the set of objective and consistent rules derived from the consistency of reality. Those theories that conform to logic are called “valid.” Those theories that are confirmed by empirical testing are called “accurate.” Those theories that are both valid and accurate are called “true.” “Preferences” are required for life, thought, language and debating. Debating requires that both parties hold “truth” to be both objective and universally preferable. Thus the very act of debating contains an acceptance of universally preferable behaviour (UPB). Theories regarding UPB must pass the tests of logical consistency and empirical verification. The subset of UPB that examines enforceable behaviour is called “morality.” As a subset of UPB, no moral theory can be considered true if it is illogical or unsupported by empirical evidence. Moral theories that are supported by logic and evidence are true. All other moral theories are false. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
471:You are still beautiful,” Fern said softly, her face turned to his. He was quiet for a moment, but he didn't pull away or groan or deny what she'd said. “I think that statement is more a reflection of your beauty than mine,” Ambrose said eventually, turning his head so he could look down at her. Fern's face was touched with moonglow, the color of her eyes and the red of her hair undecipherable in the wash of pale light. But her features were clear–the dark pools of expressive eyes, the small nose and soft mouth, the earnest slant of her brow that indicated she didn't understand his response. “You know that thing people always say, about beauty being in the eye of the beholder?” “Yes?” “I always thought it meant we all have different tastes, different preferences . . . you know? Some guys focus on the legs, some guys prefer blondes, some men like girls with long hair, that kind of thing. I never thought about it really, not before this moment. But maybe you see beauty in me because you are beautiful, not because I am.” “Beautiful on the inside?” “Yes. ~ Amy Harmon, #NFDB
472:That’s true,” said Brin. “Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them and suggest useful information.” “Somebody introduces themselves to you, and your watch goes to your web page,” said Page. “Or if you met this person two years ago, this is what they said to you.” Later in the conversation Page said, “Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.” It was a fantastic vision, straight out of science fiction. But Page was making remarkable progress—except for the implant. When asked in early 2010 what will come next for search, he said that Google will know about your preferences and find you things that you don’t know about but want to know about. So even if you don’t know what you’re looking for, Google will tell you. ~ Steven Levy, #NFDB
473:It is here upon earth, in the body itself, that you must acquire a complete knowledge and learn to use a full and complete power. Only when you have done that will you be free to move about with entire security in all the worlds. Only when you are incapable of having the slightest fear, when you remain unmoved, for example, in the midst of the worst nightmare, can you say, “Now I am ready to go into the vital world.” But this means the acquisition of a power and a knowledge that can come only when you are a perfect master of the impulses and desires of the vital nature. You must be absolutely free from everything that can bring in the beings of the darkness or allow them to rule over you; if you are not free, beware!
No attachments, no desires, no impulses, no preferences; perfect equanimity, unchanging peace and absolute faith in the Divine protection: with that you are safe, without it you are in peril. And as long as you are not safe, it is better to do like little chickens that take shelter under the mother’s wings. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#NFDB
474:From Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign ruling by authority to Max Weber 250 years later, defining the state in terms of a monopoly of force is a slow loss of civil sensitivity. The term “democracy” is strictly a constitutional belief about how authority is generated, but today it most commonly commends rather than names a government that serves some particular interest, such as that of “the people.” The drift of these and other confusions of our political talk has always been to transform the subtle and balanced features attributed to the state in the past into an enterprise that facilitates our political preferences. It would be hard to deny that political sophistication has given way to a kind of partisan brutishness, some elements of which Oakeshott thought had already been recognized by Tocqueville in 1848: “… the passions of man, from being political, have now become social.” And this means that men care now far more about “the satisfaction of substantive wants” and the power of government needed to supply them than about freedom and constitutionality. ~ Kenneth Minogue, #NFDB
475:This resulted in a model of the macroeconomy as consisting of a single consumer, who lives for ever, consuming the output of the economy, which is a single good produced in a single firm, which he owns and in which he is the only employee, which pays him both profits equivalent to the marginal product of capital and a wage equivalent to the marginal product of labor, to which he decides how much labor to supply by solving a utility function that maximizes his utility over an infinite time horizon, which he rationally expects and therefore correctly predicts. The economy would always be in equilibrium except for the impact of unexpected ‘technology shocks’ that change the firm’s productive capabilities (or his consumption preferences) and thus temporarily cause the single capitalist/worker/consumer to alter his working hours. Any reduction in working hours is a voluntary act, so the representative agent is never involuntarily unemployed, he’s just taking more leisure. And there are no banks, no debt, and indeed no money in this model.
You think I’m joking? I wish I was. ~ Steve Keen,#NFDB
476:Except for the very poor, for whom income coincides with survival, the main motivators of money-seeking are not necessarily economic. For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our heads. We carefully keep score of them. They shape our preferences and motivate our actions, like the incentives provided in the social environment. As a result, we refuse to cut losses when doing so would admit failure, we are biased against actions that could lead to regret, and we draw an illusory but sharp distinction between omission and commission, not doing and doing, because the sense of responsibility is greater for one than for the other. The ultimate currency that rewards or punishes is often emotional, a form of mental self-dealing that inevitably creates conflicts of interest when the individual acts as an agent on behalf of an organization. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
477:Other reasons account for Hamilton’s failure to snatch the prize. Though blessed with a great executive mind and a consummate policy maker, Hamilton could never master the smooth restraint of a mature politician. His conception of leadership was noble but limiting: the true statesman defied the wishes of the people, if necessary, and shook them from wishful thinking and complacency. Hamilton lived in a world of moral absolutes and was not especially prone to compromise or consensus building. Where Washington and Jefferson had a gift for voicing the hopes of ordinary people, Hamilton had no special interest in echoing popular preferences. Much too avowedly elitist to become president, he lacked what Woodrow Wilson defined as an essential ingredient for political leadership: “profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”36 Alexander Hamilton enjoyed no such mystic bond with the American people. This may have been why Madison was so adamant that “Hamilton never could have got in” as president. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
478:He turned over the application, and Lauren watched him scanning it, his gaze nearing the bottom where she had listed her job preferences. She knew the exact instant he spotted what she had written. "What the...!" he said, astonished, and then he burst out laughing. "Weatherby and I are going to have to be careful. Which of our jobs do you want most?"
"Neither," Lauren said shortly. "I did that because on my way to the interview at Sinco,I decided I didn't want to work there after all."
"So you purposely flunked your tests,is that it?"
"That's it."
"Lauren..." he began in a soft seductive voice that instantly put her on guard.
"I've had the dubious pleasure of reading through your file," she clarified, at his stunned look. "I know all about Bebe Leonardos and the French movie star.I even saw the picture of you that was taken with Ericka Moran the day after you sent me away because a "business aquaintance' was coming to see you."
"And," he concluded evenly, "you were hurt."
"I was disgusted," Lauren shot back, refusing to admit to any of the anguish she'd felt. ~ Judith McNaught,#NFDB
479:1. Accept everything just the way it is.
2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
5. Be detached from desire your whole life long.
6. Do not regret what you have done.
7. Never be jealous.
8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.
9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.
10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
11. In all things have no preferences.
12. Be indifferent to where you live.
13. Do not pursue the taste of good food.
14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.
15. Do not act following customary beliefs.
16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
17. Do not fear death.
18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.
20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.
21. Never stray from the Way. ~ Miyamoto Musashi,#NFDB
480:This inclination is a reflection of a person’s uniqueness. This uniqueness is not something merely poetic or philosophical—it is a scientific fact that genetically, every one of us is unique; our exact genetic makeup has never happened before and will never be repeated. This uniqueness is revealed to us through the preferences we innately feel for particular activities or subjects of study. Such inclinations can be toward music or mathematics, certain sports or games, solving puzzle-like problems, tinkering and building, or playing with words. With those who stand out by their later mastery, they experience this inclination more deeply and clearly than others. They experience it as an inner calling. It tends to dominate their thoughts and dreams. They find their way, by accident or sheer effort, to a career path in which this inclination can flourish. This intense connection and desire allows them to withstand the pain of the process—the self-doubts, the tedious hours of practice and study, the inevitable setbacks, the endless barbs from the envious. They develop a resiliency and confidence that others lack. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
481:Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries. They did not have to worry whether their astronomy agreed with the precepts of the Bible, that their standards of writing followed the classical principles taught by the mandarins of China, or that Muslim imams disapproved of their printing and painting. The Mongols had the power, at least temporarily, to impose new international systems of technology, agriculture, and knowledge that superseded the predilections or prejudices of any single civilization; and in so doing, they broke the monopoly on thought exercised by local elites. ~ Jack Weatherford, #NFDB
482:I know why you did it too. You can't become mortal yourself until you change her back again. Isn't that it? You don't care what happens to her, or to the others, just as long as you become a real magician, even if you change the Bull into a bullfrog, because it's still just a trick when you do it. You don't care about anything but magic, and what kind of magician is that? Schmendrick, I don't feel good. I have to sit down."
Schmendrick must have carried her for a time, because she was definitely not walking and his green eyes were ringing in her head. "That's right. Nothing but magic matters to me. I would round up unicorns for Haggard myself if it would heighten my power but half a hair. It's true. I have no preferences and no loyalties. I have only magic." His voice was hard and sad.
"Really?" she asked, rocking dreamily in her terror, watching the brightness flowing by. "That's awful." She was very impressed. "Are you really like that?"
"No," he said, then or later. "No, it's not true. How could I be like that, and still have all these troubles?" Then he said, "Molly, you have to walk now. ~ Peter S Beagle,#NFDB
483:Analytic philosophy, that is to say, can very occasionally produce practically conclusive results of a negative kind. It can show in a few cases that just too much incoherence and inconsistency is involved in some position for any reasonable person to continue to hold it. But it can never establish the rational acceptability of any particular position in cases where each of the alternative rival positions available has sufficient range and scope and the adherents of each are willing to pay the price necessary to secure coherence and consistency. Hence the peculiar flavor of so much contemporary analytic writing—by writers less philosophically self-aware than Rorty or Lewis—in which passages of argument in which the most sophisticated logical and semantic techniques available are deployed in order to secure maximal rigor alternate with passages which seem to do no more than cobble together a set of loosely related arbitrary preferences; contemporary analytic philosophy exhibits a strange partnership between an idiom deeply indebted to Frege and Carnap and one deriving from the more simple-minded forms of existentialism ~ Alasdair MacIntyre, #NFDB
484:In cognitive science, the tendency to give different responses to problems that have surface dissimilarities but that are really formally identical is termed a framing effect. Framing effects are very basic violations of the strictures of rational choice. In the technical literature of decision theory, the stricture that is being violated is called descriptive invariance-the stricture that choices should not change as the result of trivial rewordings of a problem.2 Subjects in framing experiments, when shown differing versions of the same choice situation, overwhelmingly agree that the differences in the problem representations should not affect their choice. If choices flip-flop based on problem characteristics that the subjects themselves view as irrelevant-then the subjects can be said to have no stable, well-ordered preferences at all. If a person's preference reverses based on inconsequential aspects of how the problem is phrased, the person cannot be described as maximizing expected
utility. Thus, such failures of descriptive invariance have quite serious implications for our view of whether or not people are rational. ~ Keith E Stanovich,#NFDB
485:And Bram?"
Panic punched me in the chest. So far today she'd been willing to touch me, laugh with me, confide in me, and now she was wondering if Chas shouldn't go out with me? Had I misread something somewhere?
Chas shook her head and grinned. "Nah. Bram's too busy waiting."
"Waiting?" Nora didn't take her eyes from me. Maybe she wanted me to answer.
"For the right girl," I said curtly.
"And he has very specific physical preferences," Chas said. I grabbed her wrist and squeezed. She'd better not.
She did. "For some reason, he is terribly attracted to black hair. Tom's a leg man, himself...attached, unattached, doesn't really mtter. But Bram likes the hair."
With all the various methods of Chastity Disposal flying through my imagination-should I just shoot her, or should I open her skull and puree her brains with a motorized mixer, or perhaps set her on fire?-It took me a minute to notice me a very shy smile.
I dropped Chas's wrist. I almost dropped my machete.
Nora looked away and moved a few steps in front of us, leaping into the grass to flatten it for herself as she went.
"I win," Chas whispered.
"Smoke all you want," I whispered back. ~ Lia Habel,#NFDB
486:Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
487:The three of us are strong-willed individuals with distinct preferences, and the Eating Out Jar came out of a struggle. Each time we talked about going out to eat, we would spend so much energy bickering that we would be exhausted or discouraged by the time we finally chose. It was not fun. The same situation occurred with choosing an activity for the weekend. I sat my family at the table and gave them pens and Post-it notes where we wrote all the ideas we had. It was fun to see my family’s ideas. My husband and daughter realized that they both liked the same places and the same activities. Usually I was the one to introduce new ideas, which were met with resistance. Here was my chance to introduce things and activities I would like to experiment with and experience. Creating jars eliminated the necessity of using force, manipulation, or persuasion. Now we don’t waste time on making simple decisions, we just pull the jar out and randomly pick one, and we all love (or accept) the choice. The Happiness Jar we created for those times when we were going through down times as family. We came up with ideas that we all like and enjoy—simple things such as bathing our dog Bella or making potato-zucchini pancakes. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
488:My next suggestion for breaking from the past is perhaps the strangest: Use a random process to generate and select decision alternatives. Sometimes it is better to ignore the traditional decision-making process, where people spend a great deal of time comparing the pros and cons of each alternative. Writers from Benjamin Franklin to modern decision theorists have shown how, by decomposing a complex problem into simpler elements, the problem as a whole can be better understood, and better decisions can be made. As one team of researchers put it,“the terms decision theory and decision analysis describe a myriad of theoretical formulations; an assumption made by most of these approaches is that decisions are best made deliberately, objectively, and with reflection.”26 But these methods, while effective, have a troubling limitation: No matter how hard people try not to think about their past experiences, irrational prejudices, and personal preferences, much research shows that these and a host of other biases have powerful effects. These biases shape—in often suboptimal ways—which decision alternatives are generated, which decision criteria are applied, and which decisions are ultimately made and implemented. ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
489:For preference utilitarians, taking the life of a person will normally be worse than taking the life of some other being, because persons are highly future-oriented in their preferences. To kill a person is therefore, normally, to violate not just one but a wide range of the most central and significant preferences a being can have. Very often, it will make nonsense of everything that the victim has been trying to do in the past days, months or even years. In contrast, beings that cannot see themselves as entities with a future do not have any preferences about their own future existence. This is not to deny that such beings might struggle against a situation in which their lives are in danger, as a fish struggles to get free of the barbed hook in its mouth; but this indicates no more than a preference for the cessation of a state of affairs that causes pain or fear. The behaviour of a fish on a hook suggests a reason for not killing fish by that method but does not in itself suggest a preference utilitarian reason against killing fish by a method that brings about death instantly, without first causing pain or distress. Struggles against danger and pain do not suggest that fish are capable of preferring their own future existence to non-existence. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
490:Hundreds of experiments into the misinformation effect have been conducted, and people have been convinced of all sorts of things. Screwdrivers become wrenches, white men become black men, and experiences involving other people get traded back and forth. In one study, [Elizabeth] Loftus convinced people they were once lost in a shopping mall as a child. She had subjects read four essays provided by family members, but the one about getting lost as a kid was fake. A quarter of the subjects incorporated the fake story into their memory and even provided details about the fictional event that were not included in the narrative. Loftus even convinced people they shook hands with Bugs Bunny, who isn’t a Disney character, when they visited Disney World as a kid, just by showing them a fake advertisement where a child was doing the same. She altered the food preferences of subjects in one experiment where she lied to people, telling them they had reported becoming sick from eating certain things as a child. A few weeks later, when offered those same foods, those people avoided them. In other experiments, she implanted memories of surviving drowning and fending off animal attacks— none of them real, all of them accepted into the autobiography of the subjects without resistance. ~ David McRaney, #NFDB
491:But there is a tension between the respect for diversity or individuality and the recognition of natural right. When liberals became impatient of the absolute limits to diversity or individuality that are imposed even by the most liberal version of natural right, they had to make a choice between natural right and the uninhibited cultivation of individuality. They chose the latter. Once this step was taken, tolerance appeared as one value or ideal among many, and not intrinsically superior to its opposite. In other words, intolerance appeared as a value equal in dignity to tolerance. But it is practically impossible to leave it at the equality of all preferences or choices. If the unequal rank of choices cannot be traced to the unequal rank of their objectives, it must be traced to the unequal rank of the acts of choosing; and this means eventually that genuine choice, as distinguished from spurious or despicable choice, is nothing but resolute or deadly serious decision. Such a decision, however, is akin to intolerance rather than to tolerance. Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance. ~ Leo Strauss, #NFDB
492:Universities promote diversity. On April 24, 1997, 62 research universities led by Harvard bought a full-page advertisement in the New York Times that justified racial preferences in university admissions by explaining that diversity is a “value that is central to the very concept of education in our institutions.”
Lee Bollinger, who has been president of the University of Michigan and of Columbia, once claimed that diversity “is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare.”
Many companies and universities have a “chief diversity officer” who reports directly to the president. In 2006, Michael J. Tate was vice president for equity and diversity of Washington State University. He had an annual budget of three million dollars, a full time staff of 55, and took part in the highest levels of university decision-making. There were similarly powerful “chief diversity officers” at Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Virginia, Brown, and the University of Michigan.
In 2006, the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse decided that diversity was so important that its beneficiaries—students—should pay for it. It increased in-state tuition by 24 percent, from $5,555 to $6,875, to cover the costs of recruitment to increase diversity. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
493:Your first sign something may be amiss comes quickly, the moment you get off the plane at the airport in Baltimore. After months of deprivation, American excess is overwhelming. Crowds of self-important bustling businessmen. Shrill and impatient advertising that saturates your eyes and ears. Five choices of restaurant, with a hundred menu items each, only a half-minute walk away at all times. In the land you just left, dinners are uniformly brown and served on trays when served at all. I was disoriented by the choice, the lights, the infinite variety of gummy candy that filled an entire wall of the convenience store, a gluttonous buffet repeated every four gates. The simple pleasure of a cup of coffee after a good night’s sleep, sleep you haven’t had since you received your deployment orders, seems overly simple when reunited with such a vast volume of overindulgent options.
But the shock wears off, more quickly for some, but eventually for most. Fast food and alcohol are seductive, and I didn’t fight too hard. Your old routine is easy to fall back into, preferences and tastes return. It’s not hard to be a fussy, overstuffed American. After a couple of months, home is no longer foreign, and you are free to resume your old life.
I thought I did. Resume my old life, that is. I was wrong. ~ Brian Castner,#NFDB
494:One of the frequent attacks on the behavior of the free market is based on the Georgist bugbear of natural resources held off the market for speculative purposes. We have dealt with this alleged problem above. Another, and diametrically opposite, attack is the common one that the free market wastes resources, especially depletable resources. Future generations are allegedly robbed by the greed of the present. Such reasoning would lead to the paradoxical conclusion that noneof the resource be consumed at all. For whenever, at any time, a man consumes a depletable resource (here we use “consumes” in a broader sense to include “uses up” in production), he is leaving less of a stock for himself or his descendants to draw upon. It is a fact of life that wheneverany amount of a depletable resource is used up, less is left for the future, and therefore anysuch consumption could just as well be called “robbery of the future,” if one chooses to define robbery in such unusual terms. Once we grant any amount of use to the depletable resource, we have to discard the robbery-of-the-future argument and accept the individual preferences of the market. There is then no more reason to assume that the market will use the resources too fast than to assume the opposite. The market will tend to use resources at precisely the rate that the consumers desire. ~ Murray N Rothbard, #NFDB
495:Psychologist and mindfulness expert David Richo, Ph.D., has focused on how these healthy connections are formed and what is needed to keep them alive. He describes the “5 A’s” as the qualities and gifts we all naturally seek out from the important people in our lives, including family, friends, and especially partners. What are these 5 A’s? • Attention—genuine interest in you, what you like and dislike, what inspires and motivates you without being overbearing or intrusive. You experience being heard and noticed. • Acceptance—genuinely embracing your interests, desires, activities, and preferences as they are without trying to alter or change them in any way. • Affection—physical comforting as well as compassion. • Appreciation—encouragement and gratitude for who you are, as you are. • Allowing—it is safe to be yourself and express all that you feel, even if it is not entirely polite or socially acceptable. What Richo is describing, in essence, are those genuine needs we have that form the basis of secure, healthy relationships. The 5 A’s are what we all should have received most of the time from our caregivers when we were growing up. They are also what we want in our adult relationships today. In his book How to Be an Adult in Relationships, Richo compares and contrasts the 5 A’s with what happens in unhealthy or unequal relationships. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
496:Men Are from Mars Women Are from Venus Imagine that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. One day long ago the Martians, looking through their telescopes, discovered the Venusians. Just glimpsing the Venusians awakened feelings they had never known. They fell in love and quickly invented space travel and flew to Venus. The Venusians welcomed the Martians with open arms. They had intuitively known that this day would come. Their hearts opened wide to a love they had never felt before. The love between the Venusians and Martians was magical. They delighted in being together, doing things together, and sharing together. Though from different worlds, they revelled in their differences. They spent months learning about each other, exploring and appreciating their different needs, preferences, and behaviour patterns. For years they lived together in love and harmony. Then they decided to fly to Earth. In the beginning everything was wonderful and beautiful. But the effects of Earth's atmosphere took hold, and one morning everyone woke up with a peculiar kind of amnesia selective amnesia! Both the Martians and Venusians forgot that they were from different planets and were supposed to be different. In one morning everything they had learned about their differences was erased from their memory. And since that day men and women have been in conflict. ~ John Gray, #NFDB
497:Miss Wigglesworth gave him an assessing look out of her remarkable blue eyes.
“You’re a libertine? How very unique.”
She gave a small fake yawn. She was, in that heartbeat, so perfect and so pure and so very dangerous indeed that all he could do was frighten her away.
“Have you been listening at keyholes, Lazuli? I assure you, they have always been willing, even when I ask that they pretend otherwise.”
She blushed deep pink at that – an appealing thing, the blood high under her cheeks, warm and subtle and alive. He wanted to delve into her, with teeth and body until she was ravaged and supine and wrecked and bleeding and his. She did not, as he had expected, break away from him mid-step. The blush was there, to be sure, but she was made of sterner stuff. Any true innocent would be repulsed by the intent in his tone. A woman without experience would fear the implication of his preferences – the certain acknowledgment that there was wolf, nothing but wolf, underneath all his icy indifference. Faith was intrigued. She tilted her head and looked hard at him, her lovely eyes flinty.
“So, you’re just a beast who enjoys the chase, nothing else?”
“Exactly so.”
She threw it all at him. Like a piece of warm fresh meat, cut and dripping temptation, enough to make him salivate, to bait her trap.
“You can’t catch me.”
The waltz ended. ~ Gail Carriger,#NFDB
498:keep faith :::
We must have faith that always what is for the best happens. We may for the moment not consider it as the best because we are ignorant and also blind, because we do not see the consequences of things and what will happen later. But we must keep the faith that if it is like that, if we rely on the Divine, if we give Him the full charge of ourselves, if we let Him decide everything for us, well, we must know that it is always what is best for us that happens. This is an absolute fact. To the extent to which you surrender, the best happens to you. This may not be in conformity with what you would like, your preferences or desire, because these things are blind: it is the best from thespiritual point of view, the best for your progress, your development, your spiritual growth, your true life. It is always that. And you must keep this faith, because faith is the expression of a trust in the Divine and the full self-giving you make to the Divine. And when you make it, it is something absolutely marvellous. That's a fact, these are not just words, you understand, it is a fact. When you look back, all kinds of things which you did not understand when they happened to you, you realise as just the thing which was necessary in order to compel you to make the needed progress. Always, without exception. It is our blindness which prevents us from seeing it. ~ The Mother,#NFDB
499:I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hypothesis of Cerion's general pattern required that two predictions be affirmed (or else we were in trouble): this population must disappear by hybridization with mottled shells toward bank-interior coasts and with ribby snails toward the bank-edge. We hiked west toward the bank-interior and easily found hybrids right on the verge of the airport road. We then moved east toward the bank-edge along a disused road with vegetation rising to five feet in the center between the tire paths. We should have found our hybrids but we did not. The Cerion agassizi simply stopped about two hundred yards north of our first ribby Cerion. Then we realized that a pond lay just to our east and that ribby forms, with their coastal preferences, might not favor the western side of the pond. We forded the pond and found a classic hybrid zone between Cerion agassizi and ribby Cerions. (Ribby Cerion had just managed to round the south end of the pond, but had not moved sufficiently north along the west side to establish contact with C. agassizi populations.) I wanted to shout for joy. Then I thought, "But who can I tell; who cares?" And I answered myself, "I don't have to tell anyone. We have just seen and understood something that no one has ever seen and understood before. What more does a man need? ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
500:The first is what some psychologists call “hot hate,” based on anger. Imagine yourself yelling at the television, and you get the picture. Most Americans would be ashamed to say “I hate Republicans” or “I hate Democrats.” But our market preferences tell the true story. We reward professional political pundits who say or write that the other side is evil or stupid or both. For some haters, the hot variety is a little too crude. They prefer “cool hate,” based on contempt, and express disgust for another person through sarcasm, dismissal or mockery. Cool hate can be every bit as damaging as hot hate. The social psychologist and relationship expert John Gottman was famously able to predict with up to 94 percent accuracy whether couples would divorce just by observing a brief snippet of conversation. The biggest warning signs of all were indications of contempt, such as sarcasm, sneering and hostile humor. Want to see if a couple will end up in divorce court? Watch them discuss a contentious topic — which Mr. Gottman has done thousands of times — and see if either partner rolls his or her eyes. Disagreement is normal, but dismissiveness can be deadly. As it is in love, so it is in politics. With just an ironic smile, one can dismiss an entire class of citizens as uncultured rubes or mindless theocrats. Feigning shock and dismay at the resulting indignation simply adds insult to injury. The last variety is anonymous hate. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
501:You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy.
You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.
If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.
Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference.
Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire—overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything that isn’t necessary. ~ Julien Smith,#NFDB
502:You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch.
Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy.
You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. You personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.
If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.
Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference.
Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire—overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything that isn’t necessary. ~ Julien Smith,#NFDB
503:David Buss has amassed a lot of evidence that human females across many cultures tend to prefer males who have high social status, good income, ambition, intelligence, and energy--contrary to the views of some cultural anthropologists, who assume that people vary capriciously in their sexual preferences across different cultures. He interpreted this as evidence that women evolved to prefer good providers who could support their families by acquiring and defending resources I respect his data enormously, but disagree with his interpretation.
The traits women prefer are certainly correlated with male abilities to provide material benefits, but they are also correlated with heritable fitness. If the same traits can work both as fitness indicators and as wealth indicators, so much the better. The problem comes when we try to project wealth indicators back into a Pleistocene past when money did not exist, when status did not imply wealth, and when bands did not stay in one place long enough to defend piles of resources. Ancestral women may have preferred intelligent, energetic men for their ability to hunt more effectively and provide their children with more meat. But I would suggest it was much more important that intelligent men tended to produce intelligent, energetic children more likely to survive and reproduce, whether or not their father stayed around. In other words, I think evolutionary psychology has put too much emphasis on male resources instead of male fitness in explaining women's sexual preferences. ~ Geoffrey Miller,#NFDB
504:The Westminster system understandably produces governments with more formal powers than in the United States. This greater degree of decisiveness can be seen clearly with respect to the budget process. In Britain, national budgets are not drawn up in Parliament, but in Whitehall, the seat of the bureaucracy, where professional civil servants act under instructions from the cabinet and prime minister. The budget is then presented by the chancellor of the exchequer (equivalent of the U.S. treasury secretary) to the House of Commons, which votes to approve it in a single up-or-down vote. This usually takes place within a week or two of its promulgation by the government. The process in the United States is totally different. The Constitution grants Congress primary authority over the budget. While presidents formulate budgets through the executive branch Office of Management and Budget, this office often becomes more like another lobbying organization supporting the president’s preferences. The budget, put before Congress in February, works its way through a complex set of committees over a period of months, and what finally emerges for ratification (we hope) by the two houses toward the end of the summer is the product of innumerable deals struck with individual members to secure their support. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was established in 1974 to provide Congress with greater technocratic support in drawing up budgets, but in the end the making of an American budget is a highly decentralized and nonstrategic process in comparison to what happens in Britain. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
505:Lareau stresses that one style isn’t morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau’s words, the middle-class children learn a sense of “entitlement.” That word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the term: “They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention…. It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences.” They knew the rules. “Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires.” By contrast, the working-class and poor children were characterized by “an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint.” They didn’t know how to get their way, or how to “customize”—using Lareau’s wonderful term—whatever environment they were in, for their best purposes. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
506:Cognitive scientists recognize two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. The simplest definition of instrumental rationality-the one that emphasizes most that it is grounded in the practical world-is: Behaving in the world so that you get exactly what you most want, given the resources (physical and mental) available to you. Somewhat more technically, we could characterize instrumental rationality as the optimization of the individual's goal fulfillment. Economists and cognitive scientists have refined the notion of optimization of goal fulfillment into the technical notion of expected utility. The model of rational judgment used by decision scientists is one in which a person chooses options based on which option has the largest expected utility.' One discovery of modern decision science is that if people's preferences follow certain patterns (the so-called axioms of choice) then they are behaving as if they are maximizing utility-they are acting to get what they most want. This is what makes people's degrees of rationality measurable by the experimental methods of cognitive science. The deviation from the optimal choice pattern is an (inverse) measure of the degree of rationality.
The other aspect of rationality studied by cognitive scientists is termed epistemic rationality. This aspect of rationality concerns how well beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world.' The two types of rationality are related. Importantly, a critical aspect of beliefs that enter into instrumental calculations (that is, tacit calculations) is the probabilities of states of affairs in the world. ~ Keith E Stanovich,#NFDB
507:Nir elaborates in this post: TriggerThe trigger is the actuator of a behavior — the spark plug in the engine. Triggers come in two types: external and internal. Habit-forming technologies start by alerting users with external triggers like an email, a link on a web site, or the app icon on a phone. ActionAfter the trigger comes the intended action. Here, companies leverage two pulleys of human behavior – motivation and ability. This phase of the Hook draws upon the art and science of usability design to ensure that the user acts the way the designer intends. Variable RewardVariable schedules of reward are one of the most powerful tools that companies use to hook users. Research shows that levels of dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward. Introducing variability multiplies the effect, creating a frenzied hunting state, activating the parts associated with wanting and desire. Although classic examples include slot machines and lotteries, variable rewards are prevalent in habit-forming technologies as well. InvestmentThe last phase of the Hook is where the user is asked to do bit of work. The investment implies an action that improves the service for the next go-around. Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all commitments that improve the service for the user. These investments can be leveraged to make the trigger more engaging, the action easier, and the reward more exciting with every pass through the Hook. We’ve found this model (and the accompanying book) to be a great starting point for a customer acquisition and retention strategy. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
508:The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life--knowing that under certain conditions it is not worth while to live. He is of a disposition to do men service, though he is ashamed to have a service done to him. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination... He does not take part in public displays... He is open in his dislikes and preferences; he talks and acts frankly, because of his contempt for men and things... He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend; complaisance is the characteristic of a slave... He never feels malice, and always forgets and passes over injuries... He is not fond of talking... It is no concern of his that he should be praised, or that others should be blamed. He does not speak evil of others, even of his enemies, unless it be to themselves. His carriage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech measured; he is not given to hurry, for he is concerned about only a few things; he is not prone to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very important. A shrill voice and hasty steps come to a man through care... He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skillful general who marshals his limited forces with the strategy of war... He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
509:He does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life,—knowing that under certain conditions it is not worth while to live. He is of a disposition to do men service, though he is ashamed to have a service done to him. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination . . . He does not take part in public displays . . . He is open in his dislikes and preferences; he talks and acts frankly, because of his contempt for men and things . . . He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend; complaisance is the characteristic of a slave . . . . He never feels malice, and always forgets and passes over injuries . . . . He is not fond of talking . . . . It is no concern of his that he should be praised, or that others should be blamed. He does not speak evil of others, even of his enemies, unless it be to themselves. His carriage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech measured; he is not given to hurry, for he is concerned about only a few things; he is not prone to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very important. A shrill voice and hasty steps come to a man through care . . . . He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skilful general who marshals his limited forces with all the strategy of war . . . . He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.59 ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
510:The question has been raised, General Ia, as to whether or not you already know the outcome of this tribunal. Do you?” he asked her. “Is that why you’re trying to avoid being here? To avoid being bored?”
“Sirs, I deal in percentages. There are eight possible outcomes to this tribunal which are greater than one percent in their probability, and fifty-two possible outcomes that are less than one percent, most being less than one-tenth of one percent. However small those minor possibilities are, I cannot rule them out as an outcome. I was shot in the shoulder with a handheld laser cannon on a less than three percent probability, which most people would consider to be a highly unlikely outcome. I was also elevated to the rank of a four-star General, never mind that I am now a five-star, on a less than one-hundred-thousandth of a percent, when the largest percentile, forty-seven percent, was that I should have been elevated only to the rank of Rear Admiral.
“As for being bored . . . I actually would prefer to be here because that means nobody would be attacking our colonies. But they are, and that means my preferences must take second place to my sense of duty. I will admit I have sat through this tribunal around eight or nine times in the timestreams, examining those eight largest percentiles,” Ia added candidly. “This has left me very familiar with the majority of all evidence the prosecution will be presenting against me . . . but again, the outcome is never one hundred percent certain, until it has actually come to pass. I do take this tribunal seriously, but I also take the ongoing threat to Terran civilians equally seriously, sirs. ~ Jean Johnson,#NFDB
511:Some of us, understandably, do not wish to hear even this message of hope and personal growth. We wish to have our old world, our former assumptions and stratagems, reinstituted as quickly as possible. We are desperate to hear: “Yes, your marriage can be restored to its pristine assumptions; yes, your depression can be magically removed without understanding why it has come; yes, your old values and preferences still work.” This understandable desire for what is called “the regressive restoration of the persona” merely papers over the growing crevice within, and off we go in search of another palliative treatment, or another less demanding view of our difficulties. It is quite natural to cling to the known world and fear the unknown. We all do—even as that crevice between the false self and the natural self grows ever greater within, and the old attitudes more and more ineffectual. Most of us live our lives backing into our future, making the choices of each new moment from the data and agenda of the old—and then we wonder why repetitive patterns turn up in our lives. Our dilemma was best described in the nineteenth century by the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard when he noted in his journal the paradox that life must be remembered backward but lived forward. Is it not self-deluding, then, to keep doing the same thing but expecting different results? For those willing to stand in the heat of this transformational fire, the second half of life provides a shot at getting themselves back again. They might still fondly gaze at the old world, but they risk engaging a larger world, one more complex, less safe, more challenging, the one that is already irresistibly hurtling toward them. ~ James Hollis, #NFDB
512:Traditional economics assumes that prices of products in the market are determined by a balance between two forces: production at each price (supply) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand). The price at which these two forces meet determines the prices in the marketplace.
This is an elegant idea, but it depends cetnrally on the assumption that the two forces are independent and that together they produce the market price. The results of all the experiments presented in this chapter (and the basic idea of arbitrary coherence itself) challenge these assumptions. First, according to the standard economic framework, consumers' willingness to pay is one of the two inputs that determine market prices (this is the demand). But as our experiments demonstrate, what consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated, and this means that consumers don't in fact have a good handle on their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences.
Second, whereas the standard economic framework assumes that the forces of supply and demand are independent, the type of anchoring manipulations we have shown here suggest that they are, in fact, dependent. In the real world, anchoring comes from manufacturer's suggested retail prices (MSRPs), advertised prices, promotions, product introductions, etc.-all of which are supply-side variables. It seems then that instead of consumers' willingness to pay influencing market prices, the causality is somewhat reversed and it is market prices themselves that influence consumers' willingness to pay. What this means is that demand is not, in fact, a completely separate force from supply. ~ Dan Ariely,#NFDB
513:In all that is done in the universe, the Divine through his Shakti is behind all action but he is veiled by his Yoga Maya and works through the ego of the Jiva in the lower nature.
In Yoga also it is the Divine who is the Sadhaka and the Sadhana; it is his Shakti with her light, power, knowledge, consciousness, Ananda, acting upon the adhara and, when it is opened to her, pouring into it with these divine forces that makes the Sadhana possible. But so long as the lower nature is active the personal effort of the Sadhaka remains necessary.
The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender, -
an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing - the mind's will, the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature;
rejection of the movements of the lower nature - rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind, - rejection of the vital nature's desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, - rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may establish itself in a body growing always more divine;
surrender of oneself and all one is and has and every plane of the consciousness and every movement to the Divine and the Shakti.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother,#NFDB
514:Sweet Mother, how can we cut the knot of the ego?
How to cut it? Take a sword and strike it (laughter), when one becomes conscious of it. For usually one is not; we think it quite normal, what happens to us; and in fact it is very normal but we think it quite good also.So to begin with one must have a great clear-sightedness to become aware that one is enclosed in all these knots which hold one in bondage. And then, when one is aware that there's something altogether tightly closed in there - so tightly that one has tried in vain to move it - then one imagines one's will to be a very sharp sword-blade, and with all one's force one strikes a blow on this knot (imaginary, of course, one doesn't take up a sword in fact), and this produces a result. Of course you can do this work from the psychological point of view, discovering all the elements constituting this knot, the whole set of resistances, habits, preferences, of all that holds you narrowly closed in. So when you grow aware of this, you can concentrate and call the divine Force and the Grace and strike a good blow on this formation, these things so closely held, like that, that nothing can separate them. And at that moment you must resolve that you will no longer listen to these things, that you will listen only to the divine Consciousness and will do no other work except the divine work without worrying about personal results, free from all attachment, free from all preference, free from all wish for success, power, satisfaction, vanity, all this.... All this must disappear and you must see only the divine Will incarnated in your will and making you act. Then, in this way, you are cured.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#NFDB
515:Aristotle's ideal man, however, is no mere metaphysician. He does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life,—knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live. He is of a disposition to do men service, though he is ashamed to have a service done to him. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination... He does not take part in public displays... He is open in his dislikes and preferences; he talks and acts frankly, because of his contempt for men and things... He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend; complaisance is the characteristic of a slave... He never feels malice, and always forgets and passes over injuries... He is not fond of talking... It is no concern of his that he should be praised, or that others should be blamed. He does not speak evil of others, even of his enemies, unless it be to themselves. His carriage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech measured; he is not given to hurry, for he is concerned about only a few things; he is not prone to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very important. A shrill voice and hasty steps come to a man through care... He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skillful general who marshals his limited forces with all the strategy of war... He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.[78] Such is the Superman of Aristotle. VIII. politics ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
516:Sweet Mother, how can we cut the knot of the ego?
How to cut it? Take a sword and strike it (laughter), when one becomes conscious of it. For usually one is not; we think it quite normal, what happens to us; and in fact it is very normal but we think it quite good also.So to begin with one must have a great clear-sightedness to become aware that one is enclosed in all these knots which hold one in bondage. And then, when one is aware that there's something altogether tightly closed in there - so tightly that one has tried in vain to move it - then one imagines one's will to be a very sharp sword-blade, and with all one's force one strikes a blow on this knot (imaginary, of course, one doesn't take up a sword in fact), and this produces a result. Of course you can do this work from the psychological point of view, discovering all the elements constituting this knot, the whole set of resistances, habits, preferences, of all that holds you narrowly closed in. So when you grow aware of this, you can concentrate and call the divine Force and the Grace and strike a good blow on this formation, these things so closely held, like that, that nothing can separate them. And at that moment you must resolve that you will no longer listen to these things, that you will listen only to the divine Consciousness and will do no other work except the divine work without worrying about personal results, free from all attachment, free from all preference, free from all wish for success, power, satisfaction, vanity, all this.... All this must disappear and you must see only the divine Will incarnated in your will and making you act. Then, in this way, you are cured.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#NFDB
517:Aristotle’s ideal man, however, is no mere metaphysician. He does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life,—knowing that under certain conditions it is not worth while to live. He is of a disposition to do men service, though he is ashamed to have a service done to him. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination . . . He does not take part in public displays . . . He is open in his dislikes and preferences; he talks and acts frankly, because of his contempt for men and things . . . He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend; complaisance is the characteristic of a slave . . . . He never feels malice, and always forgets and passes over injuries . . . . He is not fond of talking . . . . It is no concern of his that he should be praised, or that others should be blamed. He does not speak evil of others, even of his enemies, unless it be to themselves. His carriage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech measured; he is not given to hurry, for he is concerned about only a few things; he is not prone to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very important. A shrill voice and hasty steps come to a man through care . . . . He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skilful general who marshals his limited forces with all the strategy of war . . . . He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude. 59 Such is the Superman of Aristotle. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
518:In our relationships, weatherproofing typically plays itself out like this: You meet someone and all is well. You are attracted to his or her appearance, personality, intellect, sense of humor, or some combination of these traits. Initially, you not only approve of your differences with this person, you actually appreciate them. You might even be attracted to the person, in part because of how different you are. You have different opinions, preferences, tastes, and priorities. After a while, however, you begin to notice little quirks about your new partner (or friend, teacher, whoever), that you feel could be improved upon. You bring it to their attention. You might say, “You know, you sure have a tendency to be late.” Or, “I’ve noticed you don’t read very much.” The point is, you’ve begun what inevitably turns into a way of life—looking for and thinking about what you don’t like about someone, or something that isn’t quite right. Obviously, an occasional comment, constructive criticism, or helpful guidance isn’t cause for alarm. I have to say, however, that in the course of working with hundreds of couples over the years, I’ve met very few people who didn’t feel that they were weatherproofed at times by their partner. Occasional harmless comments have an insidious tendency to become a way of looking at life. When you are weatherproofing another human being, it says nothing about them—but it does define you as someone who needs to be critical. Whether you have a tendency to weatherproof your relationships, certain aspects of your life, or both, what you need to do is write off weatherproofing as a bad idea. As the habit creeps into your thinking, catch yourself and seal your lips. The less often you weatherproof your partner or your friends, the more you’ll notice how super your life really is. ~ Richard Carlson, #NFDB
519:The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page. ~ Jorge Luis Borges,#NFDB
520:The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page. ~ Jorge Luis Borges,#NFDB
521:Keynesian argument that wage earners consume a greater proportion of their income than landlords or entrepreneurs, and therefore that a decreased total wage bill is a calamity because consumption will decline and savings increase. In the first place, this is not always accurate. It assumes (1) that the laborers are the relatively “poor” and the nonlaborers the relative “rich,” and (2) that the poor consume a greater proportion of their income than the rich. The first assumption is not necessarily correct. The President of General Motors is, after all, a “laborer,” and so also is Mickey Mantle; on the other hand, there are a great many poor landlords, farmers, and retailers. Manipulating relations between wage earners and others is a very clumsy and ineffective way of manipulating relations between poor and rich (provided we desire any manipulation at all). The second assumption is often, but not necessarily, true, as we have seen above. As we have also seen, however, the empirical study of Lubell indicates that a redistribution of income between rich and poor may not appreciably affect the social consumption–saving proportions. But suppose that all these objections are waved aside for the moment, and we concede for the sake of argument that a fall in total payroll will shift the social proportion against consumption and in favor of saving. What then? But this is precisely an effect that we should highly prize. For, as we have seen, any shift in social time preferences in favor of saving and against consumption will speed the advent of recovery, and decrease the need for a lengthy period of depression readjustment. Any such shift from consumption to savings will foster recovery. To the extent that this dreaded fall in consumption does result from a cut in wage rates, then, the depression will be cured that much more rapidly. ~ Murray N Rothbard, #NFDB
522:THE FOUR FOUNDATIONAL PRACTICES
Changing the Karmic Traces
Throughout the day, continuously remain in the awareness that all experience is a dream. Encounter all things as objects in a dream, all events as events in a dream, all people as people in a dream.
Envision your own body as a transparent illusory body. Imagine you are in a lucid dream during the entire day. Do not allow these reminders to be merely empty repetition. Each time you tell yourself, "This is a dream," actually become more lucid. Involve your body and your senses in becoming more present.
Removing Grasping and Aversion
Encounter all things that create desire and attachment as the illusory empty, luminous phenomena of a dream. Recognize your reactions to phenomena as a dream; all emotions, judgments, and preferences are being dreamt up. You can be certain that you are doing this correctly if immediately upon remembering that your reaction is a dream, desire and attachment lessen.
Strengthening Intention
Before going to sleep, review the day and reflect on how the practice has been. Let memories of the day arise and recognize them as memories of dream. Develop a strong intention to be aware in the coming night's dreams. Put your whole heart into this intention and pray strongly for success.
Cultivating Memory and joyful Effort
Begin the day with the strong intention to maintain the practice. Review the night, developing happiness if you remembered or were lucid in your dreams. Recommit yourself to the practice, with the intention to become lucid if you were not, and to further develop lucidity if you were. At any time during the day or evening it is good to pray for success in practice. Generate as strong an intention as possible. This is the key to the practice, ~ Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep,#NFDB
523:According to the prevailing notion, to be free means to be free to satisfy one’s preferences. Preferences themselves are beyond rational scrutiny; they express the authentic core of a self whose freedom is realized when there are no encumbrances to its preference-satisfying behavior. Reason is in the service of this freedom, in a purely instrumental way; it is a person’s capacity to calculate the best means to satisfy his ends. About the ends themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of respect for the autonomy of the individual. To do otherwise would be to risk lapsing into paternalism. Thus does liberal agnosticism about the human good line up with the market ideal of “choice.” We invoke the latter as a content-free meta-good that bathes every actual choice made in the softly egalitarian, flattering light of autonomy.
This mutually reinforcing set of posits about freedom and rationality provides the basic framework for the discipline of economics, and for “liberal theory” in departments of political science. It is all wonderfully consistent, even beautiful.
But in surveying contemporary life, it is hard not to notice that this catechism doesn’t describe our situation very well. Especially the bit about our preferences expressing a welling-up of the authentic self. Those preferences have become the object of social engineering, conducted not by government bureaucrats but by mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations armed with big data. To continue to insist that preferences express the sovereign self and are for that reason sacred—unavailable for rational scrutiny—is to put one’s head in the sand. The resolutely individualistic understanding of freedom and rationality we have inherited from the liberal tradition disarms the critical faculties we need most in order to grapple with the large-scale societal pressures we now face. ~ Matthew B Crawford,#NFDB
524:There are deceivers among Muslims as there are among Christians who go on Scripture (i.e., Qur'an/Bible) with "Sola Scriptura" attitude and behaviour. They take this path thinking that they purify themselves from an evil doctrine which was attached to Scripture, as if it were a legitimate act of scholarship and Scripture would be cleansed by such a self-proclaimed entrepreneurship endeavour. It helps them foremost in attracting new converts in environments that are not tolerant of historical Scripture and its culture in the first place. However, such an unscientific stance will inevitably lead to their dependence on the text rather than the authority of the whole package (i.e., text, history, science, reason, context ..etc) which The Lord has endowed the truth with, and sooner or later they'll end up worshipping the text itself; and eventually the book (i.e., the paper and its cover)!
If one cannot differentiate between the authority of the Messengers of God and other creatures and yet refuse to simply believe that their role is not substitutable by others, then worshipping materialism in form of atoms/particles or spirit/consciousness will unequivocally follow and conclude the development of their faith/religion establishment. Playing that role of the Messengers (i.e., revelation reception) when there is no such communication/relation with God in the first place, will certainly lead to establishing a contact with that being that lurks in the darkness in the absence of light awaiting those stray children of Adam.
If God wanted to establish faith using Socialism, He'd have inscribed Scripture on a mountain for example so that all creatures/humans have equal access unto it! But this is not how The Lord created and intended the universe to be; there are ranks, preferences and degrees. He who transgresses the limits is not guided by God and is to be held responsible for his stray choices. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,#NFDB
525:I have already told you this several times. When you are in a particular set of circumstances and certain events take place, these events often oppose your desire or what seems best to you, and often you happen to regret this and say to yourself, "Ah! how good it would have been if it were otherwise, if it had been like this or like that", for little things and big things.... Then years pass by, events are unfolded; you progress, become more conscious, understand better, and when you look back, you notice―first with astonishment, then later with a smile―that those very circumstances which seemed to you quite disastrous or unfavourable, were exactly the best thing that could have happened to you to make you progress as you should have. And if you are the least bit wise you tell yourself, "Truly, the divine Grace is infinite."
So, when this sort of thing has happened to you a number of times, you begin to understand that in spite of the blindness of man and deceptive appearances, the Grace is at work everywhere, so that at every moment it is the best possible thing that happens in the state the world is in at that moment. It is because our vision is limited or even because we are blinded by our own preferences that we cannot discern that things are like this.
But when one begins to see it, one enters upon a state of wonder which nothing can describe. For behind the appearances one perceives this Grace―infinite, wonderful, all-powerful―which knows all, organises all, arranges all, and leads us, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, towards the supreme goal, that is, union with the Divine, the awareness of the Godhead and union with Him.
Then one lives in the Action and Presence of the Grace a life full of joy, of wonder, with the feeling of a marvellous strength, and at the same time with a trust so calm, so complete, that nothing can shake it any longer. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1956, 8 August 1956,#NFDB
526:Truth changes with the season of our emotions. It is the shadow that moves with the phases of our inner sun. When the nights falls, only our perception can guess where it hides in the dark. Within every solar system of the soul lies a plan of what truth is--- the design God has created, in our own unique story. This is as varying as the constellations, and as turning as the tide. It is not one truth we live to, but many. If we ever hope to determine if there is such a thing as truth, apart from cultural and personal preferences, we must acknowledge that we are then aiming to discover something greater than ourselves, something that transcends culture and individual inclinations. Some say that we must look beyond ourselves and outside of ourselves. However, we don’t need to look farther than what is already in each other. If there was any great plan from a higher power it is a simplistic, repetitious theme found in all religions; the basic core importance to unity comes from shared theological and humanistic virtues. Beyond the synagogue, mosques, temples, churches, missionary work, church positions and religious rituals comes a simple “message of truth” found in all of us, that binds theology---holistic virtues combined with purpose is the foundation of spiritual evolution. The diversity among us all is not divided truth, but the opportunity for unity through these shared values. Truth is the framework and roadmap of positive virtues. It unifies diversity when we choose to see it and use it. It is simple message often lost among the rituals, cultural traditions and socializing that goes on behind the chapel doors of any religion or spiritual theology. As we fight among ourselves about what religion, culture or race is right, we often lose site of the simple message any great orator has whispered through time----a simplistic story explaining the importance of virtues, which magically reemphasizes the importance of loving one another through service. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
527:Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation." It’s an attempt to actively "foster and assess a child’s talents, opinions and skills." Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth." They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own.
Lareau stresses that one style isn’t morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middleclass child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau’s words, the middle-class children learn a sense of "entitlement."
That word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the term: "They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences." They knew the rules. "Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires."
By contrast, the working-class and poor children were characterized by "an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint." They didn’t know how to get their way, or how to "customize"—using Lareau’s wonderful term—whatever environment they were in, for their best purposes. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,#NFDB
528:In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. And in stories, endings matter. Yet we also recognize that the experiencing self should not be ignored. The peak and the ending are not the only things that count. In favoring the moment of intense joy over steady happiness, the remembering self is hardly always wise. “An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds,” Kahneman observes. “We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory … has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains.” When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that both the experiencing self and the remembering self matter. We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
529:Some people argue that economics is an exception to this general story. Economics, they say, provides a much more analytically precise and tightly integrated body of theory—a theory that is explicitly linked to a small set of generally accepted assumptions about human beings’ motivations and decision-making procedures, and that has been rigorously tested against quantified empirical evidence. Among all the social sciences, economics alone, these boosters contend, has a defensible claim to true scientific status. Economics certainly deserves to be regarded as the queen of the social sciences; unlike the others, it has unquestionably produced useful knowledge on a wide range of issues that affect our daily lives. Yet we should be suspicious of its bold claims to scientific status. Modern neoclassical economic theory is firmly grounded in the kind of mechanistic worldview (described in “Complexities”) that sees the economy as a machine, and to explain the operation of this machine it imports many of the concepts of nineteenth-century classical physics. So it stresses the natural tendency of the economy to find a stable equilibrium and the possibility of isolating the effect of changes in different economic factors (like changes in interest rates) on economic performance.25 As well, to achieve its simplicity and elegance, the theory focuses on the behavior of independent individuals operating in a market—individuals who are atomized, rational, similar in preferences, and stripped of any social attributes. But this makes the theory largely asocial and ahistorical: there’s generally no place in it for large-scale historical, cultural, and political forces that sometimes have a huge impact on our economies—forces like the emancipation of women, rising environmental consciousness, or democratization in poor countries. Because it’s insensitive to broad social forces, modern economic theory is also surprisingly insensitive to its own tight relationship with capitalism. Nevertheless, it’s clearly a product of capitalism—a specific, historically rooted economic system—and it only makes sense in the context of capitalism.26 ~ Thomas Homer Dixon, #NFDB
530:The Jefferson political style, though, remained smooth rather than rough, polite rather than confrontational. He was a warrior for the causes in which he believed, but he conducted his battles at a remove, tending to use friends and allies to write and publish and promulgate the messages he thought crucial to the public debate. Part of the reason for his largely genial mien lay in the Virginia culture of grace and hospitality; another factor was a calculated decision, based on his experience of men and of politics, that direct conflict was unproductive and ineffective. Jefferson articulated this understanding of politics and the management of conflicting interests in a long, thoughtful letter to a grandson. “A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence, and good humor, will go far towards securing to you the estimation of the world,” he wrote to Patsy’s son Thomas Jefferson Randolph.67 Good humor, Jefferson added, “is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment’s consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another!” Jefferson went on: When this is in return for a rude thing said by another, it brings him to his senses, it mortifies and corrects him in the most salutary way, and places him at the feet of your good nature in the eyes of the company.68 But in stating prudential rules for our government in society I must not omit the important one of never entering into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many, on their getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another. Conviction is the effect of our own dispassionate reasoning, either in solitude, or weighing within ourselves dispassionately what we hear from others standing uncommitted in argument ourselves. It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable of men in society, “never to contradict anybody. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
531:Do you have any cheese preferences?” Jack asked.
“All cheese is good cheese, Lend said.
“True dat.” I nodded solemnly.
“You did not just say ‘true dat,’” Arianna said, walking into the kitchen. “Because if you think you have any ability whatsoever to pull that off, we are going to have to have a long, long talk.”
“Can I at least use it ironically? Or ‘dude.’ Can I use ‘dude?’ Because I really want to be able to use ‘dude.’”
“No. No, you cannot, but thank you for asking. Besides, ironic use always segues into non-ironic use, and unless you suddenly become far cooler or far more actually Californian than you are now, I simply cannot allow it.”
“But on Easton Heights—”
“You are not going to bring up Cary’s cousin Trevyn’s multiepisode arc where he’s sent there as punishment for his pot-smoking surf-bum ways, are you? Because that arc sucked, and he wasn’t even very hot. Also, what’s the lunatic doing?” She jerked her head toward Jack.
He flipped a gorgeous looking omelet onto a plate and placed it with a flourish in front of Lend. “I am providing insurance against frying pan boy deciding to enact all the very painful fantasies he’s no doubt entertained about me for the last few weeks. An omelet this good should rule out any dismemberment vengeance.”
“Have you been reading his diary?” I asked. “Because I’ll bet he got really creative with the violence ideas.”
“No, I only ever read yours. But let me tell you, one more exclamation mark dotted with a heart while talking about how good a kisser Lend is and I was about ready to do myself in. You’re rather single-minded when it comes to adoring him.”
“True dat,” Arianna said, nodding.
“How come you can use ‘true dat’ if I can’t?” I asked, rightfully outraged.
“Because I’m dead, and none of the rules apply anymore.”
Lend ate his omelet, refusing to answer Jack’s questions about just how delicious it was on a scale from cutting off limbs to just breaking his nose. I gave Jack full points for flavor but noted the texture was slightly off, exempting him from name-calling but not from dirty looks.
Arianna lounged against the counter, and when I finished first we debated the usage rules of “dude,” “true dat,” and my favorite, “for serious.”
“I kind of wish they’d shut up,” Jack said.
“Dude, true dat,” Lend answered.
Jack nodded solemnly. “For serious. ~ Kiersten White,#NFDB
532:While whites were still the majority, they established preferences for blacks and Hispanics that took such deep root that Congress and state legislatures have been powerless to abolish them. These programs would provoke outrage if they were practiced in favor of whites, but they have been partially curbed only by state ballot initiatives and equivocal Supreme Court decisions. Demography would change this. In 2006, the state of Michigan voted to abolish racial preferences in college admissions and state contracting, but the measure passed only because whites were still a majority. Eighty-five percent of blacks and 69 percent of Hispanics voted to maintain racial preferences for themselves. When they have a voting majority nothing will prevent non-whites from reestablishing and extending preferences.
Are there portents in the actions of Eric Holder, the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president? J. Christian Adams, a white Justice Department lawyer resigned in protest when the department dropped a case of voter intimidation the previous administration had already won by default against the New Black Panther Party. In this 2008 case, fatigue-clad blacks waved billy clubs at white voters and yelled such things as “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” Mr. Adams called it “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” He believed the decision to dismiss the case reflected hostility to the rights of whites. He said some of his colleagues called selective prosecution “payback time,” adding that “citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims.”
Christopher Coates, who was the head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division, agreed with this assessment. In sworn testimony before Congress, he called the dismissal of the Black Panthers case a “travesty of justice” and described a “hostile atmosphere” against “race-neutral enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. He said the department had a “deep-seated opposition to the equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act against racial minorities and for the protection of white voters who have been discriminated against.”
How will the department behave when whites become a minority? ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
533:The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other’s projects. This is the dominant ethic in individualistic societies. You find it in the writings of utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer11 (who value justice and rights only to the extent that they increase human welfare), and you find it in the writings of deontologists such as Kant and Kohlberg (who prize justice and rights even in cases where doing so may reduce overall welfare). But as soon as you step outside of Western secular society, you hear people talking in two additional moral languages. The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous—a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends. The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody’s rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts.13 ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
534:The Hesitating Veteran
When I was young and full of faith
And other fads that youngsters cherish
A cry rose as of one that saith
With emphasis: 'Help or I perish!'
'Twas heard in all the land, and men
The sound were each to each repeating.
It made my heart beat faster then
Than any heart can now be beating.
For the world is old and the world is grayGrown prudent and, I think, more witty.
She's cut her wisdom teeth, they say,
And doesn't now go in for Pity.
Besides, the melancholy cry
Was that of one, 'tis now conceded,
Whose plight no one beneath the sky
Felt half so poignantly as he did.
Moreover, he was black. And yet
That sentimental generation
With an austere compassion set
Its face and faith to the occasion.
Then there were hate and strife to spare,
And various hard knocks a-plenty;
And I ('twas more than my true share,
I must confess) took five-and-twenty.
That all is over now-the reign
Of love and trade stills all dissensions,
And the clear heavens arch again
Above a land of peace and pensions.
The black chap-at the last we gave
Him everything that he had cried for,
Though many white chaps in the grave
'Twould puzzle to say what they died for.
I hope he's better off-I trust
That his society and his master's
Are worth the price we paid, and must
491
Continue paying, in disasters;
But sometimes doubts press thronging round
('Tis mostly when my hurts are aching)
If war for Union was a sound
And profitable undertaking.
'Tis said they mean to take away
The Negro's vote for he's unlettered.
'Tis true he sits in darkness day
And night, as formerly, when fettered;
But pray observe-howe'er he vote
To whatsoever party turning,
He'll be with gentlemen of note
And wealth and consequence and learning.
With saints and sages on each side,
How could a fool through lack of knowledge,
Vote wrong? If learning is no guide
Why ought one to have been in college?
O Son of Day, O Son of Night!
What are your preferences made of?
I know not which of you is right,
Nor which to be the more afraid of.
The world is old and the world is bad,
And creaks and grinds upon its axis;
And man's an ape and the gods are mad!There's nothing sure, not even our taxes!
No mortal man can Truth restore,
Or say where she is to be sought for.
I know what uniform I woreO, that I knew which side I fought for!
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
535:I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. 'Slavery' is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. she can hope for more. But when she dies, the world - which is really the only world she can ever know - ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains - whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - not matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates,#NFDB
536:Have you talked about how many children you’d like to have?”
“Yes, sir,” Marlboro Man said.
“And?” Father Johnson prodded.
“I’d like to have six or so,” Marlboro Man answered, a virile smile spreading across his face.
“And what about Ree?” Father Johnson asked.
“Well, she says she’d like to have one,” Marlboro Man said, looking at me and touching my knee. “But I’m workin’ on her.”
Father Johnson wrinkled his brow.
“How do you and Ree resolve conflict?”
“Well…,” Marlboro Man replied. “To tell you the truth, we haven’t really had much conflict to speak of. We get along pretty darn well.”
Father Johnson looked over his glasses. “I’m sure you can think of something.” He wanted some dirt.
Marlboro Man tapped his boot on the sterile floor of Father Johnson’s study and looked His Excellence straight in the eye. “Well, she fell off her horse once when we went riding together,” he began. “And that upset her a little bit. And a while back, I dragged her to a fire with me and it got a little dicey…” Marlboro Man and I looked at each other. It was the largest “conflict” we’d had, and it had lasted fewer than twelve hours.
Father Johnson looked at me. “How did you deal with that, Ree?”
I froze. “Uh…uh…” I tapped my Donald Pliner mule on the floor. “I told him how I felt. And after that it was fine.”
I hated every minute of this. I didn’t want to be examined. I didn’t want my relationship with Marlboro Man to be dissected with generic, one-size-fits-all questions. I just wanted to drive around in his pickup and look at pastures and curl up on the couch with him and watch movies. That had been going just fine for us--that was the nature of our relationship. But Father Johnson’s questioning was making me feel defensive, as if we were somehow neglecting our responsibility to each other if we weren’t spending every day in deep, contemplative thought about the minutiae of a future together. Didn’t a lot of that stuff just come naturally over time? Did it really serve a purpose to figure it out now?
But Father Johnson’s interrogation continued:
“What do you want for your children?”
“Have you talked about budgetary matters?”
“What role do your parents play in your life?”
“Have you discussed your political preferences? Your stances on important issues? Your faith? Your religion?”
And my personal favorite:
“What are you both going to do, long term, to nurture each other’s creativity?”
I didn’t have an answer for him there. But deep down, I knew that, somehow, gravy would come into play. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
537:Learn That Your Feelings Are as Important as Theirs. Some of us can’t see our own feelings because we have learned somewhere along the way that other people’s feelings are more important than ours. For example, it was always assumed that your father would move in with your family when his health began to fail. But now that he has, his constant demands and crankiness are beginning to take a toll, especially on top of managing his medications and frequent doctor’s visits. You are exhausted and frustrated, and wonder why your brother isn’t willing to do his share. Yet you don’t raise it with parent or sibling. “It’s hard, but it’s not that hard,” you reason. “Besides, I don’t want to rock the boat.” Your girlfriend calls and says she can’t have dinner on Friday after all. She’s wondering whether Saturday is okay. She says a friend of hers is in town and wants to see a movie on Friday. You say, “Sure, if that’s better for you.” Although you said yes, Saturday is actually not as good for you, because you had planned to go to a baseball game. Still, you’d rather see your girlfriend, so you give your ticket away. In each of these situations, you’ve chosen to put someone else’s feelings ahead of your own. Does this make sense? Is your father’s frustration or your brother’s peace of mind more important than yours? Is your girlfriend’s desire to see a movie with her friend more important than your desire to see a baseball game? Why is it that they express their feelings and preferences, but you cope with yours privately? There are several reasons why you may choose to honor others’ feelings even when it means dishonoring your own. The implicit rule you are following is that you should put other people’s happiness before your own. If your friends or loved ones or colleagues don’t get their way, they’ll feel bad, and then you’ll have to deal with the consequences. That may be true, but it’s unfair to you. Their anger is no better or worse than yours. “Well, it’s just easier not to rock the boat,” you think. “I don’t like it when they’re mad at me.” If you’re thinking this, then you are undervaluing your own feelings and interests. Friends, neighbors, and bosses will recognize this and begin to see you as someone they can manipulate. When you are more concerned about others’ feelings than your own, you teach others to ignore your feelings too. And beware: one of the reasons you haven’t raised the issue is that you don’t want to jeopardize the relationship. Yet by not raising it, the resentment you feel will grow and slowly erode the relationship anyway. ~ Douglas Stone, #NFDB
538:[L]et us imagine a mirror image of what is happening today. What if millions of white Americans were pouring across the border into Mexico, taking over parts of cities, speaking English rather than Spanish, celebrating the Fourth of July rather than Cinco de Mayo, sleeping 20 to a house, demanding bilingual instruction and welfare for immigrants, opposing border control, and demanding ballots in English? What if, besides this, they had high rates of crime, poverty, and illegitimacy? Can we imagine the Mexicans rejoicing in their newfound diversity?
And yet, that is what Americans are asked to do. For whites to celebrate diversity is to celebrate their own declining numbers and influence, and the transformation of their society. For every other group, to celebrate diversity is to celebrate increasing numbers and influence. Which is a real celebration and which is self-deception?
Whites—but only whites—must never take pride in their own people. Only whites must pretend they do not prefer to associate with people like themselves. Only whites must pretend to be happy to give up their neighborhoods, their institutions, and their country to people unlike themselves. Only whites must always act as individuals and never as members of a group that promotes shared interests.
Racial identity comes naturally to all non-white groups. It comes naturally because it is good, normal, and healthy to feel kinship for people like oneself. Despite the fashionable view that race is a socially created illusion, race is a biological reality. All people of the same race are more closely related genetically than they are to anyone of a different race, and this helps explain racial solidarity.
Families are close for the same reason. Parents love their children, not because they are the smartest, best-looking, most talented children on earth. They love them because they are genetically close to them. They love them because they are a family.
Most people have similar feelings about race. Their race is the largest extended family to which they feel an instinctive kinship. Like members of a family, members of a race do not need objective reasons to prefer their own group; they prefer it because it is theirs (though they may well imagine themselves as having many fine, partly imaginary qualities). These mystic preferences need not imply hostility towards others. Parents may have great affection for the children of others, but their own children come first. Likewise, affection often crosses racial lines, but the deeper loyalties of most people are to their own group—their extended family. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
539:I Am a Church Member I am a church member. I like the metaphor of membership. It’s not membership as in a civic organization or a country club. It’s the kind of membership given to us in 1 Corinthians 12: “Now you are the body of Christ, and individual members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27). Because I am a member of the body of Christ, I must be a functioning member, whether I am an “eye,” an “ear,” or a “hand.” As a functioning member, I will give. I will serve. I will minister. I will evangelize. I will study. I will seek to be a blessing to others. I will remember that “if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Cor. 12:26). I am a church member. I will seek to be a source of unity in the church. I know there are no perfect pastors, staff, or other church members. But neither am I. I will not be a source of gossip or dissension. One of the greatest contributions I can make is to do all I can in God’s power to help keep the church in unity for the sake of the gospel. I am a church member. I will not let my church be about my preferences and desires. That is self-serving. I am in this church to serve others and to serve Christ. My Savior went to a cross for me. I can deal with any inconveniences and matters that are just not my preference or style. I am a church member. I will pray for my pastor every day. His work is never-ending. His days are filled with constant demands for his time—with the need to prepare sermons, with those who are rejoicing in births, with those who are traveling through the valley of the shadow of death, with critics, with the hurts and hopes of others, and with the need to be a husband and a father. My pastor cannot serve our church in his own power. I will pray for God’s strength for him and his family every day. I am a church member. I will lead my family to be good members of this church as well. We will pray together for our church. We will worship together in our church. We will serve together in our church. And we will ask Christ to help us fall deeper in love with this church, because He gave His life for her. I am a church member. This membership is a gift. When I received the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ, I became a part of the body of Christ. I soon thereafter identified with a local body and was baptized. And now I am humbled and honored to serve and to love others in our church. I pray that I will never take my membership for granted, but see it as a gift and an opportunity to serve others and to be a part of something so much greater than any one person or member. I am a church member. And I thank God that I am. ~ Thom S Rainer, #NFDB
540:The textbooks of history prepared for the public schools are marked by a rather naive parochialism and chauvinism. There is no need to dwell on such futilities. But it must be admitted that even for the most conscientious historian abstention from judgments of value may offer certain difficulties.
As a man and as a citizen the historian takes sides in many feuds and controversies of his age. It is not easy to combine scientific aloofness in historical studies with partisanship in mundane interests. But that can and has been achieved by outstanding historians. The historian's world view may color his work. His representation of events may be interlarded with remarks that betray his feelings and wishes and divulge his party affiliation. However, the postulate of scientific history's abstention from value judgments is not infringed by occasional remarks expressing the preferences of the historian if the general purport of the study is not affected. If the writer, speaking of an inept commander of the forces of his own nation or party, says "unfortunately" the general was not equal to his task, he has not failed in his duty as a historian. The historian is free to lament the destruction of the masterpieces of Greek art provided his regret does not influence his report of the events that brought about this destruction.
The problem of Wertfreíheit must also be clearly distinguished from that of the choice of theories resorted to for the interpretation of facts. In dealing with the data available, the historian needs ali the knowledge provided by the other disciplines, by logic, mathematics, praxeology, and the natural sciences. If what these disciplines teach is insufficient or if the historian chooses an erroneous theory out of several conflicting theories held by the specialists, his effort is misled and his performance is abortive. It may be that he chose an untenable theory because he was biased and this theory best suited his party spirit. But the acceptance of a faulty doctrine may often be merely the outcome of ignorance or of the fact that it enjoys greater popularity than more correct doctrines.
The main source of dissent among historians is divergence in regard to the teachings of ali the other branches of knowledge upon which they base their presentation. To a historian of earlier days who believed in witchcraft, magic, and the devil's interference with human affairs, things hàd a different aspect than they have for an agnostic historian. The neomercantilist doctrines of the balance of payments and of the dollar shortage give an image of presentday world conditions very different from that provided by an examination of the situation from the point of view of modern subjectivist economics. ~ Ludwig von Mises,#NFDB
541:Just about the only serious argument anyone tries to make in favor of diversity echoes Jonathan Alger, a lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences: “Corporations have to compete internationally,” he says, and “cross-cultural competency is a key skill in the work force.”
This argument assumes that people get along best with people like themselves, that Koreans, for example, can do business most effectively with other Koreans. Presumably, if the United States has a large population of Koreans they will be a bridge between Korea and the United States. For that to work, however, Korean-Americans should not fully assimilate because if they do, they will lose the qualities that make them an asset. America should give up the ideal of Americanization that, in a few generations, made Englishmen, Dutchmen, Germans, Swedes, the Irish, and all other Europeans essentially indistinguishable. Do we really want to give up the idea of assimilation? Or should only racial minorities give up on assimilation?
More to the point, is a diverse population really an advantage in trade or international affairs? Japan is one of the most racially homogeneous nations. It would be hard to find a country that so clearly practices the opposite of American-style diversity, but it is one of the most successful trading nations on earth. If diversity were a key advantage, Brazil, Indonesia, Sudan, Malaysia, and Lebanon would be world leaders in trade.
Other great trading nations—Taiwan, Korea and China—are, if anything, even more closed and exclusionist than Japan. Germany is likewise a successful trading nation, but its trade surpluses cannot be attributed to cultural or racial diversity. Only since the 1960s has it had a large non-German minority of Turks who came as guest workers, and there is no evidence that Turks have helped Germany become more of a world presence or even a better trade partner with Turkey.
The world’s consumers care about price and quality, not the race or nationality of the factory worker. American corporations boast about workforces that “look like America,” but they are often beaten in their own market by companies whose workforces look like Yokohama or Shanghai.
If we really took seriously the idea that “cross-cultural competence” was crucially important, we would adjust the mix of immigrants accordingly. We might question the wisdom of Haitian immigration, for example, since Haiti is a small, poor country that is never likely to be an important trade partner. And do 32 million Mexican-Americans help our trade relations with the world—or even with Mexico? Canada is our number-one trading partner. Should we therefore encourage immigration from Canada? No one ever talks about immigration in these terms because at some level everyone understands that diversity has nothing to do with trade or influence in the world. The “cross-cultural competence” argument is artificial. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
542:Many models are constructed to account for regularly observed phenomena. By design, their direct implications are consistent with reality. But others are built up from first principles, using the profession’s preferred building blocks. They may be mathematically elegant and match up well with the prevailing modeling conventions of the day. However, this does not make them necessarily more useful, especially when their conclusions have a tenuous relationship with reality. Macroeconomists have been particularly prone to this problem. In recent decades they have put considerable effort into developing macro models that require sophisticated mathematical tools, populated by fully rational, infinitely lived individuals solving complicated dynamic optimization problems under uncertainty. These are models that are “microfounded,” in the profession’s parlance: The macro-level implications are derived from the behavior of individuals, rather than simply postulated. This is a good thing, in principle. For example, aggregate saving behavior derives from the optimization problem in which a representative consumer maximizes his consumption while adhering to a lifetime (intertemporal) budget constraint.† Keynesian models, by contrast, take a shortcut, assuming a fixed relationship between saving and national income. However, these models shed limited light on the classical questions of macroeconomics: Why are there economic booms and recessions? What generates unemployment? What roles can fiscal and monetary policy play in stabilizing the economy? In trying to render their models tractable, economists neglected many important aspects of the real world. In particular, they assumed away imperfections and frictions in markets for labor, capital, and goods. The ups and downs of the economy were ascribed to exogenous and vague “shocks” to technology and consumer preferences. The unemployed weren’t looking for jobs they couldn’t find; they represented a worker’s optimal trade-off between leisure and labor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these models were poor forecasters of major macroeconomic variables such as inflation and growth.8 As long as the economy hummed along at a steady clip and unemployment was low, these shortcomings were not particularly evident. But their failures become more apparent and costly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–9. These newfangled models simply could not explain the magnitude and duration of the recession that followed. They needed, at the very least, to incorporate more realism about financial-market imperfections. Traditional Keynesian models, despite their lack of microfoundations, could explain how economies can get stuck with high unemployment and seemed more relevant than ever. Yet the advocates of the new models were reluctant to give up on them—not because these models did a better job of tracking reality, but because they were what models were supposed to look like. Their modeling strategy trumped the realism of conclusions. Economists’ attachment to particular modeling conventions—rational, forward-looking individuals, well-functioning markets, and so on—often leads them to overlook obvious conflicts with the world around them. ~ Dani Rodrik, #NFDB
543:Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to.
Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation.
Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it.
These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself. ~ James Bridle,#NFDB
544:Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making.
At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work.
Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense.
It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement. ~ Edward N Luttwak,#NFDB
71 Integral Yoga
2 Philosophy
1 Psychology
1 Occultism
1 Integral Theory
1 Fiction
1 Education
56 The Mother
53 Sri Aurobindo
21 Satprem
5 Nolini Kanta Gupta
4 A B Purani
2 Aldous Huxley
19 The Synthesis Of Yoga
7 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
6 Letters On Yoga IV
6 Agenda Vol 10
5 Questions And Answers 1956
5 Questions And Answers 1954
5 Letters On Yoga II
5 Essays On The Gita
4 Words Of The Mother II
4 Questions And Answers 1955
4 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
4 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
3 Agenda Vol 08
3 Agenda Vol 02
2 Words Of Long Ago
2 The Perennial Philosophy
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 Some Answers From The Mother
2 Questions And Answers 1953
2 Prayers And Meditations
2 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
2 Letters On Yoga I
2 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
2 Agenda Vol 13
2 Agenda Vol 12
2 Agenda Vol 09
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
because its desires and preferences are not satisfied. All that has
no true reality.
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For the desires are not the expression of needs but of preferences.
19 September 1959
01.02 - The Object of the Integral Yoga, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
You must go inside yourself and enter into a complete dedication to the spiritual life. All clinging to mental preferences must fall away from you, all insistence on vital aims and interests and attachments must be put away, all egoistic clinging to family, friends, country must disappear if you want to succeed in Yoga. Whatever has to come as outgoing energy or action, must proceed from the Truth once discovered and not from the lower mental or vital motives, from the Divine Will and not from personal choice or the preferences of the ego.
0 1961-01-17, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is another case where peoplewithout knowing it or because they WANT to ignore italways pursue their personal interests, their preferences, their attachments, their concepts; people who are not entirely consecrated to the Divine and make use of moral and yogic ideas to conceal their personal motives. These people doubly deceive themselves: not only do they deceive themselves through their outer activities, their relations with others, but they also deceive themselves about their personal motives; instead of serving the Divine they are serving their own egoism. And this happens constantly, constantly! One serves his own personality, his egoism, while pretending to serve the Divine. This is no longer even self-deception: its sheer hypocrisy.
This mental habit of always cloaking everything with a favorable appearance, of giving all movements a favorable explanation, is at times so flagrant that it can fool nobody but oneself (although it may occasionally be subtle enough to create an illusion). It is a sort of habitual self-exoneration, the habit of giving a favorable mental excuse, a favorable mental explanation for all one does, all one says, all one feels. For example, someone with no self-control who strikes another in great indignation and is ready to call it divine wrath! Righteous2 is perfect, because righteous immediately introduces this element of puritanical moralitywonderful!
0 1961-02-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know this mental habit (which people take for mental superiority!) of lumping everything together on the same level: all the teachings, all the prophets, all the sects, all the religions. You know the habit: We are not prejudiced, we have no preferencesits all the SAME THING. A dreadful muddle!
Its one of the biggest mental difficulties of this age.
0 1961-12-16, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah, lets seewell play preferences! Which do you prefer? Frankly, quite frankly.
From what point of view?
0 1962-05-29, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For my taste (do I still have tastes? I certainly have no preferences, but some things do come more spontaneously than others) my spontaneous movement, you know, would be this (all-embracing gesture, open to all horizons)and then just let go.
If I could plunge you into certain vibrations, you wouldnt need the mountains.
0 1966-09-14, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One very clearly feelsits visible, anyway that the opposite opinion has as much value and its simply a question of attitude, thats all. And naturally, the egos preferences get always mixed up in it: you prefer things to be that way, so your opinion is that they are that way.
But as long as you dont have the higher light, in order to act you need to use opinions.
0 1967-01-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This possibility of transformation in trance was announced to the body about yes, about sixty years ago, and periodically afterwards. And there has always been a prayer: No, may it not be necessary: its the method of laziness. Its the method of inertia. Now all those preferences, all that is gone. There is only an increasingly alerted, awakened consciousness, but awakened to the point of being alerted to the possibility of unconscious resistances, with the will for them to disappear. All depends on the plasticity, the receptivity.
You understand, even if this body is told, You will have to last a hundred or two hundred years for the work to be done without trance, it says, Its all the same to me. All it wants is to be conscious. All it wants is, Lord, to be conscious of Your consciousness, nothing else. Thats its sole, exclusive will: To be conscious of Your consciousness, that is, to consciously become You in another mode. But it isnt in a hurry, because it has no reason to be in a hurry.
0 1967-08-02, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But he has ideas, principles, preferences and so on, and as such, he can make gross errors as any other human being.
It is through this whole jumble and chaos that the Truth-Consciousness is at work everywhere, on all the points of the earth at once, in all nations, all individualities, without preferences or distinctions, wherever there is a spark of consciousness capable of receiving and manifesting It.
(July 29, 1967)
0 1967-10-11, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I met Y. Theyre preparing an issue on Auroville, and she came with a list of questions this long (gesture), saying, I dont know Aurovilles sociology too well. I told her (laughing), Neither do I! Then she asked me questions (very intelligent ones, mind you), and I answered her. But there was one thing about the selection of people and admissions to Auroville I told her that naturally, the essential condition to be able to select people was that preferences, attractions and repulsions, likes and dislikes, all moral rules, all of that must have completely disappearednot that one should be on the way to overcoming it, its not that: it must have disappeared (laughing), there must be no more ego! Then I told her, Its not a judgment, its not that you look at people and judge whether they are fit to be there or not, if they are destined to be there or not, its not that at allyou dont judge. And after she left, I noted the end of the thing (Mother takes a note and reads):
The Force is put on all, identical and supreme
--
As for me, I said, Very well! (Mother laughs) I said, What the Lord wants will be. But since then, I have been treating her as (what should I say?) more than an equalas a superior, and with assertions that are crushing for her. And I never miss an opportunity to tell her that in order to do this or that, or to manifest That or one must SPONTANEOUSLY AND DEFINITIVELY be above all desires, all ambitions, all preferencesevery time, like this (Mother makes a hammering gesture).
Nothing in her apparently budges, but Very well (laughing), if she stands the test, well see.
0 1968-03-09, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now all experiences, all of them, come as if to let life grow clear (its quite interesting), to put things in their place. And all preferences, all opinions, all attractions, all distastes, all that is going away in a kind of smile, in factnot in indifference, but in a smile, the smile of the extraordinary relativity of the manifestation. And there begins to come the perception of what a true manifestation would bein a sort of very supple harmony, smooth, and very vast. Its in process of formation. Very interesting.
And these things (showing the Playground Talk) are still too cut-and-dried. But I quite understand that if now I were to tell experiences like the one I had this morning, it would be almost incomprehensibletoo far from [peoples] consciousness.
0 1968-11-09, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday, it was even very interesting, because I told her, I said to her mind, Yes, if you like, you can settle in and make use of this instrument [Mother], but you know, you will have to renounce your preferences and prejudices! She still used to have terrible reactions when she found that people didnt behave properly with her. So I told her, All that will have to go! (Mother laughs).
But now she is quiet. Last night I succeeded in quieting her.
--
Thats it, I felt the pressure [of Bharatidis mind], I told her, Very well, Ill give you refuge, but not to your preferences.
Very well.
0 1969-03-12, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats why in the past it was taught that all that happens is the effect of the Divines Will. The way it was put was limited (its always the same thing: the way things are put causes a restriction or a coloration, or its shown from a particular angle the thing loses its essential truth), but I am sure it was said for its psychological effect. The danger of this teaching is that people slump down and dont budge anymore, they stop doing anythingno more effort of progress, no more effort to do some good work, they remain like that: I dont have to do anything anymore, its God who does everything! Thats why it cant be put in that way. But it does have an advantage, that of leaving you absolutely peaceful. And I insist a lot on people having this peace, this tranquil peaceits COMPLETELY indispensable. I saw (with the help of this Consciousness, in fact), I saw the force of power acting; and when the instrument (that is, the individual or the group) is wholly peaceful and trusting, like that, vitally and mentally still, the force goes through without being distortednothing distorts itand acts with its full power. As soon as there is a human consciousness (either a mental or a vital one, or both) which is agitated, or questions, or has preferences, or thinks it knows very well, or it makes a sort of whirl and the Force loses three-fourths of its power!
So we have to use one means or another (people dont understand, they always half understand); as for me, I spend my time telling them, Be in peace, be in peace. But of course, they might also become inert, like that. Theres no knowing what to do.
0 1969-04-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
6) To be a true servitor of the Truth one must forget all ones personal desires and preferences and have only the thought to serve the Truth.
7) The Mother then said to N.S. personally and hoped that the men present would not be offended, that it is only women who know how to use this Power that comes from serving the Truth.
0 1969-08-09, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The need to tolerate indicates the presence of preferences.
He whose consciousness is one with the Supreme Consciousness meets all things with a perfect equanimity
0 1969-08-16, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only, one must have reached a state in which, naturally, there are no more preferences or desires or disgusts or attractions or anythingall that is gone.
And above all, above all, no fearabove anything else. Of all things thats the most needed.
0 1969-09-10, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, you say above all that one shouldnt have either desires or fears or preferences, and so on.
Thats obvious.
0 1969-09-20, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes. And ABOVE ALL without any mental preferences: its mostly the mind that stands in the way Material desires, things of that sort, it doesnt care, but mental ideas, rigid conceptions, oh! It doesnt seem to be touched by that, its not interested.
Its very hard to know what comes from the true source and whats an old reaction from our makeup.
0 1970-03-25, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The conditions to organizeto be an organizer (its not to govern, its to ORGANIZE)the conditions to be an organizer should be these: no more desires, no more preferences, no more attractions, no more repulsionsa perfect equality for all things. Sincerity, of course, but that goes without saying: wherever insincerity enters, poison enters at the same time. And then, only those who are themselves in that condition can discern whether another is in it or not.
At present, all human organizations are based on: the visible fact (which is a falsehood), public opinion (another falsehood), and moral sense, which is a third falsehood! (Mother laughs) So
--
But the one thing the body has conquered (almost totally I may say) is, no more desires, no more preferences (immutable gesture). Its replaced by Only what You will. Doesnt choose, doesnt say This is better than thatwhat You will.
Thats the natural and spontaneous state.
0 1971-05-01, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We (human beings) are not living for the satisfaction of our ego; we live to fulfill Gods will. But to be able to perceive and to know the will of God, we must be without desires and preferences. Otherwise we mistake for Gods will our own limited ideas and principles.
It is in the wide peace of an absolute and devoted sincerity free from fixed ideas and preferences that we can realize the conditions required to know Gods Will and it is with a fearless discipline that we must execute it.
April 30, 1971
0 1971-10-23, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, there is a moment when it becomes clear. It all depends on. All personal preferences and desires must disappear.
Yes, thats it.
--
Its very difficult to say that one no longer has any preferences and desires.
(Mother laughs)
--
Oh! But thats progressive, you see; you can go on working at it all the time, all the time, all the time. Its my constant occupation: eliminating all preferences. But the positive means is (we always come back to the same thing): What You want, what You want. What You want, what You want. And when youre completely still and free from any trepidation (what I call passive receptivity, that is, there isnt any activity, and yet: what You want, what You want), then then onlyThat works. And you really have the feeling (I dont know how to say it), really that youre used only as a channel so the Thing the Force or the Actioncan go exactly where it is supposed to go. Thats what our consciousness is used for (gesture of a pipe).
***
0 1972-11-11, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Beyond all preferences and limitations, there is a ground of mutual understanding where all can meet and find their harmony: it is the aspiration for a divine consciousness.1
(With a charming smile) Nothing to ask?
0 1973-02-17, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All human notions are so narrow and limited, so partial and tinged with moral preferences.
As if I were being shown everything in the consciousness that opposes the immensity the divine immensity. Everything is so narrow, so small.
08.24 - On Food, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I Believe the primitive man was very near to the animal. He lived more by instinct than by intelligence. He ate when he was hungry without any kind of fixed rule. He might have had his own tastes and preferences, we do not know much about it; but we know that he lived much more physically, much less mentally or even vitally than now.
Originally very material in nature, much like the animal, man in he course of his progress through centuries or millenniums became more and more mental, more and more vital. And as he grew more mental and more vital, refinement became possible, the intelligence increased, but the possibility too of perversion and deformation. It is one thing to educate the senses so as to bring into them every variety of refinement, growth, knowledge, appreciation, taste and all that, meaning a progress in consciousness: it is quite another to be attached to the objects of sense, to have greed, to be a glutton.
09.04 - The Divine Grace, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is because our vision is limited or because we are blinded by our preferences that we are unable to discover why things are as they are. But when one begins to see one enters into that state of wonder which nothing can describe. Behind the appearances one finds this infinite, marvellous, all-powerful Grace that knows everything, organises everything, arranges everything, and leads us, whether we want it or not, whether we know it or not, towards the supreme goal, the union with the Divine, the awareness of the Divine Consciousness and becoming one with it.
Thus living in the action and the presence of the Grace one lives a life full of delight and wonder, the sense of a marvellous power and at the same time, full of a quiet and complete trust which nothing can shake.
09.14 - Education of Girls, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What we want is precisely to bring into the world something which is not there. But if we keep to all the habits of the world, all its preferences and prejudices, all its constructions, how shall we come out of the rut and do something new?
I have told you, my children, I have repeated in all kinds of tone and temper: if you wish truly to benefit by your stay here, try to look at things and understand them with a new eye and a new perception based on something higher, deeper, truer, something which is yet not there, but will be one day. And it is to build up this future that we have taken a special attitude.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
despite our ability to generalize about their value. It is our personal preferences, therefore, that determine
the import of the world (but these preferences have constraints!).
The meaning we attri bute to objects or situations is not stable. What is important to one man is not
1.02 - Shakti and Personal Effort, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3.2:rejection of the movements of the lower nature - rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind, - rejection of the vital nature's desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, - rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may establish itself in a body growing always more divine;
3.3:surrender of oneself and all one is and has and every plane of the consciousness and every movement to the Divine and the Shakti.
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
So, our first task is to find God and base life on that Consciousness; In that process what is necessary for humanity will naturally be done. But that is not our direct aim. Ours is a tremendous task. It is an adventure in which one must be prepared to leave behind his desires and passions, intellectual preferences and mental constructions in order to enable the Higher Power to do its work. You have to see whether you can give your consent to the radical transformation that is inevitable.
Athavale: Yes, I am prepared for the gamble.
1.04 - GOD IN THE WORLD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Except that it refuses to make preferences.
Only when freed from hate and love
--
The seventeenth-century Frenchmans vocabulary is very different from that of the seventh-century Chinamans. But the advice they give is fundamentally similar. Conformity to the will of God, submission, docility to the leadings of the Holy Ghostin practice, if not verbally, these are the same as conformity to the Perfect Way, refusing to have preferences and cherish opinions, keeping the eyes open so that dreams may cease and Truth reveal itself.
The world inhabited by ordinary, nice, unregenerate people is mainly dull (so dull that they have to distract their minds from being aware of it by all sorts of artificial amusements), sometimes briefly and intensely pleasurable, occasionally or quite often disagreeable and even agonizing. For those who have deserved the world by making themselves fit to see God within it as well as within their own souls, it wears a very different aspect.
1.05 - The Ways of Working of the Lord, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To understand the Divine we must have no more preferences.
To understand the Divine one must become the Divine.
1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In the practice of mortification as in most other fields, advance is along a knife-edge. On one side lurks the Scylla of egocentric austerity, on the other the Charybdis of an uncaring quietism. The holy indifference inculcated by the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy is neither stoicism nor mere passivity. It is rather an active resignation. Self-will is renounced, not that there may be a total holiday from willing, but that the divine will may use the mortified mind and body as its instrument for good. Or we may say, with Kabir, that the devout seeker is he who mingles in his heart the double currents of love and detachment, like the mingling of the streams of Ganges and Jumna. Until we put an end to particular attachments, there can be no love of God with the whole heart, mind and strength and no universal charity towards all creatures for Gods sake. Hence the hard sayings in the Gospels about the need to renounce exclusive family ties. And if the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head, if the Tathagata and the Bodhisattvas have their thoughts awakened to the nature of Reality without abiding in anything whatever, this is because a truly Godlike love which, like the sun, shines equally upon the just and the unjust, is impossible to a mind imprisoned in private preferences and aversions.
The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of divine union. For whether it be a strong wire rope or a slender and delicate thread that holds the bird, it matters not, if it really holds it fast; for, until the cord be broken, the bird cannot fly. So the soul, held by the bonds of human affections, however slight they may be, cannot, while they last, make its way to God.
1.06 - On Thought, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Let us be transparent so that the light within us may fully illumine the thoughts we want to observe, analyse, classify. Let us be impartial and courageous so as to rise above our own little preferences and petty personal conveniences. Let us look at the thoughts in themselves, for themselves, without bias.
And little by little, if we persevere in our work of classification, we shall see order and light take up their abode in our minds. But we should never forget that this order is but confusion compared with the order that we must realise in the future, that this light is but darkness compared with the light that we shall be able to receive after some time.
1.06 - Wealth and Government, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
2) To have no preferences, not to like one and to dislike the other to be equal with everybody.
3) To be patient and enduring.
1.07 - A Song of Longing for Tara, the Infallible, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
around us suit our preferences and needs?
That doesnt mean the happiness of this life is bad or wrong. The Buddha
1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
16:Against this danger of suppression and immobilisation Nature in the individual reacts. It may react by an isolated resistance ranging from the instinctive and brutal revolt of the criminal to the complete negation of the solitary and ascetic. It may react by the assertion of an individualistic trend in the social idea, may impose it on the mass consciousness and establish a compromise between the individual and the social demand. But a compromise is not a solution; it only salves over the difficulty and in the end increases the complexity of the problem and multiplies its issues. A new principle has to be called in other and higher than the two conflicting instincts and powerful at once to override and to reconcile them. Above the natural individual law which sets up as our one standard of conduct the satisfaction of our individual needs, preferences and desires and the natural communal law which sets up as a superior standard the satisfaction of the needs, preferences and desires of the community as a whole, there had to arise the notion of an ideal moral law which is not the satisfaction of need and desire, but controls and even coerces or annuls them in the interests of an ideal order that is not animal, not vital and physical, but mental, a creation of the mind's seeking for light and knowledge and right rule and right movement and true order. The moment this notion becomes powerful in man, he begins to escape from the engrossing vital and material into the mental life; he climbs from the first to the second degree of the threefold ascent of Nature. His needs and desires themselves are touched with a more elevated light of purpose and the mental need, the aesthetic, intellectual and emotional desire begin to predominate over the demand of the physical and vital nature.
17:The natural law of conduct proceeds from a conflict to an equilibrium of forces, impulsions and desires; the higher ethical law proceeds by the development of the mental and moral nature towards a fixed internal standard or else a self-formed ideal of absolute qualities, - justice, righteousness, love, right reason, right power, beauty, light. It is therefore essentially an individual standard; it is not a creation of the mass mind. The thinker is the individual; it is he who calls out and throws into forms that which would otherwise remain subconscious in the amorphous human whole. The moral striver is also the individual; selfdiscipline, not under the yoke of an outer law, but in obedience to an internal light, is essentially an individual effort. But by positing his personal standard as the translation of an absolute moral ideal the thinker imposes it, not on himself alone, but on all the individuals whom his thought can reach and penetrate. And as the mass of individuals come more and more to accept it in idea if only in an imperfect practice or no practice, society also is compelled to obey the new orientation. It absorbs the ideative influence and tries, not with any striking success, to mould its institutions into new forms touched by these higher ideals. But always its instinct is to translate them into binding law, into pattern forms, into mechanic custom, into an external social compulsion upon its living units.
1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In work too there is an austerity. It consists in not having any preferences and in doing everything one does with interest. For one who wants to grow in self-perfection, there are no great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful for one who aspires for progress and self-mastery. It is said that one only does well what one is interested in doing. This is true, but it is truer still that one can learn to find interest in everything one does, even in what appear to be the most insignificant chores. The secret of this attainment lies in the urge towards self-perfection. Whatever occupation or task falls to your lot, you must do it with a will to progress; whatever one does, one must not only do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better in a constant effort for perfection. In this way everything without exception becomes interesting, from the most material chore to the most artistic and intellectual work. The scope for progress is infinite and can be applied to the smallest thing.
This leads us quite naturally to liberation in action. For, in ones action, one must be free from all social conventions, all moral prejudices. However, this does not mean that one should lead a life of licence and dissoluteness. On the contrary, one imposes on oneself a rule that is far stricter than all social rules, for it tolerates no hypocrisy and demands a perfect sincerity. Ones entire physical activity should be organised to help the body to grow in balance and strength and beauty. For this purpose, one must abstain from all pleasure-seeking, including sexual pleasure. For every sexual act is a step towards death. That is why from the most ancient times, in the most sacred and secret schools, this act was prohibited to every aspirant towards immortality. The sexual act is always followed by a longer or shorter period of unconsciousness that opens the door to all kinds of influences and causes a fall in consciousness. But if one wants to prepare oneself for the supramental life, one must never allow ones consciousness to slip into laxity and inconscience under the pretext of pleasure or even of rest and relaxation. One should find relaxation in force and light, not in darkness and weakness. Continence is therefore the rule for all those who aspire for progress. But especially for those who want to prepare themselves for the supramental manifestation, this continence must be replaced by a total abstinence, achieved not by coercion and suppression but by a kind of inner alchemy, as a result of which the energies that are normally used in the act of procreation are transmuted into energies for progress and integral transformation. It is obvious that for the result to be total and truly beneficial, all sexual impulses and desires must be eliminated from the mental and vital consciousness as well as from the physical will. All radical and durable transformation proceeds from within outwards, so that the external transformation is the normal, almost inevitable result of this process.
--
There are also all the words that are uttered to express ideas, opinions, the results of reflection or study. Here we are in an intellectual domain and we might think that in this domain men are more reasonable, more self-controlled, and that the practice of rigorous austerity is less indispensable. It is nothing of the kind, however, for even here, into this abode of ideas and knowledge, man has brought the violence of his convictions, the intolerance of his sectarianism, the passion of his preferences. Thus, here too, one must resort to mental austerity and carefully avoid any exchange of ideas that leads to controversies which are all too often bitter and nearly always unnecessary, or any clash of opinion which ends in heated discussions and even quarrels, which are always the result of some mental narrowness that can easily be cured when one rises high enough in the mental domain.
For sectarianism becomes impossible when one knows that any formulated thought is only one way of saying something which eludes all expression. Every idea contains a little of the truth or one aspect of the truth. But no idea is absolutely true in itself.
1.09 - Civilisation and Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The first results of this momentous change have been inspiriting to our desire of movement, but a little disconcerting to the thinker and to the lover of a high and fine culture; for if it has to some extent democratised culture or the semblance of culture, it does not seem at first sight to have elevated or streng thened it by this large accession of the half-redeemed from below. Nor does the world seem to be guided any more directly by the reason and intelligent will of her best minds than before. Commercialism is still the heart of modern civilisation; a sensational activism is still its driving force. Modern education has not in the mass redeemed the sensational man; it has only made necessary to him things to which he was not formerly accustomed, mental activity and occupations, intellectual and even aesthetic sensations, emotions of idealism. He still lives in the vital substratum, but he wants it stimulated from above. He requires an army of writers to keep him mentally occupied and provide some sort of intellectual pabulum for him; he has a thirst for general information of all kinds which he does not care or has not time to coordinate or assimilate, for popularised scientific knowledge, for such new ideas as he can catch, provided they are put before him with force or brilliance, for mental sensations and excitation of many kinds, for ideals which he likes to think of as actuating his conduct and which do give it sometimes a certain colour. It is still the activism and sensationalism of the crude mental being, but much more open and free. And the cultured, the intelligentsia find that they can get a hearing from him such as they never had from the pure Philistine, provided they can first stimulate or amuse him; their ideas have now a chance of getting executed such as they never had before. The result has been to cheapen thought and art and literature, to make talent and even genius run in the grooves of popular success, to put the writer and thinker and scientist very much in a position like that of the cultured Greek slave in a Roman household where he has to work for, please, amuse and instruct his master while keeping a careful eye on his tastes and preferences and repeating trickily the manner and the points that have caught his fancy. The higher mental life, in a word, has been democratised, sensationalised, activised with both good and bad results. Through it all the eye of faith can see perhaps that a yet crude but an enormous change has begun. Thought and Knowledge, if not yet Beauty, can get a hearing and even produce rapidly some large, vague, yet in the end effective will for their results; the mass of culture and of men who think and strive seriously to appreciate and to know has enormously increased behind all this surface veil of sensationalism, and even the sensational man has begun to undergo a process of transformation. Especially, new methods of education, new principles of society are beginning to come into the range of practical possibility which will create perhaps one day that as yet unknown phenomenon, a race of mennot only a classwho have to some extent found and developed their mental selves, a cultured humanity.
***
1.09 - Equality and the Annihilation of Ego, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:The work itself is at first determined by the best light we can comm and in our ignorance. It is that which we conceive as the thing that should be done. And whether it be shaped by our sense of duty, by our feeling for our fellow-creatures, by our idea of what is for the good of others or the good of the world or by the direction of one whom we accept as a human Master, wiser than ourselves and for us the representative of that Lord of all works in whom we believe but whom we do not yet know, the principle is the same. The essential of the sacrifice of works must be there and the essential is the surrender of all desire for the fruit of our works, the renunciation of all attachment to the result for which yet we labour. For so long as we work with attachment to the result, the sacrifice is offered not to the Divine, but to our ego. We may think otherwise, but we are deceiving ourselves; we are making our idea of the Divine, our sense of duty, our feeling for our fellow-creatures, our idea of what is good for the world or others, even our obedience to the Master a mask for our egoistic satisfactions and preferences and a specious shield against the demand made on us to root all desire out of our nature.
3:At this stage of the Yoga and even throughout the Yoga this form of desire, this figure of the ego is the enemy against whom we have to be always on our guard with an unsleeping vigilance. We need not be discouraged when we find him lurking within us and assuming all sorts of disguises, but we should be vigilant to detect him in all his masks and inexorable in expelling his influence. The illumining Word of this movement is the decisive line of the Gita, "To action thou hast a right but never under any circumstances to its fruit." The fruit belongs solely to the Lord of all works; our only business with it is to prepare success by a true and careful action and to offer it, if it comes, to the divine Master. Afterwards even as we have renounced attachment to the fruit, we must renounce attachment to the work also; at any moment we must be prepared to change one work, one course or one field of action for another or abandon all works if that is the clear comm and of the Master. Otherwise we do the act not for his sake but for our satisfaction and pleasure in the work, from the kinetic nature's need of action or for the fulfilment of our propensities; but these are all stations and refuges of the ego. However necessary for our ordinary motion of life, they have to be abandoned in the growth of the spiritual consciousness and replaced by divine counterparts: an Ananda, an impersonal and God-directed delight will cast out or supplant the unillumined vital satisfaction and pleasure, a joyful driving of the Divine Energy the kinetic need; the fulfilment of the propensities will no longer be an object or a necessity, there will be instead the fulfilment of the Divine Will through the natural dynamic truth in action of a free soul and a luminous nature. In the end, as the attachment to the fruit of the work and to the work itself has been excised from the heart, so also the last clinging attachment to the idea and sense of ourselves as the doer has to be relinquished; the Divine Shakti must be known and felt above and within us as the true and sole worker.
1.1.01 - Seeking the Divine, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
You must go inside yourself and enter into a complete dedication to the spiritual life. All clinging to mental preferences must fall away from you, all insistence on vital aims and interests and attachments must be put away, all egoistic clinging to family, friends, country must disappear if you want to succeed in Yoga. Whatever has to come as outgoing energy or action, must proceed from the Truth once discovered and not from the lower mental or vital motives, from the Divine Will and not from personal choice or the preferences of the ego.
It is a universally accepted principle of the spiritual endeavour that one must be prepared to sacrifice everything without reserve in order to reach the Divine through a spiritualised consciousness. If self-development on the mental, vital and physical plane is his aim that is another matter - that life is the life of the ego with the soul kept behind undeveloped or half developed.
1.1.04 - Philosophy, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He treads down his emotions, because emotion distorts reason and replaces it by passions, desires, preferences, prejudices, prejudgments. He avoids life, because life awakes all his sensational being and puts his reason at the mercy of egoism, of sensational reactions of anger, fear, hope, hunger, ambition, instead of allowing it to act justly and do disinterested work. It becomes merely the paid pleader of a party, a cause, a creed, a dogma, an intellectual faction. Passion and eagerness, even intellectual eagerness, so disfigure the greatest minds that even Shankara becomes a sophist and a word-twister, and even Buddha argues in a circle. The philosopher wishes above all to preserve his intellectual righteousness; he is or should be as careful of his mental rectitude as the saint of his moral stainlessness. Therefore he avoids, as far as the world will let him, the conditions which disturb. But in this way he cuts himself off from experience and only the gods can know without experience. Sieyes said that politics was a subject of which he had made a science.
He had, but the pity was that though he knew the science of politics perfectly, he did not know politics itself in the least and when he did enter political life, he had formed too rigidly the logical habit to replace it in any degree by the practical. If he had reversed the order or at least coordinated experiment with his theories before they were formed, he might have succeeded better. His readymade Constitutions are monuments of logical perfection and practical ineffectiveness. They have the weakness
1.11 - Works and Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
vanities, sentiments and preferences; but even otherwise, even at the purest, still we obey a choice of our nature, and if our nature were different and the gun.as acted on our intelligence and will in some other combination, we would not accept the Shastra, but live according to our pleasure or our intellectual notions or else break free from the social law to live the life of the solitary or the ascetic. We cannot become impersonal by obeying something outside ourselves, for we cannot so get outside ourselves; we can only do it by rising to the highest in ourselves, into our free Soul and Self which is the same and one in all and has therefore no personal interests, to the Divine in our being who possesses
Himself transcendent of cosmos and is therefore not bound by
1.2.07 - Surrender, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For surrender it is necessary not to insist on the mind's opinions, ideas and preferences, the vital's desires and impulses, the physical's habitual actions, the life of the ego - all such insistence is contrary to surrender. All egoism and self-will has to be abandoned and one must seek to be governed only by the Divine
Shakti. No complete surrender is possible without the psychic opening.
1.2.4 - Speech and Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The fault of character of which you speak is common and almost universal in human nature. The impulse to speak what is untrue or at least to exaggerate or understate or twist the truth so as to flatter ones own vanity, preferences, wishes or to get some advantage or secure something desired is very general. But one must learn to speak the truth alone if one is to succeed truly in changing the nature.
To become conscious of what is to be changed in the nature is the first step towards changing it. But one must observe these things without being despondent or thinking it is hopeless or I cannot change. You do right to be confident that the change will come. For nothing is impossible in the nature if the psychic being is awake and leading you with the Mothers consciousness and force behind it and working in you. This is now happening. Be sure that all will be done.
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As one likes is never a formula that leads to truth; it implies enthroning the vital and its desire as the standard or following the minds preferenceswhich even in any mental discipline is regarded as contrary to the very principle of the search for Truth.
***
1.4.02 - The Divine Force, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
- there can be no passivity to other forces, for that would be dangerous in the extreme. Passivity does not mean a blank mind - it means allowing the Divine Force to work without interference of the mental preferences, vital desires or physical disinclinations. As for freedom from ego or desire, that is the
The Divine Force
1916 06 07p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is not unaware, however, that this is only one stage, and it bows before Thee in a profound adoration and tells Thee: Lord, Thou hast taken up Thy instrument again and willed to use it for action. The instrument knows its imperfection and impurity and implores Thy mercy to perfect and purify it, so that, day by day, through a progressive disappearance of all its preferences and limitations, it may be able to manifest Thee more integrally.
***
1917 04 28p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O my divine Master, who hast appeared to me this night in all Thy radiant splendour, Thou canst in an instant make this being perfectly pure, luminous, translucid, conscious. Thou canst liberate it from its last dark spots, free it from its last preferences. Thou canst but hast Thou not done this tonight when it was penetrated with Thy divine effluence and Thy ineffable light? It may be for in me is a superhuman strength made all of calm and immensity. Grant that from this summit I may not fall; grant that peace may for ever reign as the master of my being, not only in my depths of which it has long been the sovereign but in the least of my external activities, in the smallest recesses of my heart and of my action.
I salute Thee, O Lord, deliverer of beings!
Lo! here are flowers and benedictions! here is the smile of divine Love! It is without preferences and without repulsions. It streams out towards all in a generous flow and never takes back its marvellous gifts!
Her arms outstretched in a gesture of ecstasy, the Eternal Mother pours upon the world the unceasing dew of Her purest love!
1929-05-12 - Beings of vital world (vampires) - Money power and vital beings - Capacity for manifestation of will - Entry into vital world - Body, a protection - Individuality and the vital world, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No attachments, no desires, no impulses, no preferences; perfect equanimity, unchanging peace and absolute faith in the Divine protection: with that you are safe, without it you are in peril. And as long as you are not safe, it is better to do like little chickens that take shelter under the mothers wings.
How does the physical body act as a protection?
1929-06-23 - Knowledge of the Yogi - Knowledge and the Supermind - Methods of changing the condition of the body - Meditation, aspiration, sincerity, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In your meditation the first imperative need is a state of perfect and absolute sincerity in all the consciousness. It is indispensable that you should not deceive yourself or deceive or be deceived by others. Often people have a wish, a mental preference or vital desire; they want the experience to happen in a particular way or to take a turn that satisfies their ideas or desires or preferences; they do not keep themselves blank and unprejudiced and simply and sincerely observe what happens. Then if you do not like what happens, it is easy to deceive yourself; you will see one thing, but give it a little twist and make it something else, or you will distort something simple and straightforward or magnify it into an extraordinary experience. When you sit in meditation you must be as candid and simple as a child, not interfering by your external mind, expecting nothing, insisting on nothing. Once this condition is there, all the rest depends upon the aspiration deep within you. If you ask from within for peace, it will come; if for strength, for power, for knowledge, they too will come, but all in the measure of your capacity to receive it. And if you call upon the Divine, then tooalways admitting that the Divine is open to your call, and that means your call is pure enough and strong enough to reach him,you will have the answer.
***
1929-06-30 - Repulsion felt towards certain animals, etc - Source of evil, Formateurs - Material world, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The way to attain to this perfect consciousness is to increase your actual consciousness beyond its present grooves and limits, to educate it, to open it to the Divine Light and to let the Divine Light work in it fully and freely. But the Light can do its full and unhindered work only when you have got rid of all craving and fear, when you have no mental prejudices, no vital preferences, no physical apprehensions or attractions to obscure or bind you.
Repulsion is a movement of weakness. It comes because you have been touched and hurt and recoil from what hurts you. The atmosphere of a being or man or animal or its emanations may be harmful for you, although it may not be so felt by everybody, and directly it touches you, you shrink back from it. But if you were strong enough, you could stop the danger at a distance and not let it reach or hurt you. For you would see and know at once that there was something harmful there and put a barrier of defence around you, and, even if the thing came near, it would not be able to touch you; you would remain unhurt and unmoved by its presence.
1950-12-21 - The Mother of Dreams, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What is necessary is an aspiration which burns in the being like a constant fire, and every time you have a desire, a preference, an attraction it must be thrown into this fire. If you do this persistently, you will see that a little gleam of true consciousness begins to dawn in your ordinary consciousness. At first it will be faint, very far behind all the din of desires, preferences, attractions, likings. But you must go behind all this and find that true consciousness, all calm, tranquil, almost silent.
Those who are in contact with the true consciousness see all the possibilities at the same time and may deliberately choose even the most unfavourable, if necessary. But to reach this point, you must go a long way.
Should preferences be neutralized or forgotten?
One should not have them!
1950-12-28 - Correct judgment., #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He alone who is above likes and dislikes, desires and preferences can look at things with perfect impartiality, through senses that are in their functioning objective, like that of an extremely delicate and perfected machine, to which is added the clarity of a living consciousness.
Correct Judgment, On Education
1951-02-08 - Unifying the being - ideas of good and bad - Miracles - determinism - Supreme Will - Distinguishing the voice of the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I forgot one thing: to hear it you must be absolutely sincere, for if you are not sincere, you will begin by deceiving yourself and you will hear nothing at all except the voice of your ego and then you will commit with assurance (thinking that it is the real small voice) the most awful stupidities. But if you are sincere, the way is sure. It is not even a voice, not even a sensation, it is something extremely subtlea slight indication. When everything goes well, that is, when you do nothing contrary to the divine Will, you will not perhaps have any definite impression, everything will seem to you normal. Of course, you should be eager to know whether you are acting in accordance with the divine Will, that is the first point, naturally, without which you can know nothing at all. But once you are eager and you pay attention, everything seems to you normal, natural, then all of a sudden, you feel a little uneasiness somewhere in the head, in the heart or even in the stomachgenerally one doesnt give it a thought; you may feel it several times in the day but you reject it without giving it any attention; but it is no longer quite the same; then, at that moment, you must stop, no matter what you may be doing, and look, and if you are sincere, you will notice a small black spot (a tiny wicked idea, a tiny false movement, a small arbitrary decision) and thats the source of the uneasiness. You will notice then that the little black spot comes from the ego which is full of preferences; generally it does what it likes; the things it likes are called good and those it does not are called badthis clouds your judgment. It is difficult to judge under these conditions. If you truly want to know, you must draw back a step and look, and you will know then that it is this small movement of the ego which is the cause of the uneasiness. You will see that it is a tiny thing curled back upon itself; you will have the impression of being in front of something hard which resists or is black. Then with patience, from the height of your consciousness, you must explain to this thing its mistake, and in the end it will disappear. I do not say that you will succeed all at once the very first day, but if you try sincerely, you will always end with success. And if you persevere, you will see that all of a sudden you are relieved of a mass of meanness and ugliness and obscurity which was preventing you from flowering in the light. It is those things which make you shrivel up, prevent you from widening yourself, opening out in a light where you have the impression of being very comfortable. If you make this effort, you will see finally that you are very far from the point where you had begun, the things you did not feel, did not understand, have become clear. If you are resolved, you are sure to succeed.
This is the first step towards unifying yourself, becoming a conscious being who has a central will and acts only according to this will, which will be a constant expression of the divine Will. It is worth trying.
1951-02-10 - Liberty and license - surrender makes you free - Men in authority as representatives of the divine Truth - Work as offering - total surrender needs time - Effort and inspiration - will and patience, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You see, individual, human authority, like the authority of a father of the family, of a teacher, of the head of a state, is a symbolic thing. They have no real authority but authority is given to them to enable them to fulfil a role in social life as it now is, that is to say, a social life founded upon falsehood and not at all on truth, for truth means unity and society is founded on division. There are people who work out their role, their function, their symbol more or less wellnobody is faultless, all is mixed in this world. But he who takes his role seriously, tries to fill it as honestly as possible, may receive inspirations which enable him to play his part a little more truly than an ordinary man. If the teacher who gives marks kept in mind that he was the representative of the divine truth, if he constantly took sufficient trouble to be in tune with the divine Will as much as this is possible for him, well, that could be very useful; for the ordinary teacher acts according to his personal preferenceswhat he does not like, what he likes, etc.and he belongs to the general falsehood, but if at the time of giving marks, the teacher tries sincerely to put himself in harmony with a truth deeper than his small narrow consciousness, he may serve as an intermediary of this truth and, as such, help his students to become conscious of this truth within themselves.
This is precisely one of the things that I wanted to tell you. Education is a sacerdocy, teaching is a sacerdocy, and to be at the head of a State is a sacerdocy. Then, if the person who fulfils this role aspires to fulfil it in the highest and the most true way, the general condition of the world can become much better. Unfortunately, most people never think about this at all, they fill their role somehownot to speak of the innumerable people who work only to earn money, but in this case their activity is altogether rotten, naturally. That was my very first basis in forming the Ashram: that the work done here be an offering to the Divine.
1951-02-15 - Dreams, symbolic - true repose - False visions - Earth-memory and history, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the mental world, for instance, there is a domain of the physical mind which is related to physical things and keeps the memory of physical happenings upon earth. It is as though you were entering into innumerable vaults, one following another indefinitely, and these vaults are filled with small pigeon-holes, one above another, one above another, with tiny doors. Then if you want to know something and if you are conscious, you look, and you see something like a small pointa shining point; you find that this is what you wish to know and you have only to concentrate there and it opens; and when it opens, there is a sort of an unrolling of something like extremely subtle manuscripts, but if your concentration is sufficiently strong you begin to read as though from a book. And you have the whole story in all its details. There are thousands of these little holes, you know; when you go for a walk there, it is as though you were walking in infinity. And in this way you can find the exact facts about whatever you want to know. But I must tell you that what you find is never what has been reported in historyhistories are always planned out; I have never come across a single historical fact which is like history. This is not to discourage you from learning history, but things are like that. Events have been quite different from the way in which they have been reported, and for a very simple reason: the human brain is not capable of recording things with exactitude; history is built upon memories and memories are always vague. If you take, for example, written memories, he who writes chooses the events which have interested him, what he has seen, noticed or known, and that is always only a very small portion of the whole. When the historian narrates, the same thing happens as with dreams where you take one point, then another, then another, and at last you can have an almost exact vision of what has taken place and with a little imagination you fill up the gaps; but historians relate a continuous story; between the events or moments there are gaps which they fill up as best they can or rather as they wish, according to their mental, vital and other preferences. And that comprises the history you are made to learn. The same story, narrated in one language and in another, in one country or in another, you cannot imagine how comic it is! This is particularly true if one of the countries is interested because of its vanity, its prestige. And finally the two pictures presented to you are so different that you could believe that two different things were being spoken about. It is unbelievable. But I have noticed that even for altogether external, concrete facts where there is no question of evaluation, it is still the same thing. No human brain is capable of understanding a thing in its totality; even the most scholarly, the most learned, even the most sincere person does not see a subjectand especially many subjectstotally. He will say what he knows, what he understands, and all that he does not know, all that he does not understand is not there, and this absolutely changes everything.
But if you can acquire this capability of entering into the terrestrial memory, I assure you it is worth the trouble. It is quite different from Yoga; it is not necessary to have a spiritual life for that, you must have a special ability.
1951-03-12 - Mental forms - learning difficult subjects - Mental fortress - thought - Training the mind - Helping the vital being after death - ceremonies - Human stupidities, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Take any general idea; for example: Is the worlds duration indefinite? or Has it a beginning and an end? Who has a precise thought on this subject? Or again: How did the earth begin and how did humanity commence on earth? The mind is incapable of resolving this question; it will find itself before an indefinite number of possibilities and will not know how to choose. Then, what does it do, how does it choose? by personal preference, the thought that gives it an agreeable, comfortable feeling; it says, Yes, that must be it. But if you are quite honest and scrupulous and do not allow your preferences to come into play, how will you decide? It is a subject close enough to humanity for it to take an interest in it, isnt it? Earth is, after all, its domain. Well, if you read one book, it will tell you one thing; if you read another, it will tell you another. Then the religions with their theories take a hand in the matter and, moreover, they will tell you that such and such an idea is the absolute Truth and you must believe it, otherwise you will be damned! You read the scientists they will tell you scientific things. You read the philosophers they will tell you philosophical things. You read the spiritualists, they will dish up spirituality for you and you will be exactly at the same point from which you started. But there are people who like to have a kind of stability in their mind (precisely those who build fortresses they like to be in a fortress very much, it gives them a comfortable sensation), so they make a choice, and if they have sufficient mental strength, they make a choice out of a considerable number of ideas; then they trim it up for you, set up a fine wall by putting each thing in what they consider to be its proper place (that is, there must not be too many contradictions close together lest they clash! It must make a proper organisation) and they tell you, Now, I know!They know nothing at all!
It is quite interesting, for the more mental activity one has, the more does one indulge in this little game. And there are ideas to which one clings! One hangs on to them as though all life depended upon it! I have known people who had fixed upon one central idea in their formation and said, All the rest may go to pieces, I dont care, but this idea will stand: this is the truth. And when they come to yoga, amusingly enough it is this idea which is constantly battered, all the time! All events, all circumstances come and strike at it until it begins to totter, and then one fine day they say in despair, Ah, my idea has gone.
1951-03-14 - Plasticity - Conditions for knowing the Divine Will - Illness - microbes - Fear - body-reflexes - The best possible happens - Theories of Creation - True knowledge - a work to do - the Ashram, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Second: to overcome desires and preferences.
Third: to silence the mind and listen.
1953-10-07, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The first thing is to learn how to know by identity. That is indispensable when one has the responsibility for others. To learn how to guide other people, the first indispensable step is to know how to enter into their minds so as to know themnot to project ones thought, imagine what they are, but go out of oneself and enter into them, to know what is happening there. Then, in this way, one knows them because one is them. When one knows only oneself in others, that means one knows nothing. One may be completely mistaken. One imagines it is like this or thatone judges by appearances or else through mental preferences, preconceived ideas; that is to say, one knows nothing. But there is one condition in which one doesnt even need to know, to try to know what somebody is like: one cant do otherwise but feel what he is, for he is a projection of oneself. And unless one knows how to do that, one can never do what is necessary for peopleunless one feels as they feel, thinks as they think, unless one is able to enter into them as though one were they themselves. That is the only way. If you try to know with a small active mind, you will never know anythingnor by looking at people and telling yourself: Why, he does this in this way and that way, so he must be like that. That is impossible.
So, the first task of those who have a responsibility for instance, those who are in charge of educating other children, taking care of others, from rulers to teachers and monitors their first task is to learn how to identify themselves with the others, to feel as they do. Then one knows what one should do. One keeps ones inner light, keeps ones consciousness where it ought to be, very high above, in the light, and at the same time gets identified, and so one feels what they are, what their reactions are, what their thoughts, and one holds that before the light one has: one succeeds in thinking out perfectly well what should be done for them. You will tell each one what he needs to hear, you will act with each one as is necessary to make him understand. And that is why it is a wonderful grace to have the responsibility for a certain number of people, for that obliges you to make the most essential progress. And I hasten to tell you that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people dont make it.But that is exactly why things are in such a bad way. Particularly those who have the responsibility of governing a countrythis is the last thing they think about! They are very eager rather to keep their way of seeing and their way of feeling, and fiercely refrain from realising the needs of those over whom they rule. But indeed one can see that the result is not up to much; so far it is evident that one cant say that governments have been remarkable institutions. It is the same thing on all levels: there are small governments, there are big governments. But the laws are the same, for all. And unless, when giving a lesson, you are able, there and then, to take in the entire atmosphere, to gather the vibrations around people, put them all together, keep all that before you, and become aware of what you can do with this stuff (with the vibrations you can spread, the forces you can give out, those which will be received, those which will be assimilated), unless you do that, mostly you too are wasting your time. In order to do the least work, one must make a lot of progress.
1953-10-21, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is the same thing everywhere. Only those who have developed a little artistic taste, have travelled much and seen many things have widened their consciousness and they are no longer so sectarian. But it is very difficult to pull a person out of the specialised tastes of his race I am not even speaking now of the country, I am speaking of the race. It is very difficult. It is there, you know, hidden right at the bottom, in the subconscious, and it comes back without your even noticing it, quite spontaneously, quite naturally. Even on this very point: the woman of your race is always much more beautiful than the woman of other racesspontaneously, it is the spontaneous taste. Thats what I mean. So, you must rise above that. I am not even speaking of those who find everything thats outside their own family or caste very ugly and bad. I am not speaking at all of these people. I am not even speaking of those for whom one country is much more beautiful than another. And yet, these people have already risen above the altogether ordinary way of thinking. I am not even speaking of a question of race. It is very difficult, one must go right down, right down within oneself into the subconsciousand even fartherto discover the root of these things. Therefore, if you want to have the sense of beauty in itself which is quite independent of all these tastes, the taste of the raceyou must have a universal consciousness. Otherwise how can you have it? You will always have preferences. Even if these are not active and conscious preferences, they are subconscious preferences, instincts. So, to know true beauty independent of all form, one must rise above all form. And once you have known it beyond every form, you can recognise it in any form whatsoever, indifferently. And that becomes very interesting.
So thats all. Au revoir, my children.
1954-04-07 - Communication without words - Uneven progress - Words and the Word, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont understand this: you have said, Even here, into the abode of ideas and knowledge, man has brought the violence of his convictions, the intolerance of his sectarianism, the passion of his preferences.
Yes, what is there in this that cannot be understood? Its a perpetual thing!
1954-05-19 - Affection and love - Psychic vision Divine - Love and receptivity - Get out of the ego, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So, at first, to begin with, one must be able to get out of the ego. Afterwards, it has to be, you understand, in a certain state of inexistence. Then you begin to perceive things as they are, from a little higher up. But if you want to know things as they really are, you must be absolutely like a mirror: silent, peaceful, immobile, impartial, without preferences and in a state of total receptivity. And if you are like that, you will begin to see that there are many things you are not aware of, but which are there, and which will start becoming active in you.
Then you will be able to be in these things instead of being exclusively enclosed within the little point you are in the universe.
1954-10-06 - What happens is for the best - Blaming oneself -Experiences - The vital desire-soul -Creating a spiritual atmosphere -Thought and Truth, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All who have visions usually deform them, all, almost without exception. I dont think there is one in a million who doesnt deform his vision, because the minute it touches the brain it touches the domain of preferences, desires, attachments, and this indeed is enough to give a colouring, a special look to what you have seen. Even if you have seen correctly, you translate it wrongly in your consciousness. This truly asks for a great perfection. But you can have perfection without the gift of vision. And the perfection can be as great without the gift as with it. If it interests you specially, you can make an effort to obtain it. But only if it interests you specially. If you lay great store by knowing certain things, you can undertake a discipline; you may undertake a discipline also in order to change the functioning of your sees. I think I have already explained to you how one can hear at a distance, see at a distance, even physically; but this means considerable effort, which perhaps is not always in proportion to the result, because these are side issues, not the central, the most important thing. These are side issues which may be interesting, but in itself this is not the spiritual life; one may have a spiritual life without this. Now, the two together can give you perhaps a greater capacity. But for this too you must tell yourself, If I ought to have itif I take the true attitude of surrender to the Divine and of complete consecrationif I ought to have it I shall have it. As, if I ought to have the gift of speech, I shall have it. And in fact, if one is truly surrendered, in the true way and totally, at every minute one is what he ought to be and does what he ought to do and knows what he ought to know. This but naturally, for this one should have overcome the petty limitations of the ego, and this does not happen overnight. But it can happen.
Another question?
1954-11-03 - Body opening to the Divine - Concentration in the heart - The army of the Divine - The knot of the ego -Streng thening ones will, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How to cut it? Take a sword and strike it (laughter), when one becomes conscious of it. For usually one is not; we think it quite normal, what happen to us; and in fact it is very normal but we think it quite good also. So to begin with one must have a great clear-sightedness to become aware that one is enclosed in all these knots which hold one in bondage. And then, when one is aware that theres something altogether tightly closed in thereso tightly that one has tried in vain to move it then one imagines his will to be a very sharp sword-blade, and with all ones force one strikes a blow on this knot (imaginary, of course, one doesnt take up a sword in fact), and this produces a result. Of course you can do this work from the psychological point of view, discovering all the elements constituting this knot, the whole set of resistances, habits, preferences, of all that holds you narrowly closed in. So when you grow aware of this, you can concentrate and call the divine Force and the Grace and strike a good blow on this formation, these things so closely held, like that, that nothing can separate them. And at that moment you must resolve that you will no longer listen to these things, that you will listen only to the divine Consciousness and will do no other work except the divine work without worrying about personal results, free from all attachment, free from all preference, free from all wish for success, power, satisfaction, vanity, all this All this must disappear and you must see only the divine Will incarnated in your will and making you act. Then, in this way, you are cured.
Mother, how can one streng then ones will?
1954-11-10 - Inner experience, the basis of action - Keeping open to the Force - Faith through aspiration - The Mothers symbol - The mind and vital seize experience - Degrees of sincerity -Becoming conscious of the Divine Force, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So, in order to avoid this it is said that they must be clear, quiet, peaceful, and must not rush at the force which is trying to manifest and make of it a tool for their personal use. For the mind to be clear it must be silentat least to a certain extent, and for the vital to be clear it must give up its desires, have no desires and impulses and passions. This indeed is the essential condition. Later, if one goes into details, neither of them should have any preferences, attachments, any particular way of being or particular set of ideas.
Sweet Mother, what does sincerity mean, exactly?
1955-02-23 - On the sense of taste, educating the senses - Fasting produces a state of receptivity, drawing energy - The body and food, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I think primitive man was very close to the animal and lived more by instinct than by intelligence, you see. He ate when he was hungry, without any rule of any kind. Perhaps he had his tastes and preferences too, we know nothing much about it, but he lived much more materially, much less mentally and vitally than now.
Surely primitive man was very material, very near the animal. And as the centuries pass, man becomes more mental and more vital; and as he becomes more vital and mental, naturally refinement is possible, intelligence grows, but also the possibility of perversion and distortion. You see, there is a difference between educating one's senses to the point of being able to bring in all kinds of refinements, developments, knowledge, all the possibilities of appreciation, taste, and all that-there is a difference between this, which is truly a development and progress of consciousness, and attachment or greediness.
1955-03-30 - Yoga-shakti - Energies of the earth, higher and lower - Illness, curing by yogic means - The true self and the psychic - Solving difficulties by different methods, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And I think the result comes. For it depends on the nature of the difficulty. If it is a problem thats to be solved, then the solution comes; if it is an inner movement, something that has gone wrong, then usually if one does this very sincerely, well, it is put back in its place; and if it is a decision thats to be taken, if it is something one doesnt know whether one must do or not do, then this too, if one is very quiet one knows whether its a yes or no; it comes: Yes or No. Then here you must not discuss any more, the mind must not say, But if? and then, for then everything becomes foggy. You must say, Good! and follow like this. But for this you must be sincere, in the sense that you must have no preferences.
If the difficulty comes from one part of the being wanting one thing and another part of the being knowing that one must not have it, then it becomes complicated because the part which wants can try to introduce its own will into the answer. So when one sits down, first one must begin by persuading it to make a little act of sincere surrender, and it is here that one can make true progress, saying, Now I am conscious that it is this that I desire, but I am ready to give up my desire if that should be done. But you must do this not only in the head, it must be done sincerely, and then you proceed as I said. Then one knowsknows whats to be done.
1955-05-25 - Religion and reason - true role and field - an obstacle to or minister of the Spirit - developing and meaning - Learning how to live, the elite - Reason controls and organises life - Nature is infrarational, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A being who is in a whirlwind of darkness is obviously not ready to receive the Spirit. But when by the use of reason one has managed to organise his being logically and reasonably, in a balanced and wise wayreason is essentially an instrument of wisdomwell, this is an excellent preparation for going beyond, on condition that one knows that it is not a culmination, that it is only a preparation. It is like a base, you see; people who have spiritual experiences, who have a contact with the higher worlds and are not ready in the lower domains, have a lot of trouble, because they have to fight constantly against a heap of elements which are neither organised nor purified nor classified; and each one pulls its own way, there are impulses and preferences and desires, and so this light which has come from above has to organise all this; whereas if the reason had worked to begin with and made the place at least a habitable one, when the Spirit came it would have been more easily installed.
How can the reason be developed?
1955-06-01 - The aesthetic conscience - Beauty and form - The roots of our life - The sense of beauty - Educating the aesthetic sense, taste - Mental constructions based on a revelation - Changing the world and humanity, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there is a sincere creative spirit behind, which is trying to manifest, which, for the moment, does not manifest, but is strong enough to destroy the past. That is, there was a time when I used to look at the pictures of Rembrandt, of Titian, of Tintoretto, the pictures of Renoir and Monet, I felt a great aesthetic joy. This aesthetic joy I dont feel any more. I have progressed because I follow the whole movement of terrestrial evolution; therefore, I have had to overpass this cycle, I have arrived at another; and this one seems to me empty of aesthetic joy. From the point of view of reason one may dispute this, speak of all the beautiful and good things which have been done, all that is a different affair. But this subtle something, precisely, which is the true aesthetic joy, is gone, I dont feel it any longer. Of course I am a hundred miles away from having it when I look at the things they are now doing. But still it is something which is behind this that has made the other disappear. So perhaps by making just a little effort towards the future we are going to be able to find the formula of the new beauty. That would be interesting. It is quite recently that this impression came to me; it is not old. I have tried with the most perfect goodwill, by abolishing all kinds of preferences, preconceived ideas, habits, past tastes, all that; all that eliminated, I look at their pictures and I dont succeed in getting any pleasure; it doesnt give me any, sometimes it gives me a disgust, but above all the impression of something thats not true, a painful impression of insincerity.
But then quite recently, I suddenly felt this, this sensation of something very new, something of the future pushing, pushing, trying to manifest, trying to express itself and not succeeding, but something which will be a terrific progress over all that has been felt and expressed before; and then, at the same time is born the movement of consciousness which turns to this new thing and wants to grasp it. This will perhaps be interesting. That is why I told you: ten years. Perhaps in ten years there will be people who have found a new expression. A great progress would be necessary, an immense progress in the technique; the old technique seems barbarous. And now with the new scientific discoveries perhaps the technique of execution will change and one could find a new technique which would then express this new beauty which wants to manifest. We shall speak about it in ten years time.
1956-01-04 - Integral idea of the Divine - All things attracted by the Divine - Bad things not in place - Integral yoga - Moving idea-force, ideas - Consequences of manifestation - Work of Spirit via Nature - Change consciousness, change world, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Everyone forms an idea of the Divine for himself according to his personal taste, his possibilities of understanding, his mental preferences, and even his desires. People form the idea of the Divine they want, the Divine they wish to meet, and so naturally they limit their realisation considerably.
But if we can come to understand that the Divine is all that we can conceive of, and infinitely more, we begin to progress towards integrality. Integrality is an extremely difficult thing for the human consciousness, which begins to be conscious only by limiting itself. But still, with a little effort, for those who know how to play with mental activities, it is possible to widen oneself sufficiently to approach something integral.
1956-07-25 - A complete act of divine love - How to listen - Sports programme same for boys and girls - How to profit by stay at Ashram - To Women about Their Body, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And when they put this argument in my way, they couldnt tell me anything that appears more utterly stupid to me. It is done everywhere? That is just the reason for not doing it; for if we do what others do, it is not worth the trouble doing anything at all. We want precisely to introduce into the world something which is not there; but if we keep all the habits of the world, all the preferences of the world, all the constructions of the world, I dont see how we can get out of the rut and do something new.
My children, I have told you, repeated it in every tone, in every way: if you really want to profit by your stay here, try to look at things and understand them with a new vision and a new understanding based on something higher, something deeper, vaster, something more true, something which is not yet but will be one day. And it is because we want to build this future that we have taken this special stand.
1956-08-08 - How to light the psychic fire, will for progress - Helping from a distance, mental formations - Prayer and the divine - Grace Grace at work everywhere, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So, when this sort of thing has happened to you a number of times, you begin to understand that in spite of the blindness of man and deceptive appearances, the Grace is at work everywhere, so that at every moment it is the best possible thing that happens in the state the world is in at that moment. It is because our vision is limited or even because we are blinded by our own preferences that we cannot discern that things are like this.
But when one begins to see it, one enters upon a state of wonder which nothing can describe. For behind the appearances one perceives this Graceinfinite, wonderful, all-powerfulwhich knows all, organises all, arranges all, and leads us, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, towards the supreme goal, that is, union with the Divine, the awareness of the Godhead and union with Him.
1956-11-28 - Desire, ego, animal nature - Consciousness, a progressive state - Ananda, desireless state beyond enjoyings - Personal effort that is mental - Reason, when to disregard it - Reason and reasons, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Is it possible to disregard reason? It is possible only when you have passed beyond mental activity. It is possible only when you have achieved a surrender, a total giving of yourself. It is possible only when you no longer have any desires. So long as you have desires, have an ego and a will of your own, you cannot give up reason, because, as I said just a moment ago, you would become quite unbalanced and perhaps insane. Therefore reason must be the master until one has gone beyond the state in which it is useful. And as I said, as long as there is an ego and as long as there are desires, and so long as there are impulses and so long as there are passions and preferences, and so long as there are attractions and repulsions, etc., as long as all these things are there, reason is altogether useful.
I shall also add that there is another quite indispensable condition in order not to have recourse to reason any more; that is to open no door, no part of the being to the suggestions of the adverse forces. For if you are not completely liberated from the habit of responding to adverse suggestions, if you give up your reason, you also give up reason itself, that is, common sense. And you begin to act in an incoherent way which may finally become quite unbalanced. Well, to be free from suggestions and adverse influences, you must be exclusively under the influence of the Divine.
1956-12-26 - Defeated victories - Change of consciousness - Experiences that indicate the road to take - Choice and preference - Diversity of the manifestation, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How should we understand not to have preferences? Shouldnt we prefer order to disorder, cleanliness to dirt, etc? Not to have preferencesdoes it mean treating everybody in the same way?
Now, here is my answer: this is playing on words! What you call preference, I call choice. You must be in a perpetual state of choice; at every minute of your life you must make a choice between what drags you down and what draws you up, between what makes you progress and what makes you go backwards; but I do not call this having preferences, I call this making a choicemaking a choice, choosing. At every minute one has to choose, this is indispensable, and infinitely more so than choosing once for all between cleanliness and dirt, whether moral or physical. The choice: at every second the choice is before you, and you may take a step downward or a step upward, take a step backward or a step forward; and this state of choice must be constant, perpetual, you must never fall asleep. But this is not what I call having preferences. preferencesthis means precisely not choosing. There is something for which you feel sympathy or antipathy, repulsion or attraction, and blindly, without any reason, you become attached to this thing; or else, when you have a problem to solve, you prefer the solution of this problem or this difficulty to be of one particular kind or another. But that is not at all choosingdont you see, what the truest thing is doesnt come into question, it is a matter of having a preference. For me the meaning of the word is very clear: a preference is something blind, an impulse, an attachment, an unconscious movement which is usually terribly obstinate.
You are placed in certain circumstances; one thing or another may happen, and you yourself have an aspiration, you ask to be guided, but within you there is something which prefers the answer to be of a certain kind, the indication to be a particular one, or the event to come about in one way rather than another; but all this is not a question of choice, it is a preference. And when the answer to your aspiration or prayer is not in accord with your desire, this preference makes you feel unhappy, you find it difficult to accept the answer, you must fight to accept it; whereas if you had no preferences, whatever the answer to your aspiration, when it comes, you cling to it joyfully, spontaneously with a sincere lan. Otherwise you are compelled to make an effort to accept what comes, the decision which comes in answer to your aspiration; you wish, desire, prefer things to be like this and not like that. But that, indeed, is not a choice. The choice is there at every minute; every minute you are faced with a choice: the choice to climb up or go down, the choice to progress or go backwards. But this choice does not imply that you prefer things to be like this or like that; it is a fact of every moment, an attitude you take.
Choice means a decision and an action. Preference is a desire. A choice is made and ought to be made, and if it is truly a choice, it is made without care for the consequences, without expecting any result. You choose; you choose according to your inner truth, your highest consciousness; whatever happens does not touch you, you have made your choice, the true choice, and what comes about is not your concern. While, on the contrary, if you have preferences, you will choose through preference in one way or another, your preference will distort your choice: it will be calculation, bargaining, you will act with the idea that a particular thing must happen because this is what you prefer and not because that is the truth, the right thing to do. Preference is attached to the result, acts with a view to the result, wishes things to be in a particular way and acts to bring about its wish; and so this opens the door to all kinds of things. Choice is independent of the result. And certainly, at every minute you can choose, you are faced with the necessity of choosing at every second. And you do not choose really well, in all sincerity, unless it is the truth of the choice which interests you, and not the result of your choice. If you choose with the result in view, that falsifies your choice.
So I say it is playing on words, it is mixing up two different things; and so you ask questions which seem insoluble, for it is a mixture. There is a confusion in the question.
1960 11 14? - 51, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is another one. There are people who without knowing itor because they want to ignore italways follow their personal interest, their preferences, their attachments, their conceptions; people who are not wholly consecrated to the Divine and who make use of moral and yogic ideas to conceal their personal impulses. But these people are deceiving themselves doubly; not only do they deceive themselves in their external activities, in their relation with others, but they also deceive themselves in their own personal movement; instead of serving the Divine, they serve their own egoism. And this happens constantly, constantly! They serve their own personality, their own egoism, while pretending to serve God. Then it is no longer even self-deception, it is hypocrisy.
This mental habit of always endowing everything with a very favourable appearance, of giving a favourable explanation to all movements sometimes it is rather subtle, but sometimes it is so crude that nobody is deceived except oneself. It is a habit of excusing oneself, the habit of giving a favourable mental excuse, a favourable mental explanation to everything one does, to everything one says, to everything one feels. For example, those who have no self-control and slap someones face in great indignation would call that an almost divine wrath!
1966 09 14, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One feels very clearlyin fact, it is visible that the opposite opinion has just as much value, that it is simply a question of attitude, nothing more. And naturally the egos preferences are always involved: you like it better like that and so you have the opinion that it is like that.
But until one can act with the higher light, one needs to use opinions.
1f.lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
personal preferences to advance, and was always guided by what he took
to be solid evidence. Of course I began by considering him mistaken,
20.01 - Charyapada - Old Bengali Mystic Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You have to cross the three worldsphysical, vital and mental, pass through the three states of consciousness jgrat (waking), swapna (dreaming) and suupta (sleeping)-to enjoy the transcendent delight. It is the ecstasy of union with one's soul, the divine Beloved secreted within our inner heart. This divinity, this beloved deity is utter freedomno mental reservations or restrictions, no vital preferences or prejudices, no physical rules or regulations.
Outcastebecause she is cast out of the normal human consciousness, which does not recognise the worth of such a status. Womanbecause it is Power, Shakti and Delight (ananda). Yoginisall the attendant powers that aid and vivify the game.
2.01 - The Yoga and Its Objects, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
which you can travel widely to all parts of the world and are admitted to the freedom of the infinite. All that you need are the ship, the steering-wheel, the compass, the motive-power and a skilful captain. Your ship is the Brahmavidya, faith is your steering-wheel, self-surrender your compass, the motive-power is she who makes, directs and destroys the worlds at God's comm and and God himself is your captain. But he has his own way of working and his own time for everything. Watch his way and wait for his time. Understand also the importance of accepting the Shastra and submitting to the Guru and do not do like the Europeans who insist on the freedom of the individual intellect to follow its own fancies and preferences which it calls reasonings, even before it is trained to discern or fit to reason. It is much the fashion nowadays to indulge in metaphysical discussions and philosophical subtleties about Maya and Adwaita and put them in the forefront, making them take the place of spiritual experience. Do not follow that fashion or confuse yourself and waste time on the way by questionings which will be amply and luminously answered when the divine knowledge of the vijnana awakes in you. Metaphysical knowledge has its place, but as a handmaid to spiritual experience, showing it the way sometimes but much more dependent on it and living upon its bounty. By itself it is mere pan.d.itya, a dry and barren thing and more often a stumbling-block than a help. Having accepted this path, follow its Shastra without unnecessary doubt and questioning, keeping the mind plastic to the light of the higher knowledge, gripping firmly what is experienced, waiting for light where things are dark to you, taking without pride what help you can from the living guides who have already trod the path, always patient, never hastening to narrow conclusions, but waiting for a more complete experience and a fuller light, relying on the Jagadguru who helps you from within.
It is necessary to say something about the Mayavada and the modern teachings about the Adwaita because they are much in the air at the present moment and, penetrated with ideas from European rationalism and agnosticism for which Shankara would have been astonished to find himself made responsible,
2.02 - Habit 2 Begin with the End in Mind, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
Your decision-making criterion is limited to what you think is best for your marriage or your mate, or to the preferences and opinions of your spouse.
Your decision-making criterion is limited to what you think is best for your marriage or your mate, or to the preferences and opinions of your spouse.
WISDOM
2.03 - The Purified Understanding, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We must, however, consider deeply and clearly what we mean by the understanding and by its purification. We use the word as the nearest equivalent we can get in the English tongue to the Sanskrit philosophical term buddhi; therefore we exclude from it the action of the sense mind which merely consists of the recording of perceptions of all kinds without distinction whether they be right or wrong, true or mere illusory phenomena, penetrating or superficial. We exclude that mass of confused conception which is merely a rendering of these perceptions and is equally void of the higher principle of judgment and discrimination. Nor can we include that constant leaping current of habitual thought which does duty for understanding in the mind of the average unthinking man, but is only a constant repetition of habitual associations, desires, prejudices, prejudgments, received or inherited preferences, even though it may constantly enrich itself by a fresh stock of concepts streaming in from the environment and admitted without the challenge of the sovereign discriminating reason. Undoubtedly this is a sort of understanding which has been very useful in, the development of man from the animal; but it is only one remove above the animal mind; it is a half-animal reason subservient to habit, to desire and the senses and is of no avail in the search whether for scientific or philosophical or, spiritual knowledge. We have to go beyond it; its purification can only be effected either by dismissing or silencing it altogether or by transmuting it into the true understanding.
By the understanding we mean that which at once perceives, judges and discriminates, the true reason of the human being not subservient to the senses, to desire or to the blind force of habit, but working in its own right for mastery, for knowledge. Certainly, the reason of man as he is at present does not even at its best act entirely in this free and sovereign fashion; but so far as it fails, it fails because it is still mixed with the lower half-animal action, because it is impure and constantly hampered and pulled down from its characteristic action. In its purity it should not be involved in these lower movements, but stand back from the object, and observe disinterestedly, put it in its right place in the whole by force of comparison, contrast, analogy, reason from its rightly observed data by deduction, induction, inference and holding all its gains in memory and supplementing them by a chastened and rightly-guided imagination view all in the light of a trained and disciplined judgment. Such is the pure intellectual understanding of which disinterested observation, judgment and reasoning are the law and characterising action.
But the term buddhi is also used in another and profounder sense. The intellectual understanding is only the lower hhddhi; there is another and a higher buddhi which is not intelligence but vision, is not understanding but rather an over-standings297 in knowledge, and does not seek knowledge and attain it in subjection to the data it observes but possesses already the truth and brings it out in the terms of a revelatory and intuitional thought. The nearest the human mind usually gets to this truth-conscious knowledge is that imperfect action of illumined finding which occurs when there is a great stress of thought and the intellect electrified by constant discharges from behind the veil and yielding to a higher enthusiasm admits a considerable instreaming from the intuitive and inspired faculty of knowledge. For there is an intuitive mind in man which serves as a recipient and channel for these instreamings from a supramental faculty. But the action of intuition and inspiration in us is imperfect in kind as well as intermittent in action; ordinarily, it comes in response to a claim from the labouring and struggling heart or intellect and, even before its givings enter the conscious mind, they are already affected by the thought or aspiration which went up to meet them, are no longer pure but altered to the needs of the heart or intellect; and after they enter the conscious mind, they are immediately seized upon by the intellectual understanding and dissipated or broken up so as to fit in with our imperfect intellectual knowledge, or by the heart and remoulded to suit our blind or half-blind emotional longings and preferences, or even by the lower cravings and distorted to the vehement uses of our hungers and passions.
If this higher Buddhi could act pure of the interference of these lower members, it would give pure forms of the truth; observation would be dominated or replaced by a vision which could see without subservient dependence on the testimony of the sense-mind and senses; imagination would give place to the self-assured inspiration of the truth, reasoning to the spontaneous discernment of relations and conclusion from reasoning to an intuition containing in itself those relations and not building laboriously upon them, judgment to a thought-vision in whose light the truth would stand revealed without the mask which it now wears and which our intellectual judgment has to penetrate; while memory too would take upon itself that larger sense given to it in Greek thought and be no longer a paltry selection from the store gained by the individual in his present life, but rather the all-recording knowledge which secretly holds and constantly gives from itself everything that we now seem painfully to acquire but really in this sense remember, a knowledge which includes the future298a no less than the past. Certainly, we are intended to grow in our receptivity to this higher faculty of truth-conscious knowledge, but its full and unveiled use is as yet the privilege of the gods and beyond our present human stature.
2.04 - The Secret of Secrets, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
impartial doer of whatever has to be done, - leaving the fruit to whatever power may be the master of the cosmic workings. For he very evidently is not the master; it is not for the satisfaction of his personal ego that Nature was set upon her ways, not for the fulfilment of his desires and preferences that the universal
Life is living, not for the justification of his intellectual opinions, judgments and standards that the universal Mind is working, nor is it to that petty tribunal that it has to refer its cosmic aims or its terrestrial method and purposes. These claims can only be made by the ignorant souls who live in their personality and see everything from that poor and narrow standpoint. He must stand back first from his egoistic demand on the world and work only as one among the millions who contri butes his share of effort and labour to a result determined not by himself, but by the universal action and purpose. But he has to do yet more, he has to give up the idea of being the doer and to see, freed from all personality, that it is the universal intelligence, will, mind, life that is at work in him and in all others. Nature is the universal worker; his works are hers, even as the fruits of her works in him are part of the grand sum of result guided by a greater Power than his own. If he can do these two things spiritually, then the tangle and bondage of his works will fall far away from him; for the whole knot of that bondage lay in his egoistic demand and participation. Passion and sin and personal joy and grief will fade away from his soul, which will now live within, pure, large, calm, equal to all persons and all things. Action will produce no subjective reaction and will leave no stain nor any mark on his spirit's purity and peace. He will have the inner joy, rest, ease and inalienable bliss of a free unaffected being. Neither within nor without will he have any more the old little personality, for he will feel consciously one self and spirit with all, even as his outer nature will have become to his consciousness an inseparable part of the universal mind, life and will. His separative egoistic personality will have been taken up and extinguished in the impersonality of spiritual being; his separative egoistic nature will be unified with the action of cosmic Nature.
2.05 - Renunciation, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Self-will in thought and action has, we have already seen, to be quite renounced if we would be perfect in the way of divine works; it has equally to be renounced if we are to be perfect in divine knowledge. This self-will means an egoism in the mind which attaches itself to its preferences, its habits, its past or present formations of thought and view and will because it regards them as itself or its own, weaves around them the delicate threads of "I-ness" and "my-ness" and lives in them like a spider in its web. It hates to be disturbed, as a spider hates attack on its web, and feels foreign and unhappy if transplanted to fresh viewpoints and formations as a spider feels foreign in another web than its own. This attachment must be entirely excised from the mind. Not only must we give up the ordinary attitude to the world and life to which the unawakened mind clings as its natural element; but we must not remain bound in any mental construction of our own or in any intellectual thought-system or arrangement of religious dogmas or logical conclusions; we must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also beyond the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from Illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state so as to reach the utmost transcendence of the Divine and its utmost universality. Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit himself to any form or expression; always we must keep ourselves open to the higher Word from above that does not confine itself to its own sense and the light of the Thought that carries in it its own opposites.
But the centre of all resistance is egoism and this we must pursue into every covert and disguise and drag it out and slay it; for its disguises are endless and it will cling to every shred of possible self-concealment. Altruism and indifference are often its most effective disguises; so draped, it will riot boldly in the very face of the divine spies who are missioned to hunt it out. Here the formula of the supreme knowledge comes to our help; we have nothing to do in our essential standpoint with these distinctions, for there is no I nor thou, but only one divine Self equal in all embodiments, equal in the individual and the group, and to realise that, to express that, to serve that, to fulfil that is all that matters. Self-satisfaction and altruism, enjoyment and indifference are not the essential thing. If the realisation, fulfilment, service of the one Self demands from us an action that seems to others self-service or self-assertion in the egoistic sense or seems egoistic enjoyment and self-indulgence, that action we must do; we must be governed by the guide within rather than by the opinions of men. The influence of the environment works often with great subtlety; we prefer and put on almost unconsciously the garb which will look best in the eye that regards us from outside and we allow a veil to drop over the eye within; we are impelled to drape ourselves in the vow of poverty, or in the garb of service, or in outward proofs of indifference and renunciation and a spotless sainthood because that is what tradition and opinion demand of us and so we can make best an impression on our environment. But all this is vanity and delusion. We may be called upon to assume these things, for that may be the uniform of our service; but equally it may not. The eye of man outside matters nothing; the eye within is all.
2.08 - The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The desire-mind must also be rejected from the instrument of thought and this is best done by the detachment of the Purusha from thought and opinion itself. Of this we have already had occasion to speak when we considered in what consists the integral purification of the being. For all this movement of knowledge which we are describing is a method of purification and liberation whereby entire and final self-knowledge becomes possible, a progressive self-knowledge being itself the instrument of the purification and liberation. The method with the thought-mind will be the same as with all the rest of the being. The Purusha, having used the thought-mind for release from identification with the life and body and with the mind of desire and sensations and emotions, will turn round upon the thought-mind Itself and will say "This too I am not; I am not the thought or the thinker; all these ideas, opinions, speculations, strivings of the intellect, its predilections, preferences, dogmas, doubts, self-corrections are not myself; all this is only a working of prakriti which takes place in the thought-mind." Thus a division is created between the mind that thinks and wills and the mind that observes and the Purusha becomes the witness only; he sees, he understands the process and laws of his thought, but detaches himself from it. Then as the master of the sanction he withdraws his past sanction from the tangle of the mental undercurrent and the reasoning intellect and causes both to cease from their importunities. He becomes liberated from subjection to the thinking mind and capable of the utter silence.
For perfection there is necessary also the resumption by the Purusha of his position as the lord of his Nature and the will to replace the mere mental undercurrent and intellect by the truth-conscious thought that lightens from above. But the silence is necessary; in the silence and not in the thought we shall find the Self, we shall become aware of it, not merely conceive it, and we shall withdraw out of the mental Purusha into that which is the source of the mind. But for this withdrawal a final liberation is needed, the release from the ego-sense in the mind.
2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: It depends on the Guru. If he is a human Guru then his personal vital or mental preferences may play a part and often they falsify the purpose of Grace. The less they interfere the better. But what did you mean by the personal and the impersonal? Do you mean to say that if you gave me a lot of fruits and other things everyday there would be a lot of spiritual things going from me to you ? (Laughter)
Disciple: It will depend upon the object with which one gives the fruit, etc.
2.10 - Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But the first of these two movements, the awakening to our inner realities, imposes itself as the prior necessity because it is by this inward self-finding that the second - the cosmic selffinding - can become entirely possible: we have to go into our inner being and learn to live in it and from it; the outer mind and life and body must become for us only an antechamber. All that we are on the outside is indeed conditioned by what is within, occult, in our inner depths and recesses; it is thence that come the secret initiatives, the self-effective formations; our inspirations, our intuitions, our life-motives, our mind's preferences, our will's selections are actuated from there, - in so far as they are not shaped or influenced by an insistence, equally hidden, of a surge of cosmic impacts: but the use we make of these emergent powers and these influences is conditioned, largely determined and, above all, very much limited by our outermost nature. It is then the knowledge of this inner initiating self coupled with the
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2.12 - The Way and the Bhakta, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Or he will be one who has given up all desire and action to the Master of his being, one pure and still, indifferent to whatever comes, not pained or afflicted by any result or happening, one who has flung away from him all egoistic, personal and mental initiative whether of the inner or the outer act, one who lets the divine will and divine knowledge flow through him undeflected by his own resolves, preferences and desires, and yet for that very reason is swift and skilful in all action of his nature, because this flawless unity with the supreme will, this pure instrumentation is the condition of the greatest skill in works. Again, he will be one who neither desires the pleasant and rejoices at its touch nor abhors the unpleasant and sorrows at its burden. He has abolished the distinction between fortunate and unfortunate happenings, because his devotion receives all things equally as good from the hands of his eternal Lover and
Master. The God-lover dear to God is a soul of wide equality,
2.13 - On Psychology, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: What is man's mental knowledge before those beings? What does man know? Practically nothing. They know the complexity of forces at work, while man knows nothing of it. Man has a great destiny if he goes along the right lines, but as he is, he is shut up in the physical consciousness which is a very inferior plane. Even his reason requires data for its knowledge, and argument or reasoning can justify anything. Two quite opposite conclusions can be supported by the aid of the same reasoning, and your preferences determine which one you accept. For the data of reasoning, again, you require to depend upon what you see and hear on your senses. The vital beings are not so foolish as all that, they are not so limited.
22 JUNE 1926
2.17 - The Soul and Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Uplifted into the Spirit the soul is no longer subject to Nature; it is above this mental activity. It may be above it in detachment and aloofness, udasina, seated above and indifferent, or attracted by and lost in, the absorbing peace or bliss of its undifferentiated, its concentrated spiritual experience of itself; we must then transcend by a complete renunciation of Nature and cosmic existence, not conquer by a divine and sovereign possession. But the Spirit, the Divine is not only above Nature; it is master of Nature and cosmos; the soul rising into its spiritual poise must at least be capable of the same mastery by its unity with the Divine. It must be capable of controlling its own nature not only in calm or by forcing it to repose, but with a sovereign control of its play and activity. In the lower poise this is not possible because the soul acts through the mind and the mind can only act individually and fragmentarily in a contented obedience or a struggling subjection to that universal Nature through which the divine knowledge and the divine Will are worked out in the cosmos. But the Spirit is in possession of knowledge and will, of which it is the source and cause and not a subject; therefore in proportion as the soul assumes its divine or spiritual being, it assumes also control of the movements of its nature. It becomes, in the ancient language, svarat, free and a self-ruler over the kingdom of its own life and being. But also it increases in control over its environment, its world. This it can only do by universalising itself; for it is the divine and universal will that it must express in its action upon the world. It must first extend its consciousness and see the universe in itself instead of being like the mind limited by the physical, vital, sensational, emotional, intellectual outlook of the little divided personality; it must accept the world-truths, the world-energies, the world-tendencies, the world-purposes as its own instead of clinging to its own intellectual ideas, desires and endeavours, preferences, objects, intentions, impulses; these, so far as they remain, must be harmonised with the universal. It must then submit its knowledge and will at their very source to the divine Knowledge and the divine Will and so arrive through submission at immergence, losing its personal light in the divine Light and its personal initiative in the divine initiative. To be first in tune with the Infinite, in harmony with the Divine, and then to be unified with the Infinite, taken into the Divine is its condition of perfect strength and mastery, and this is precisely the very nature of the spiritual life and the spiritual existence.
The distinction made in the Gita between the Purusha and the prakriti gives us the clue to the various attitudes which the soul can adopt towards Nature in its movement towards perfect freedom and rule. The Purusha is, says the Gita, witness, upholder, source of the sanction, knower, lord, enjoyer; prakriti executes, it is the active principle and must have an operation corresponding to the attitude of the Purusha. The soul may assume, if it wishes, the poise of the pure witness, saksi; it may look on at the action of Nature as a thing from which it stands apart; it watches, but does not itself participate. We have seen the importance of this quietistic capacity; it is the basis of the movement of withdrawal by which we can say of everything, -- body, life, mental action, thought, sensation, emotion, -- "This is prakriti working in the life, mind and body, it is not myself, it is not even mine," and thus come to the soul's separation from these things and to their quiescence. This may, therefore, be an attitude of renunciation or at least of non-participation, tamasika, with a resigned and inert endurance of the natural action so long as it lasts, rajasika, with a disgust, aversion and recoil from it, sattvika, with a luminous intelligence of the soul's separateness and the peace and joy of aloofness and repose; but also it may be attended by an equal and impersonal delight as of a spectator at a show, joyous but unattached and ready to rise up at any moment and as joyfully depart. The attitude of the Witness at its highest is the absolute of unattachment and freedom from affection by the phenomena of the cosmic existence.
2.2.01 - Work and Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The only work that spiritually purifies is that which is done without personal motives, without desire for fame or public recognition or worldly greatness, without insistence on ones own mental motives or vital lusts and demands or physical preferences, without vanity or crude self-assertion or claim for position or prestige, done for the sake of the Divine alone and at the comm and of the Divine. All work done in an egoistic spirit, however good for people in the world of the Ignorance, is of no avail to the seeker of the Yoga.
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2.2.02 - Becoming Conscious in Work, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The passage1 describes the state of consciousness when one is aloof from all things even when in their midst and all is felt to be unreal, an illusion. There are then no preferences or desires, because things are too unreal to desire or to prefer one to another. But at the same time one feels no necessity to flee the world or not to do any action, because being free from the illusion, action or living in the world does not weigh upon one, one is not bound or involved. Those who flee from the world or shun action (the Sannyasis) do so because they would be involved or bound; they believe the world to be unreal, but in fact it weighs on them as a reality so long as they are in it. When one is perfectly free from the illusion of the reality of things, then they cannot weigh on one or bind at all.
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2.22 - The Supreme Secret, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The pursuit of an impersonal truth or an impersonal will in our conduct is vitiated so long as we live at all in our normal mind by that which is natural and inevitable to that mind, the law of our personality, the subtle urge of our vital nature, the colour of ego. The pursuit of impersonal truth is turned by these influences into an unsuspected cloak for a system of intellectual preferences supported by our mind's limiting insistence; the pursuit of a disinterested impersonal action is converted into a greater authority and apparent high sanction for our personal will's interested selections and blind arbitrary persistences. On the other hand an absolute impersonality would seem to impose an equally absolute quietism, and this would mean that all action is bound to the machinery of the ego and the three gunas and to recede from life and its works the only way out of the circle. This impersonal silence however is not the last word of wisdom in the matter, because it is not the only way and crown or not all the way and the last crown of self-realisation open to our endeavour. There is a mightier fuller more positive spiritual experience in which the circle of our egoistic personality and the round of the mind's limitations vanish in the unwalled infinity of a greatest self and spirit and yet life and its works not only remain still acceptable and possible but reach up and out to their widest spiritual completeness and assume a grand ascending significance.
There have been different gradations in this movement to bridge the gulf between an absolute impersonality and the dynamic possibilities of our nature. The thought and practice of the Mahayana approached this difficult reconciliation through the experience of a deep desirelessness and a large dissolving freedom from mental and vital attachment and sanskaras and on the positive side a universal altruism, a fathomless compassion for the world and its creatures which became as it were the flood and outpouring of the high Nirvanic state on life and action.
2.24 - The Message of the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
"Thus to impersonalise your being is not possible so long as you nurse and cherish and cling to your ego or anything that belongs to it. Desire and the passions that arise from desire are the principal sign and knot of ego. It is desire that makes you go on saying I and mine and subjects you through a persistent egoism to satisfaction and dissatisfaction, liking and disliking, hope and despair, joy and grief, to your petty loves and hatreds, to wrath and passion, to your attachment to success and things pleasant and to the sorrow and suffering of failure and of things unpleasant. Desire brings always confusion of mind and limitation of the will, an egoistic and distorted view of things, a failure and clouding of knowledge. Desire and its preferences and violences are the first strong root of sin and error. There can be while you cherish desire no assured stainless tranquillity, no settled light, no calm pure knowledge. There can be no right being - for desire is a perversion of the spirit - and no firm foundation for right thought, action and feeling. Desire, if permitted to remain under whatever colour, is a perpetual menace even to the wisest and can at any moment subtly or violently cast
The Message of the Gita
2.25 - List of Topics in Each Talk, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
| 06-09-26 | Guru and disciple, Grace, preferences; consent for Divine to act; measure of spirituality; outer success and inner progress; energy from Yoga; money power |
| 09- 09-26 | Hostiles: controlling and transforming them; Higher Power and Adhar |
2.3.01 - Aspiration and Surrender to the Mother, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Surrender means to look to the Divine Mother only - to reject all desires and do only her will, not to insist on one's own ideas and preferences, but to ask for her Truth only, to obey and follow her guidance, to open oneself and become aware of her
Force and its workings and to allow those workings to change the nature into the divine nature.
--
I had said that the human vital does not like to be controlled or dominated by another and I said that that also was a reason why sadhaks found it difficult to surrender to the Mother. For the vital wants to affirm its own ideas, impulses, desires, preferences
148
2.3.04 - The Higher Planes of Mind, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To have the true intuition one must get rid of the mind's self-will and the vital's also, their preferences, fancies, fantasies, strong insistences, and eliminate the mental and vital ego's pressure which sets the consciousness to work in the service of its own claims and desires. Otherwise these things will come in with force and claim to be intuitions, inspirations and the rest of it.
Or if any intuitions come, they can be twisted and spoiled by the mixture of these forces of the Ignorance.
2.3.06 - The Mind, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
rational or scientific or literary and prefer to follow the formations, beliefs or doubts, mental preferences and interests which are in conformity with its education and its nature. But quite apart from that, what was commanding in St. Augustine may very well have been the thinking mind or reason while what was commanded was the vital, and mind and vital, whatever anybody may say, are not the same. The thinking mind or buddhi lives, however imperfectly in man, by intelligence and reason, and tries to act or makes the rest act under that law as far as and in the way that it has conceived the law of intelligence and reason. The vital on the other hand is a thing of desires, impulses, force-pushes, emotions, sensations, seekings after life fulfilment, possession and enjoyment; these are its function and its nature;
- it is that part of us which seeks after life and its movements for their own sake and it does not want to leave hold of them even if they bring it suffering as well as or more than pleasure; it is even capable of luxuriating in tears and suffering as part of the drama of life. What then is there in common between the thinking intelligence and the vital and why should the latter obey the mind and not follow its own nature? The disobedience is perfectly normal instead of being, as Augustine suggests, unintelligible.
2.4.2 - Interactions with Others and the Practice of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The inequality of feelings towards others, liking and disliking, is ingrained in the nature of the human vital. This is because some harmonise with ones own vital temperament, others do not; also there is the vital ego which gets displeased when it is hurt or when things do not go or people do not act according to its preferences or its idea of what they should do. In the self above there is a spiritual calm and equality, a goodwill to all or at a certain stage a quiet indifference to all except the Divine; in the psychic there is an equal kindness or love to all fundamentally, but there may be special relations with one but the vital is always unequal and full of likes and dislikes. By the sadhana the vital must be quieted down; it must receive from the self above its quiet goodwill and equality to all things and from the psychic its general kindness or love. This will come, but it may take time to come. You must get rid of all inner as well as all outer movements of anger, impatience or dislike. If things go wrong or are done wrongly, you will simply say, The Mother knows and go on quietly doing or getting things done as well as you can without friction. At a later period we will show you how to use the Mothers force so that things may go better, but first you must get your inner poise in a quiet vital, for only so can the Force be used with its full possible success.
***
3.01 - Sincerity, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The greatest enemies of a perfect sincerity are preferences (either mental, vital or physical) and preconceived ideas. It is these obstacles that must be overcome.
3.03 - On Thought - II, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"To the most clairvoyant, the idea seems to be an aloof person with her whims and desires, her preferences, her queenly disdain, her virgin modesty. They know that it takes much care to win her and but a little thing to lose her, that there is a love of the mind for the idea, a love made of consecration and sacrifice, and without this the idea cannot belong to it.
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3.03 - The Four Foundational Practices, #The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, #Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, #Buddhism
Experiencing the vivid, luminous, dream-like qualities of life allows your experience to grow more spacious, lighter, and clearer. When lucidity is developed in dream and in waking, there is much greater freedom to shape life positively, and to finally give up preferences and dualisms altogether and remain in non-dual presence.
3.03 - The Mind, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The mind has a power of deception in its own regard which is incalculable. It clothes its desires and preferences with all kinds of wonderful intentions and it hides its trickeries, resentments and disappointments under the most favourable appearances.
To overcome all that, you must have the fearlessness of a true warrior, and an honesty, a straightforwardness, a sincerity that never fail.
3.2.02 - Yoga and Skill in Works, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Gita tells us that equality of soul and mind is Yoga and that this equality is the foundation of the Brahman-state, that high infinite consciousness to which the Yogin aspires. Now equality of mind means universality; for without universality of soul there may be a state of indifference or an impartial self-control or a well-governed equality of temperament, but these are not the thing that is meant. The equality spoken of is not indifference or impartiality or equability, but a fundamental oneness of attitude to all persons and all things and happenings because of the perception of all as the One. Such equality, it is erroneously thought, is incompatible with action. By no means; this is the error of the animal and the intellectual man who thinks that action is solely possible when dictated by his hopes, fears and passions or by the self-willed preferences of the emotion and the intellect justifying themselves by the illusions of the reason.
That might be the fact if the individual were the real actor and not merely an instrument or secondary agent; but we know well enough, for Science and Philosophy assure us of the same truth, that the universal is the Force which acts through the simulacrum of our individuality. The individual mind, pretending to choose for itself with a sublime ignorance and disregard of the universal, is obviously working on the basis of a falsehood and by means of an error and not in the knowledge and the will of the Truth. It cannot have any real skill in works; for to start from a falsehood or half-truth and work by means of blunders and arrive at another falsehood or half-truth which we have immediately to change, and all the while to weep and struggle
--
and suffer and have no sure resting-place, cannot surely be called skill in works. But the universal is equal in all and therefore its determinations are not self-willed preferences but are guided by the truth of the divine will and knowledge which is unlimited and not subject to incapacity or error.
Therefore that state of the being by which the Yogin differs from the ordinary man, is that by which he rises from the foundation of a perfect equality to the consciousness of the one existence in all and embracing all and lives in that existence and not in the walls of his body or personal temperament or limited mind. Mind and life and body he sees as small enough things which happen and change and develop in his being. Nay, the whole universe is seen by him as happening within himself, not in his small ego or mind, but within this vast and infinite self with which he is now constantly identified. All action in the universe he sees as arising in this being, out of the divine Existence and under the stress of the divine Truth, Knowledge, Will and Power.
He begins to participate consciously in its working and to see all things in the light of that divine truth and governance; and even when his own actions move on certain lines rather than others, he is not bound by them or shut to the truth of all the rest by his own passions and preferences, gropings and seekings and revolts. It is evident that such an increasing wideness of vision must mean an increasing knowledge. And if it be true that knowledge is power, it must mean also an increasing force for works. Certainly, it would not be so, if the Yogin continued to act by the light of his individual reason and imagination and will; for the intellect and all that depends on it can only work by virtue of rigid limitations and exclusive determinations.
Accordingly, the continued activity of the unillumined intellect and its servants conflicts with the new state of consciousness and knowledge which arises out of this larger existence, and so long as they remain active, it cannot be perfect or assured; for the consciousness is being continually pulled down to the lower field of ego-habit by the claim of their narrow workings. But the
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Not only must the will and fundamental knowledge-view of things change, but a new combination of faculties take the place of the old. For if the intellect is not to do all our mental work for us or to work at all in its unillumined state and if the will in the form of desires, wishes, intellectual preferences is not to determine and enforce our action, then it is clear that other powers of knowledge and will must awaken and either replace the intellect and the mental preference or illumine and guide the one and transform and dominate the other. Otherwise either the action may be nil or else its impulses mechanical and chaotic,
Yoga and Skill in Works
3.3.2 - Doctors and Medicines, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As for curing you by the Force, the main obstacle is your own vital movements. All this egoistic insistence on your own ideas, claims, preferencesassertion of your own righteousness as against the wickedness of others, complaints, quarrels, disputes, rancours against those around you and the reactions they causehave had this effect on your liver and stomach and nerves. If you give up all that and live quietly and at peace with others, thinking less of yourself and others and more of the Divine, it would make things much easier and help to restore your health. Quietness of the mind in facing your illness is also necessaryagitation stops the action of the Force.
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4.04 - Weaknesses, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You must never forget that I disapprove of quarrels and always consider that both sides are equally wrong. To surmount ones feelings, preferences, dislikes and impulses, is an indispensable discipline here.
1 October 1943
4.09 - The Liberation of the Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But these are only predominant powers in each part of our complex system. The three qualities mingle, combine and strive in every fibre and in every member of our intricate psychology. The mental character is made by them, the character of our reason, the character of our will, the character of our moral, aesthetic, emotional, dynamic, sensational being. Tamas brings in all the ignorance, inertia, weakness, incapacity which afflicts our nature, a clouded reason, nescience, unintelligence, a clinging to habitual notions and mechanical ideas, the refusal to think and know, the small mind, the closed avenues, the trotting round of mental habit, the dark and the twilit places. Tamas brings in the impotent will, want of faith and self-confidence and initiative, the disinclination to act, the shrinking from endeavour and aspiration, the poor and little spirit, and in our moral and dynamic being the inertia, the cowardice, baseness, sloth, lax subjection to small and ignoble motives, the weak yielding to our lower nature. Tamas brings into our emotional nature insensibility, indifference, want of sympathy and openness, the shut soul, the callous heart, the soon spent affection and languor of the feelings, into our aesthetic and sensational nature the dull aesthesis, the limited range of response, the insensibility to beauty, all that makes in man the coarse, heavy and vulgar spirit. Rajas contri butes our normal active nature with all its good and evil; when unchastened by a sufficient element of Sattwa, it turns to egoism, self-will and violence, the perverse, obstinate or exaggerating action of the reason, prejudice, attachment to opinion, clinging to error, the subservience of the intelligence to our desires and preferences and not to the truth, the fanatic or the sectarian mind, self-will, pride, arrogance, selfishness, ambition, lust, greed, cruelty, hatred, jealousy, the egoisms of love, all the vices and passions, the exaggerations of the aesthesis, the morbidities and perversions of the sensational and vital being. Tamas in its own right produces the coarse, dull and ignorant type of human nature. Rajas the vivid, restless, kinetic man, driven by the breath of action, passion and desire. Sattwa produces a higher type. The gifts of Sattwa are the mind of reason and balance, clarity of the disinterested truth-seeking open intelligence, a will subordinated to the reason or guided by the ethical spirit, self-control, equality, calm, love, sympathy, refinement, measure, fineness of the aesthetic and emotional mind, in the sensational being delicacy, just acceptivity, moderation and poise, a vitality subdued and governed by the mastering intelligence. The accomplished types of the sattwic man are the philosopher, saint and sage, of the rajasic man the statesman, warrior, forceful man of action. But in all men there is in greater or less proportions a mingling of the gunas, a multiple personality and in most a good deal of shifting and alternation from the predominance of one to the prevalence of another Guna; even in the governing form of their nature most human beings are of a mixed type. All the colour and variety of life is made of the intricate pattern of the weaving of the gunas.
But richness of life, even a sattwic harmony of mind and nature does not constitute spiritual perfection. There is a relative possible perfection, but it is a perfection of incompleteness, some partial height, force, beauty, some measure of nobility and greatness, some imposed and precariously sustained balance. There is a relative mastery, but it is a mastery of the body by life or of the life by mind, not a free possession of the instruments by the liberated and self-possessing spirit. The gunas have to be transcended if we would arrive at spiritual perfection. Tamas evidently has to be overcome, inertia and ignorance and incapacity cannot be elements of a true perfection; but it can only be overcome in Nature by the force of Rajas aided by an increasing force of Sattwa. Rajas has to be overcome, egoism, personal desire and self-seeking passion are not elements of the true perfection; but it can only be overcome by force of Sattwa enlightening the being and force of Tamas limiting the action. Sattwa itself does not give the highest or the integral perfection; Sattwa is always a quality of the limited nature; sattwic knowledge is the light of a limited mentality; sattwic will is the government of a limited intelligent force. Moreover, Sattwa cannot act by itself in Nature, but has to rely for all action on the aid of Rajas, so that even sattwic action is always liable to the imperfections of Rajas; egoism, perplexity, inconsistency, a one-sided turn, a limited and exaggerated will, exaggerating itself in the intensity of its limitations, pursue the mind and action even of the saint, philosopher and sage. There is a sattwic as well as a rajasic or tamasic egoism, at the highest an egoism of knowledge or virtue; but the mind's egoism of whatever type is incompatible with liberation. All the three gunas have to be transcended. Sattwa may bring us near to the Light, but its limited clarity falls away from us when we enter into the luminous body of the divine Nature.
4.1.1 - The Difficulties of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Fortunately, there is also in human nature a sattwic element which turns towards light and a rajasic or kinetic element which desires and needs to act and can be made to desire not only change but constant progress. But these too, owing to the limitations of human ignorance and the obstructions of the fundamental inconscience, suffer from pettiness and division and can resist as well as assist the spiritual endeavour. The spiritual change which Yoga demands from human nature and individual character is, therefore, full of difficulties, one may almost say that it is the most difficult of all human aspirations and efforts. In so far as it can get the sattwic and the rajasic (kinetic) elements to assist it, its path is made easier but even the sattwic element can resist by attachment to old ideas, to preconceived notions, to mental preferences and partial judgments, to opinions and reasonings which come in the way of higher truth and to which it is attached: the kinetic element resists by its egoism, its passions, desires and strong attachments, its vanity and self-esteem, its constant habit of demand and many other obstacles. The resistance of the vital has a more violent character than the others and it brings to the aid of the others its own violence and passion and that is a source of all the acute difficulty, revolt, upheavals and disorders which mar the course of the Yoga. The Divine is there, but He does not ignore the conditions, the laws, the circumstances of Nature; it is under these conditions that He does all His work, His work in the world and in man and consequently also in the sadhak, the aspirant, even in the Godknower and God-lover; even the saint and the sage continue to have difficulties and to be limited by their human nature. A complete liberation and a complete perfection or the complete possession of the Divine and possession by the Divine is possible but it does not usually happen by an easy miracle or a series of miracles. The miracle can and does happen but only when there is the full call and complete self-giving of the soul and the entire widest opening of the nature.
Still, if the call of the soul is there, although not yet full, however great and obstinate the difficulties, there can be no final and irretrievable failure; even when the thread is broken it is taken up again and reunited and carried to its end. There is a working in the nature itself in response to the inner need which, however slowly, brings about the result. But a certain inner consent is needed; the progress that you have marked in yourself is due to the fact that there was this consent in the soul and also in part of the nature; the change was insisted on by the mind and desired by part of the vital; the resistance in part of the mind and part of the vital made it slow and difficult but could not prevent it. The strong development you have observed in your powers with its proof in the response of others is due to the same reason; part of your being consented to it, wanted and needed it as a self-fulfilment of the nature and the soul wanted it as a means of service to the Divine; the rest was due to the pressure of the Divine force and my pressure. As for the distaste, the lack of interest etc. all this is temporary and belongs only to a part of you. In so far as it comes from a kind of vairgya, it may have helped you in overcoming some of your attachments, but it is defective in so far as the element of tamas and apravtti is there; it is not so fundamental as to resist the victorious drive of the pressure of the Divine Force.
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And you must now get rid of an exaggerated insistence on the use of reason and the correctness of your individual reasoning and its right to decide in all matters. The reason has its place especially with regard to certain physical things and general worldly questionsthough even there it is a very fallible judgeor in the formation of metaphysical conclusions and generalisations; but its claim to be the decisive authority in matters of Yoga or in spiritual things is untenable. The activities of the outward intellect there lead only to the formation of personal opinions, not to the discovery of Truth. It has always been understood in India that the reason and its logic or its judgment cannot give you the realisation of spiritual truths but can only assist in an intellectual presentation of ideas; realisation comes by intuition and inner experience. Reason and intellectuality cannot make you see the Divine, it is the soul that sees. Mind and the other instruments can only share in the vision when it is imparted to them by the soul and welcome and rejoice in it. But also the mind may prevent it or at least stand long in the way of the realisation or the vision. For its prepossessions, preconceived opinions and mental preferences may build a wall of arguments against the spiritual truth that has to be realised and refuse to accept it if it presents itself in a form which does not conform to its own previous ideas: so also it may prevent one from recognising the Divine if the Divine presents himself in a form for which the intellect is not prepared or which in any detail runs counter to its prejudgments and prejudices. One can depend on ones reason in other matters provided the mind tries to be open and impartial and free from undue passion and is prepared to concede that it is not always right and may err; but it is not safe to depend on it alone in matters which escape its jurisdiction, especially in spiritual realisation and in matters of Yoga which belong to a different order of knowledge.
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4.11 - The Perfection of Equality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The same equality must be brought into the rest of our being. Our whole dynamic being is acting under the influence of unequal impulses, the manifestations of the lower ignorant nature. These urgings we obey or partially control or place on them the changing and modifying influence of our reason, our refining aesthetic sense and mind and regulating ethical notions. A tangled strain of right and wrong, of useful and harmful, harmonious or disordered activity is the mixed result of our endeavour, a shifting standard of human reason and unreason, virtue and vice, honour and dishonour, the noble and the ignoble, things apprjved and things disapproved of men, much trouble of self-approbation and disapprobation or of self-righteousness and disgust, remorse, shame and moral depression. These things are no doubt very necessary at present for our spiritual evolution. But the seeker of a greater perfection will draw back from all these dualities, regard them with an equal eye and arrive through equality at an impartial and universal action of the dynamic Tapas, spiritual force, in which his own force and will are turned into pure and just instruments of a greater calm secret of divine working. The ordinary mental standards will be exceeded on the basis of this dynamic equality. The eye of his will must look beyond to a purity of divine being, a motive of divine will-power guided by divine knowledge of which his perfected nature will be the engine, yantra. That must remain impossible in entirety as long as the dynamic ego with its subservience to the emotional and vital impulses and the preferences of the personal judgment interferes in his action. A perfect equality of the will is the power which dissolves these knots of the lower impulsion to works. This equality will not respond to the lower impulses, but watch for a greater seeing impulsion from the Light above the mind, and will not judge and govern with the intellectual judgment, but wait for enlightenment and direction from a superior plane of vision. As it mounts upward to the supramental being and widens inward to the spiritual largeness, the dynamic nature will be transformed, spiritualised like the emotional and pranic, and grow into a power of the divine nature. There will be plenty of stumblings and errors and imperfections of adjustment of the instruments to their new working, but the increasingly equal soul will not be troubled overmuch or grieve at these things, since, delivered to the guidance of the Light and Power within self and above mind, it will proceed on its way with a firm assurance and await with growing calm the vicissitudes and completion of the process of transformation. The promise of the Divine Being in the Gita will be the anchor of its resolution, "Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve."
The equality of the thinking mind will be a part and a very important part of the perfection of the instruments in the nature. Our present attractive self-justifying attachment to our intellectual preferences, our judgments, opinions, imaginations, limiting associations of the memory which makes the basis of our mentality, to the current repetitions of our habitual mind, to the insistences of our pragmatic mind, to the limitations even of our intellectual truth-mind, must go the way of other attachments and yield to the impartiality of an equal vision. The equal thought-mind will look on knowledge and ignorance and on truth and error, those dualities created by our limited nature of consciousness and the partiality of our intellect and its little stock of reasonings and intuitions, accept them both without being bound to either twine of the skein and await a luminous transcendence. In ignorance it will see a knowledge which is imprisoned and seeks or waits for delivery, in error a truth at work which has lost itself or got thrown by the groping mind into misleading forms. On the other side, it will not hold itself bound and limited by its knowledge or forbidden by it to proceed to fresh illumination, nor lay too fierce a grasp on truth, even when using it to the full, or tyrannously chain it to its present formulations. This perfect equality of the thinking mind is indispensable because the objective of this progress is the greater light which belongs to a higher plane of spiritual cognizance. This equality is the most delicate and difficult of all, the least practised by the human mind; its perfection is impossible so long as the supramental light does not fall fully on the upward looking mentality. But an increasing will to equality in the intelligence is needed, before that light can work freely upon the mental substance. This too is not an abnegation of the seekings and cosmic purposes of the intelligence, not an indifference or impartial scepticism, nor yet a stilling of all thought in the silence of the Ineffable. A stilling of the mental thought may be part of the discipline, when the object is to free the mind from its own partial workings, in order that it may become an equal channel of a higher light and knowledge; but there must also be a transformation of the mental substance; otherwise the higher light cannot assume full possession and a compelling shape for the ordered works of the divine consciousness in the human being. The silence of the Ineffable is a truth of divine being, but the Word which proceeds from that silence is also a truth, and it is this Word which has to be given a body in the conscious form of the nature.
But, finally, all this equalisation of the nature is a preparation for the highest spiritual equality to take possession of the whole being and make a pervading atmosphere in which the light, power and joy of the Divine can manifest itself in man amid an increasing fullness. That equality is the eternal equality of Sachchidananda. It is an equality of the infinite being which is self-existent, an equality of the eternal spirit, but it will mould into its own mould the mind, heart, will, life, physical being. It is an equality of the infinite spiritual consciousness which will contain and base the blissful flowing and satisfied waves of a divine knowledge. It is an equality of the divine Tapas which will initiate a luminous action of the divine will in all the nature. It is an equality of the divine Ananda which will found the play of a divine universal delight, universal love and an illimitable aesthesis of universal beauty. The ideal equal peace and calm of the Infinite will be the wide ether of our perfected being, but the ideal, equal and perfect action of the Infinite through the nature working on the relations of the universe will be the untroubled outpouring of its power in our being. This is the meaning of equality in the terms of the integral Yoga.
4.13 - The Action of Equality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The distinctions that have already been made, will have shown in sufficiency what is meant by the status of equality. It is not mere quiescence and indifference, not a withdrawal from experience, but a superiority to the present reactions of the mind and life. It is the spiritual way of replying to life or rather of embracing it and compelling it to become a perfect form of action of the self and spirit. It is the first secret of the soul's mastery of existence. When we have it in perfection, we are admitted to the very ground of the divine spiritual nature. The mental being in the body tries to compel and conquer life, but is at every turn compelled by it, because it submits to the desire reactions of the vital self. To be equal, not to be overborne by any stress of desire, is the first condition of real mastery, self-empire is its basis. But a mere mental equality, however great it may be, is hampered by the tendency of quiescence. It has to preserve itself from desire by self-limitation in the will and action. It is only the spirit which is capable of sublime undisturbed rapidities of will as well as an illimitable patience, equally just in a slow and deliberate or a swift and violent, equally secure in a safely lined and limited or a vast and enormous action. It can accept the smallest work in the narrowest circle of cosmos, but it can work too upon the whirl of chaos with an understanding and creative force; and these things it can do because by its detached and yet intimate acceptance it carries into both an infinite calm, knowledge, will and power. It has that detachment because it is above all the happenings, forms, ideas and movements it embraces in its scope; and it has that intimate acceptance because it is yet one with all things. If we have not this free unity, ekatvam anupasyatah, we have not the full equality of the spirit. The first business of the Sadhaka is to see whether he has the perfect equality, how far he has gone in this direction or else where is the flaw, and to exercise steadily his will on his nature or invite the will of the Purusha to get rid of the defect and its causes. There are four things that he must have; first equality in the most concrete practical sense of the word, samata, freedom from mental, vital, physical preferences, an even acceptance of all God's workings within and around him; secondly, a firm peace and absence of all disturbance and trouble, santi; thirdly, a positive inner spiritual happiness and spiritual ease of the natural being which nothing can lessen, sukham; fourthly, a clear joy and laughter of the soul embracing life and existence. To be equal is to be infinite and universal, not to limit oneself, not to bind oneself down to this or that form of the mind and life and its partial preferences and desires. But since man in his present normal nature lives by his mental and vital formations, not in the freedom of his spirit, attachment to them and the desires and preferences they involve is also his normal condition. To accept them is at first inevitable, to get beyond them exceedingly difficult and not, perhaps, altogether possible so long as we are compelled to use the mind as the chief instrument of our action. The first necessity therefore is to take at least the sting out of them, to deprive them, even when they persist, of their greater insistence, their present egoism, their more violent claim on our nature.
The test that we have done this is the presence of an undisturbed calm in the mind and spirit. The Sadhaka must be on the watch as the witnessing and willing Purusha behind or, better, as soon as he can manage it, above the mind, and repel even the least indices or incidence of trouble, anxiety, grief, revolt, disturbance ill his mind. If these things come, he must at once detect their source, the defect which they indicate, the fault of egoistic claim, vital desire, emotion or idea from which they start and this he must discourage by his will, his spiritualised intelligence, his soul unity with the Master of his being. On no account must he admit any excuse for them, however natural, righteous in seeming or plausible, or any inner or outer justification. If it is the Prana which is troubled and clamorous, he must separate himself from the troubled Prana, keep seated his higher nature in the Buddhi and by the Buddhi school and reject the claim of the desire-soul in him; and so too if it is the heart of emotion that makes the clamour and the disturbance. If, on the other hand, it is the will and intelligence itself that is at fault, then the trouble is more difficult to command, because then his chief aid and instrument becomes an accomplice of the revolt against the divine Will and the old sins of the lower members take advantage of this sanction to raise their diminished heads. Therefore there must be a constant insistence on one main idea, the self-surrender to the Master of our being, God within us and in the world, the supreme Self, the universal Spirit. The Buddhi dwelling always in this master idea must discourage all its own lesser insistences and preferences and teach the whole being that the ego, whether it puts forth its claim through the reason, the personal will, the heart or the desire-soul in the Prana, has no just claim of any kind and all grief, revolt, impatience, trouble is a violence against the Master of the being.
This complete self-surrender must be the chief mainstay of the Sadhaka because it is the only way, apart from complete quiescence and indifference to all action, --and that has to be avoided, -- by which the absolute calm and peace can come. The persistence of trouble, asanti, the length of time taken for this purification and perfection, itself must not be allowed to become a reason for discouragement and impatience. It comes because there is still something in the nature which responds to it, and the recurrence of trouble serves to bring out the presence of the defect, put the Sadhaka upon his guard and bring about a more enlightened and consistent action of the will to get rid of it. When the trouble is too strong to be kept out, it must be allowed to pass and its return discouraged by a greater vigilance and insistence of the spiritualised Buddhi. Thus persisting, it will be found that these things lose their force more and more, become more and more external and brief in their recurrence, until finally calm becomes the law of the being. This rule persists so long as the mental Buddhi is the chief instrument; but when the supramental light takes possession of mind and heart, then there can be no trouble, grief or disturbance; for that brings with it a spiritual nature of illumined strength in which these things can have no place. There the only vibrations and emotions are those which belong to the anandamaya nature of divine unity.
4.1.4 - Resistances, Sufferings and Falls, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The resistance is not always an intentional one. It is the resistance of the nature, the minds personal ideas and preferences, the vitals desires, attachments, depressions, revolts, egoistic insistences on its own ways and freedom to follow its inclinations and fancies, the physicals tamas, want of faith, inertia. These things are parts of human nature. The Force comes to change them, but if the sadhak accepts these things, justifies them, or simply allows them to hold his consciousness without reacting, then their resistance which is always there can last a long time.
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4.25 - Towards the supramental Time Vision, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The mental constructions that interfere are mainly of two kinds, and the first and most powerfully distorting are those which proceed from the stresses of the will claiming to see and determine, interfering with knowledge and not allowing the intuition to be passive to the truth light and its impartial and pure channel. The personal will, whether taking the shape of the emotions and the heart's wishes or of vital desires or of strong dynamic volitions or the wilful preferences of the intelligence, is an evident source of distortion when these try, as they usually do try with success, to impose themselves on the knowledge and make us take what we desire or will for the thing that was, is or must be. For either they prevent the true knowledge from acting or if it at all presents itself, they seize upon it, twist it out of shape and make the resultant deformation a justifying basis for a mass of will-created falsehood. The personal will must either be put aside or else its suggestions must be kept in their place until a supreme reference has been made to the higher impersonal light and then must be sanctioned or rejected according to the truth that comes from deeper within than the mind or from higher above. But even if the personal will is held in abeyance and the mind passive for reception, it may be assailed and imposed on by suggestions from all sorts of forces and possibilities that strive in the world for realisation and come representing the things cast up by them on the stream of their will-to-be as the truth of past, present or future. And if the mind lends itself to these impostor suggestions, accepts their self-valuations, does not either put them aside or refer them to the truth light, the same result of prevention or distortion of the truth is inevitable. There is a possibility of the will element being entirely excluded and the mind being made a silent and passive register of a higher luminous knowledge, and in that case a much more accurate reception of time intuitions becomes possible. The integrality of the being demands, however, a will action and not only an inactive knowing, and therefore the larger and more perfect remedy is to replace progressively the personal by a universalised will which insists on nothing that is not securely felt by it to be an intuition, inspiration or revelation of what must be from that higher light in which will is one with knowledge.
The second kind of mental construction belongs to the very nature of our mind and intelligence and its dealing with things in time. All is seen here by mind as a sum of realised actualities with their antecedents and natural consequences, an indeterminate of possibilities and, conceivably, although of this it is not certain, a determining something behind, a will, fate or Power, which rejects some and sanctions or compels others out of many possibles. Its constructions therefore are made partly of inferences from the actual, both past and present, partly of a volitional or an imaginative and conjectural selection and combining of possibilities and partly of a decisive reasoning or preferential judgment or insistent creative will-intelligence that tries to fix among the mass of actuals and possibles the definitive truth it is labouring to discover or determine. All this which is indispensable to our thought and action in mind, has to be excluded or transformed before the intuitive knowledge can have a chance of organising itself on a sound basis. A transformation is possible because the intuitive mind has to do the same work and cover the same field, but with a different handling of the materials and another light upon their significance. An exclusion is possible because all is really contained in the truth consciousness above and a silencing of the mind of ignorance and a pregnant receptivity is not beyond our compass in which the intuitions descending from the truth-consciousness can be received with a subtle or strong exactitude and all the materials of the knowledge seen in their right place and true proportion. As a matter of practice it will be found that both methods are used alternatively or together to effect the transition from the one kind of mentality to the other.
4.3.2 - Attacks by the Hostile Forces, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Krishnaprems letter is admirable from start to finish and every sentence hits the truth with great point and force. He has evidently an accurate knowledge both of the psychological and the occult forces that act in Yoga; all he says is in agreement with my own experience and I concur. His account of the rationale of your present difficulties is quite correct and no other explanation is neededexcept what I was writing in my unfinished letter about the descent of the sadhana into the plane of the physical consciousness and that does not disaccord with but only completes what he says. He is quite right in saying that the heaviness of these attacks was due to the fact that you had taken up the sadhana in earnest and were approaching, as one might say, the gates of the Kingdom of Light. That always makes these forces rage and they strain every nerve and use or create every opportunity to turn the sadhak back or, if possible, drive him out of the path altogether by their suggestions, their violent influences and their exploitation of all kinds of incidents that always crop up more and more when these conditions prevail, so that he may not reach the gates. I have written to you more than once alluding to these forces, but I did not press the point because I saw that like most people whose minds have been rationalised by a modern European education you were not inclined to believe in or at least to attach any importance to this knowledge. People nowadays seek the explanation for everything in their ignorant reason, their surface experience and in outside happenings. They do not see the hidden forces and inner causes which were well-known and visualised in the traditional Indian and Yogic knowledge. Of course, these forces find their point dappui in the sadhak himself, in the ignorant parts of his consciousness and its assent to their suggestions and influences; otherwise they could not act or at least could not act with any success. In your case the chief points dappui have been the extreme sensitiveness of the lower vital ego and now also the physical consciousness with all its fixed or standing opinions, prejudices, prejudgments, habitual reactions, personal preferences, clinging to old ideas and associations, its obstinate doubts and its maintaining these things as a wall of obstruction and opposition to the larger light. This activity of the physical mind is what people call intellect and reason, although it is only the turning of a machine in a circle of mental habits and is very different from the true and free reason, the higher Buddhi which is capable of enlightenment and still more from the higher spiritual light or that insight and tact of the psychic consciousness which sees at once what is true and right and distinguishes it from what is wrong and false. This insight you had very constantly whenever you were in a good condition and especially whenever Bhakti became strong in you. When the sadhak comes down into the physical consciousness, leaving the mental and higher vital ranges on which he had first turned towards the Divine, these opposite things become very strong and sticky and, as ones more helpful states and experiences draw back behind the veil and one can hardly realise that one ever had them, it becomes difficult to get out of this condition. The only thing then, as Krishnaprem has told you and I also have insisted, is to stick it out. If once one can get and keep the resolution to refuse to accept the suggestions of these forces, however plausible they may seem, then either quickly or gradually this condition can diminish and will be overpassed and cease. To give up Yoga is no solution; you could not successfully do it as both Krishnaprem and I have told you and as your own mind tells you when it is clear. A temporary absence from the Asram for relief from the struggle is a different matter. I do not think, however, that residence in the Ramana Asram would be eventually helpful except for bringing back some peace of mind; Ramana Maharshi is a great Yogi and his realisation very high on its own line; but it does not seem to me that it is a line which you could successfully follow as you certainly can follow the path of Bhakti if you stick to it, and there might then be the danger of your falling between two stools, losing your own path and not being able to follow the path of another nature.
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7.02 - The Mind, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
May this new year bring you the liberation and enlightenment of an ignorant and arrogant mind which thinks it can judge everything without even having the elements of the problems that it judges according to its own preferences and attachments.
The whole world may perish provided my whims are gratified!
7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
dislikes, prejudices and preferences disappear. You are
in a condition when you begin to learn from everything
Big Mind (non-dual), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
I have no preference for or against having preferences.
The self is what we refer to as ordinary mind, or conventional mind. The no-self can also be called the Way. As the Unique Self, I include ordinary mind and the Way, and that is what we call "ordinary mind is the Way." When Zen people talk about ordinary mind is the Way, this is what they mean: it includes and yet transcends ordinary mind and the Way.
Blazing P1 - Preconventional consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
reciprocity (tit-for-tat)); Enduring dispositions (Needs, preferences, self concept)
Object: Perceptions; Social perceptions; Impulses
Blazing P2 - Map the Stages of Conventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Object: Concrete; Point of view; Enduring dispositions, needs, preferences
Underlying Structure: Cross-categorical, trans-categorical
LUX.04 - LIBERATION, #Liber Null, #Peter J Carroll, #Occultism
Sidestepping conventionally still leaves you with a mass of prejudices, idiosyncrasies, identifications, and preferences which give comfort and definition to the personality or ego. An idea cannot be said to be completely understood till you understand the conditions under which it is not true. Similarly you cannot be said to possess a personality until you are able to manipulate or discard it at will.
Anathemism is a technique practiced directly upon yourself. Eat all loathsome things till they no longer revolt. Seek union with all that you normally reject. Scheme against your most sacred principles in thought, word and deed. You will eventually have to witness the loss or putrefaction of every loved thing. Therefore, reflect upon the transitory and contingent nature of all things. Examine everything you believe, every preference, and every opinion, and cut it down.
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
goes on repeating its own habits and preferences against the Purusha's con386
sent till the power of the Purusha so increases that it can assert itself over the
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
the experience, depending on personal preferences. Visual imagery,
derived from the most important sense organ, carries a special emotive
--
Sensory preferences the dismrnmation between sensory stimula-
tions which 'agree', and those which 'disagree* with our innate or
--
may even affect his biological drives his taste and smell preferences,
his sexual inclinations. A hundred years ago, when oysters were the
--
To p. 537. There exist of course both innate and acquired preferences for
choosing one system of 'coloured filters* rather than another as a criterion of
--
tive preferences would change getting mellower perhaps, like an
old Stradivarius, or croaking, like an un-tuned piano. The effort to
The Logomachy of Zos, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
He has marked preferences for his suppositions; he fears or resents
everything that makes him feel inferior and therefore grasps everything
--- Overview of noun preference
The noun preference has 4 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (2) preference, penchant, predilection, taste ::: (a strong liking; "my own preference is for good literature"; "the Irish have a penchant for blarney")
2. (2) predilection, preference, orientation ::: (a predisposition in favor of something; "a predilection for expensive cars"; "his sexual preferences"; "showed a Marxist orientation")
3. preference, druthers ::: (the right or chance to choose; "given my druthers, I'd eat cake")
4. preference ::: (grant of favor or advantage to one over another (especially to a country or countries in matters of international trade, such as levying duties))
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun preference
4 senses of preference
Sense 1
preference, penchant, predilection, taste
=> liking
=> feeling
=> state
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
predilection, preference, orientation
=> predisposition
=> inclination, disposition, tendency
=> attitude, mental attitude
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
preference, druthers
=> option, alternative, choice
=> decision making, deciding
=> higher cognitive process
=> process, cognitive process, mental process, operation, cognitive operation
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
preference
=> advantage, vantage
=> asset, plus
=> quality
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun preference
2 of 4 senses of preference
Sense 1
preference, penchant, predilection, taste
=> acquired taste
=> weakness
Sense 3
preference, druthers
=> wish
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun preference
4 senses of preference
Sense 1
preference, penchant, predilection, taste
=> liking
Sense 2
predilection, preference, orientation
=> predisposition
Sense 3
preference, druthers
=> option, alternative, choice
Sense 4
preference
=> advantage, vantage
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun preference
4 senses of preference
Sense 1
preference, penchant, predilection, taste
-> liking
=> fondness, fancy, partiality
=> captivation, enchantment, enthrallment, fascination
=> preference, penchant, predilection, taste
=> mysophilia
=> inclination
=> friendliness
=> approval
=> admiration, esteem
Sense 2
predilection, preference, orientation
-> predisposition
=> predilection, preference, orientation
Sense 3
preference, druthers
-> option, alternative, choice
=> obverse
=> preference, druthers
=> default option, default
=> possibility, possible action, opening
=> impossibility, impossible action
=> Hobson's choice
=> soft option
Sense 4
preference
-> advantage, vantage
=> favor, favour
=> leverage
=> handicap
=> homecourt advantage
=> lead
=> pull, clout
=> start, head start
=> profit, gain
=> preference
=> privilege
=> expedience, expediency
=> superiority, favorable position, favourable position
=> good
=> favorableness, favourableness, advantageousness, positivity, positiveness, profitableness
=> tax advantage
--- Grep of noun preference
preference
preference shares
Wikipedia - Allocative efficiency -- State of the economy in which production represents consumer preferences
Wikipedia - Color preferences
Wikipedia - Community preference -- Principle of European Union governance
Wikipedia - Edwards Personal Preference Schedule
Wikipedia - Ephebophilia -- Sexual preference for adolescents aged 15-19
Wikipedia - Evolutionary aesthetics -- Evolutionary psychology theories in which the basic aesthetic preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success
Wikipedia - Footedness -- Natural preference of one's left or right foot for various purposes
Wikipedia - Handedness -- Better performance or individual preference for use of a hand
Wikipedia - Hebephilia -- Sexual preference for pubescent children aged 11-14
Wikipedia - Help:Preferences -- Wikipedia help page
Wikipedia - Inequity aversion -- Preference for fairness and resistance to incidental inequalities
Wikipedia - Laterality -- Preference most humans show for one side of their body over the other
Wikipedia - Mating preferences
Wikipedia - Monotone preferences -- Economics term
Wikipedia - Personality and Preference Inventory
Wikipedia - Personal preference kit -- Container for astronauts' personal items
Wikipedia - Post-racial America -- Theoretical environment in which the United States is free from racial preference, discrimination, and prejudice
Wikipedia - Preference-based planning -- Form of automated planning and scheduling
Wikipedia - Preference (economics)
Wikipedia - Preference falsification
Wikipedia - Preference Pane
Wikipedia - Preference utilitarianism
Wikipedia - Preference
Wikipedia - Psychology of music preference
Wikipedia - Racial sexual preference
Wikipedia - Radical right (United States) -- Political preference that leans towards extreme conservatism and anti-socialism
Wikipedia - Recommender system -- Information filtering system to predict users' preferences
Wikipedia - Revealed preferences
Wikipedia - Revealed preference
Wikipedia - Sexual Preference (book) -- 1981 book by Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith
Wikipedia - Sexual preference
Wikipedia - Social preferences
Wikipedia - System Preferences
Wikipedia - Time preference
Wikipedia - Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem -- Any individual whose preferences satisfy four axioms has a utility function
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences -- Statistics on the user preferences of a wiki
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:Twinkle/Preferences -- The panel to customize Twinkle.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10720126-neuroscience-of-preference-and-choice
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22899761-preference-belief-and-similarity
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/753752.Preference_Belief_and_Similarity
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/857191.La_Preference_Nationale
https://domain-migration.wikia.org/wiki/Special:ResetTrackingPreferences
https://familypedia.wikia.org/wiki/Help:Preferences
https://familypedia.wikia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences
selforum - our values and preference schedules
Psychology Wiki - MBTI#The_preferences
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - preferences
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:GlobalPreferences
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:Preferences
Undressed (1999 - 2002) - MTV show chronicling the diverse (sexual) relationships between college students, including differences in race, sexual preference, and fetishes.
Body Double(1984) - A cuckolded actor named Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) is invited to do some house-watching for a friend of his. Scully's peeping tom preference sends him into the middle of a murder mystery where his only ally is a foul-mouthed porn star named Holly Body (Melani
Personal Taste ::: Gae-in-eui chwi-hyang (original title) 1h | Comedy, Drama, Romance | TV Series (2010) The surprise hit of 2010, Personal Taste (aka Personal Preference) garnered high ratings and a huge fanbase in a comedy that proves true love is found in the most unlikely places. Quirky ... S Stars: Son Ye-Jin, Lee Min-Ho, Ji-seok Kim
https://avpm.fandom.com/wiki/The_Scarf_of_Sexual_Preference
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/A_Potter's_Preference
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Preference
https://github.com/Wikia/unified-platform/tree/master/extensions/fandom/UserPreferencesV2
https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/System_Preferences_(Mac)
https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Preferences
https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Preferences-v2-fancysig
https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Preferences-v2-fancysig-help-page-name
https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Preferences-v2-redirect-explanation
High School DxD Specials -- -- TNK -- 6 eps -- Light novel -- Ecchi Comedy Harem Romance Demons School -- High School DxD Specials High School DxD Specials -- A series of 3-5 minute specials that were bundled with the HighSchool DxD DVD and Blu-rays. They are a stand alone set of episodes that are not a part of any story line in particular. -- -- Special 1: Going Sunbathing! - The Occult Research Club goes on a beach outing. -- -- Special 2: Issei's Private Training! - Issei is being given lessons in magic by Akeno. -- -- Special 3: A Little Bold, Koneko-Chan... Nyan! - Koneko accidentally has her personality reversed magically, making her incredibly sexually active and reversing her sexual preference. -- -- Special 4: The Untold Story of The Dress Break's Birth! - A few flashbacks of how Issei first found out and eventually perfected his special move, Dress Break. -- -- Special 5: Making Udon! - As part of a penalty for losing a bet, Sona and Tsubaki make udon for the Occult Research Club but the udon comes to life in a peculiar way... -- -- Special 6: Asia Transforms! - Asia wants to prove she is just as bad as any demon by using ideas found in Issei's magazines, going as far as dressing up like a harlot and seducing him. -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- Special - Mar 21, 2012 -- 164,172 7.26
K-On!!: Keikaku! -- -- Kyoto Animation -- 1 ep -- Original -- Comedy Music School Slice of Life -- K-On!!: Keikaku! K-On!!: Keikaku! -- The summer holidays are coming to an end, but the girls from Houkago Tea Time want to take one more trip before their next semester starts. With countless travel destinations to choose from and as many preferences as there are club members, coming to an agreement seems far-flung. -- -- Unable to reach a decision, they remember that they must first apply for new passports. As simple as it may sound, the routine visit to a government office and filing a form soon turns into an all-day adventure for Yui Hirasawa and the rest of the band. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- Special - Mar 16, 2011 -- 98,742 7.84
K-On!!: Keikaku! -- -- Kyoto Animation -- 1 ep -- Original -- Comedy Music School Slice of Life -- K-On!!: Keikaku! K-On!!: Keikaku! -- The summer holidays are coming to an end, but the girls from Houkago Tea Time want to take one more trip before their next semester starts. With countless travel destinations to choose from and as many preferences as there are club members, coming to an agreement seems far-flung. -- -- Unable to reach a decision, they remember that they must first apply for new passports. As simple as it may sound, the routine visit to a government office and filing a form soon turns into an all-day adventure for Yui Hirasawa and the rest of the band. -- -- Special - Mar 16, 2011 -- 98,742 7.84
Ore ga Ojousama Gakkou ni "Shomin Sample" Toshite Gets♥Sareta Ken -- -- SILVER LINK. -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Comedy Ecchi Harem Romance School -- Ore ga Ojousama Gakkou ni "Shomin Sample" Toshite Gets♥Sareta Ken Ore ga Ojousama Gakkou ni "Shomin Sample" Toshite Gets♥Sareta Ken -- Kimito Kagurazaka is a commoner with a fetish for men's muscles—or at least that's the lie he must keep telling if he wants to keep himself out of trouble at the elite all-girls school, Seikain Academy. Kidnapped by the school under the assumption that he prefers men, Kimito is made to be their "commoner sample," exposing the girls to both commoner and man so that the transition to the world after school is not jarring. Threatened with castration should his sexual preferences not match the school's assumptions, Kimito keeps up the facade to protect his manhood. -- -- But there are eccentric individuals around every corner who begin to make Kimito's life even more difficult. Among them are Aika Tenkuubashi, a social outcast who blurts out whatever comes to mind; Hakua Shiodome, a young genius; Karen Jinryou, the daughter of samurai who is obsessed with defeating Kimito; and Reiko Arisugawa, the perfect student who has delusions of marrying Kimito. Along with the commoner himself, these four girls make up the Commoner Club, which attempts to teach the girls more about life outside the school, while Kimito gradually learns about the odd girls surrounding him. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 210,993 6.79
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/File:Tango-preferences-desktop-locale.png
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Special:Preferences
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GlobalPreferences
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-input-wpshowhiddencats
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering
Alcohol preferences in Europe
Brand preference
Cargo Preference Act
Color preferences
Common preference
Community preference
Composite Capability/Preference Profiles
Conditioned place preference
Convex preferences
EpsteinZin preferences
First-preference votes
Food Quality and Preference
Gender preference
Generalized System of Preferences
Government Telephone Preference Scheme
Grazing preference
GreenwoodHercowitzHuffman preferences
Help:Preferences
Homothetic preferences
Imperial Preference
JaimovichRebelo preferences
KingPlosserRebelo preferences
Legacy preferences
Liquidation preference
Liquidity preference
Monotone preferences
Parents' Preference Test
Patient Preference and Adherence
Personal preference kit
Preference
Preference (disambiguation)
Preference (economics)
Preference Pane
Preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation
Preference regression
Preference test
Preference theory
Preference utilitarianism
Psychology of music preference
Racial sexual preference
Revealed preference
Risk neutral preferences
Sexual Preference (book)
Single peaked preferences
Social preferences
Sokanu Interests, Personality, and Preferences Inventory
Special:Preferences
System Preferences
Telephone Preference Service
Time preference
Trade preference
Unfair preference
Veterans' Preference Act of 1944
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