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


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

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Blazing_the_Trail_from_Infancy_to_Enlightenment
Enchiridion_text
Letters_On_Yoga
Letters_On_Yoga_IV
Liber_157_-_The_Tao_Teh_King
Modern_Man_in_Search_of_a_Soul
Process_and_Reality
Questions_And_Answers_1929-1931
Savitri
The_Epic_of_Gilgamesh
The_Perennial_Philosophy
The_Republic
The_Synthesis_Of_Yoga
The_Use_and_Abuse_of_History
The_Wit_and_Wisdom_of_Alfred_North_Whitehead
Thought_Power

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
1.27_-_CONTEMPLATION,_ACTION_AND_SOCIAL_UTILITY
1929-05-26_-_Individual,_illusion_of_separateness_-_Hostile_forces_and_the_mental_plane_-_Psychic_world,_psychic_being_-_Spiritual_and_psychic_-_Words,_understanding_speech_and_reading_-_Hostile_forces,_their_utility_-_Illusion_of_action,_true_action
1.jt_-_Oh,_the_futility_of_seeking_to_convey_(from_Self-Annihilation_and_Charity_Lead_the_Soul...)

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
00.01_-_The_Approach_to_Mysticism
0.00_-_The_Wellspring_of_Reality
0.01_-_I_-_Sri_Aurobindos_personality,_his_outer_retirement_-_outside_contacts_after_1910_-_spiritual_personalities-_Vibhutis_and_Avatars_-__transformtion_of_human_personality
0.01_-_Life_and_Yoga
0.02_-_The_Three_Steps_of_Nature
0.03_-_The_Threefold_Life
0.05_-_The_Synthesis_of_the_Systems
0.06_-_INTRODUCTION
01.03_-_Rationalism
01.04_-_The_Secret_Knowledge
01.08_-_Walter_Hilton:_The_Scale_of_Perfection
01.11_-_Aldous_Huxley:_The_Perennial_Philosophy
01.11_-_The_Basis_of_Unity
0_1956-03-21
0_1958-11-15
0_1960-11-05
0_1960-11-08
0_1960-11-15
0_1961-02-25
0_1961-03-07
0_1961-12-23
0_1962-06-12
0_1962-10-30
0_1964-11-12
0_1965-05-19
0_1965-09-25
0_1966-04-27
0_1972-01-12
02.01_-_Metaphysical_Thought_and_the_Supreme_Truth
02.01_-_The_World_War
02.07_-_The_Descent_into_Night
02.08_-_The_World_of_Falsehood,_the_Mother_of_Evil_and_the_Sons_of_Darkness
02.10_-_The_Kingdoms_and_Godheads_of_the_Little_Mind
02.11_-_New_World-Conditions
02.14_-_Panacea_of_Isms
03.05_-_Some_Conceptions_and_Misconceptions
03.10_-_The_Mission_of_Buddhism
03.11_-_True_Humility
03.14_-_Mater_Dolorosa
04.02_-_Human_Progress
05.17_-_Evolution_or_Special_Creation
05.20_-_The_Urge_for_Progression
07.15_-_Divine_Disgust
07.42_-_The_Nature_and_Destiny_of_Art
08.02_-_Order_and_Discipline
10.03_-_The_Debate_of_Love_and_Death
1.00c_-_DIVISION_C_-_THE_ETHERIC_BODY_AND_PRANA
1.01_-_Economy
1.01_-_MAPS_OF_EXPERIENCE_-_OBJECT_AND_MEANING
1.01_-_On_knowledge_of_the_soul,_and_how_knowledge_of_the_soul_is_the_key_to_the_knowledge_of_God.
1.01_-_The_Cycle_of_Society
1.01_-_The_Four_Aids
10.21_-_Short_Notes_-_4-_Ego
1.02.3.2_-_Knowledge_and_Ignorance
1.02.4.1_-_The_Worlds_-_Surya
1.02_-_Isha_Analysis
1.02_-_MAPS_OF_MEANING_-_THREE_LEVELS_OF_ANALYSIS
1.02_-_Self-Consecration
1.02_-_The_Age_of_Individualism_and_Reason
1.02_-_The_Two_Negations_1_-_The_Materialist_Denial
10.34_-_Effort_and_Grace
10.35_-_The_Moral_and_the_Spiritual
1.03_-_APPRENTICESHIP_AND_ENCULTURATION_-_ADOPTION_OF_A_SHARED_MAP
1.03_-_Concerning_the_Archetypes,_with_Special_Reference_to_the_Anima_Concept
1.03_-_Spiritual_Realisation,_The_aim_of_Bhakti-Yoga
1.03_-_The_Gods,_Superior_Beings_and_Adverse_Forces
1.04_-_ADVICE_TO_HOUSEHOLDERS
1.04_-_Body,_Soul_and_Spirit
1.04_-_The_Aims_of_Psycho_therapy
1.04_-_THE_APPEARANCE_OF_ANOMALY_-_CHALLENGE_TO_THE_SHARED_MAP
1.04_-_The_Gods_of_the_Veda
1.04_-_The_Self
1.05_-_Christ,_A_Symbol_of_the_Self
1.05_-_MORALITY_AS_THE_ENEMY_OF_NATURE
1.05_-_The_Ascent_of_the_Sacrifice_-_The_Psychic_Being
1.05_-_THE_HOSTILE_BROTHERS_-_ARCHETYPES_OF_RESPONSE_TO_THE_UNKNOWN
1.05_-_The_Magical_Control_of_the_Weather
1.06_-_Being_Human_and_the_Copernican_Principle
1.06_-_Dhyana_and_Samadhi
1.06_-_Man_in_the_Universe
1.06_-_Psycho_therapy_and_a_Philosophy_of_Life
1.06_-_The_Ascent_of_the_Sacrifice_2_The_Works_of_Love_-_The_Works_of_Life
1.06_-_THE_MASTER_WITH_THE_BRAHMO_DEVOTEES
1.07_-_On_Our_Knowledge_of_General_Principles
1.07_-_Standards_of_Conduct_and_Spiritual_Freedom
1.07_-_The_Three_Schools_of_Magick_2
1.08_-_Civilisation_and_Barbarism
1.08_-_Psycho_therapy_Today
1.08_-_The_Three_Schools_of_Magick_3
1.09_-_SKIRMISHES_IN_A_WAY_WITH_THE_AGE
1.09_-_The_Greater_Self
1.1.01_-_Certitudes
1.1.05_-_The_Siddhis
1.10_-_The_Absolute_of_the_Being
1.10_-_The_Secret_of_the_Veda
1.10_-_The_Yoga_of_the_Intelligent_Will
1.11_-_Delight_of_Existence_-_The_Problem
1.11_-_GOOD_AND_EVIL
1.11_-_The_Change_of_Power
1.11_-_The_Influence_of_the_Sexes_on_Vegetation
1.11_-_The_Kalki_Avatar
1.11_-_The_Reason_as_Governor_of_Life
1.1.2_-_Commentary
1.12_-_The_Divine_Work
1.12_-_The_Office_and_Limitations_of_the_Reason
1.12_-_The_Significance_of_Sacrifice
1.12_-_The_Sociology_of_Superman
1.12_-_The_Superconscient
1.13_-_Reason_and_Religion
1.14_-_INSTRUCTION_TO_VAISHNAVS_AND_BRHMOS
1.1.4_-_The_Physical_Mind_and_Sadhana
1.15_-_Conclusion
1.15_-_The_Possibility_and_Purpose_of_Avatarhood
1.15_-_The_Suprarational_Good
1.15_-_The_Value_of_Philosophy
1.16_-_The_Suprarational_Ultimate_of_Life
1.17_-_The_Divine_Birth_and_Divine_Works
1.18_-_M._AT_DAKSHINESWAR
1.20_-_Death,_Desire_and_Incapacity
1.2.1_-_Mental_Development_and_Sadhana
1.21_-_The_Spiritual_Aim_and_Life
1.22_-_The_Necessity_of_the_Spiritual_Transformation
1.240_-_1.300_Talks
1.240_-_Talks_2
1.24_-_Necromancy_and_Spiritism
1.24_-_PUNDIT_SHASHADHAR
1.2.4_-_Speech_and_Yoga
1.25_-_The_Knot_of_Matter
1.26_-_PERSEVERANCE_AND_REGULARITY
1.27_-_AT_DAKSHINESWAR
1.27_-_CONTEMPLATION,_ACTION_AND_SOCIAL_UTILITY
1.28_-_Supermind,_Mind_and_the_Overmind_Maya
1.28_-_The_Killing_of_the_Tree-Spirit
1.29_-_Continues_to_describe_methods_for_achieving_this_Prayer_of_Recollection._Says_what_little_account_we_should_make_of_being_favoured_by_our_superiors.
1.37_-_Death_-_Fear_-_Magical_Memory
1.49_-_Ancient_Deities_of_Vegetation_as_Animals
1.73_-_Monsters,_Niggers,_Jews,_etc.
1917_01_05p
1929-04-28_-_Offering,_general_and_detailed_-_Integral_Yoga_-_Remembrance_of_the_Divine_-_Reading_and_Yoga_-_Necessity,_predetermination_-_Freedom_-_Miracles_-_Aim_of_creation
1929-05-26_-_Individual,_illusion_of_separateness_-_Hostile_forces_and_the_mental_plane_-_Psychic_world,_psychic_being_-_Spiritual_and_psychic_-_Words,_understanding_speech_and_reading_-_Hostile_forces,_their_utility_-_Illusion_of_action,_true_action
1951-02-26_-_On_reading_books_-_gossip_-_Discipline_and_realisation_-_Imaginary_stories-_value_of_-_Private_lives_of_big_men_-_relaxation_-_Understanding_others_-_gnostic_consciousness
1951-03-01_-_Universe_and_the_Divine_-_Freedom_and_determinism_-_Grace_-_Time_and_Creation-_in_the_Supermind_-_Work_and_its_results_-_The_psychic_being_-_beauty_and_love_-_Flowers-_beauty_and_significance_-_Choice_of_reincarnating_psychic_being
1951-03-03_-_Hostile_forces_-_difficulties_-_Individuality_and_form_-_creation
1951-03-08_-_Silencing_the_mind_-_changing_the_nature_-_Reincarnation-_choice_-_Psychic,_higher_beings_gods_incarnating_-_Incarnation_of_vital_beings_-_the_Lord_of_Falsehood_-_Hitler_-_Possession_and_madness
1951-03-12_-_Mental_forms_-_learning_difficult_subjects_-_Mental_fortress_-_thought_-_Training_the_mind_-_Helping_the_vital_being_after_death_-_ceremonies_-_Human_stupidities
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
1953-05-27
1953-06-24
1953-10-28
1955-02-16_-_Losing_something_given_by_Mother_-_Using_things_well_-_Sadhak_collecting_soap-pieces_-_What_things_are_truly_indispensable_-_Natures_harmonious_arrangement_-_Riches_a_curse,_philanthropy_-_Misuse_of_things_creates_misery
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
1956-09-26_-_Soul_of_desire_-_Openness,_harmony_with_Nature_-_Communion_with_divine_Presence_-_Individuality,_difficulties,_soul_of_desire_-_personal_contact_with_the_Mother_-_Inner_receptivity_-_Bad_thoughts_before_the_Mother
1956-11-14_-_Conquering_the_desire_to_appear_good_-_Self-control_and_control_of_the_life_around_-_Power_of_mastery_-_Be_a_great_yogi_to_be_a_good_teacher_-_Organisation_of_the_Ashram_school_-_Elementary_discipline_of_regularity
1957-01-09_-_God_is_essentially_Delight_-_God_and_Nature_play_at_hide-and-seek_-__Why,_and_when,_are_you_grave?
1957-09-11_-_Vital_chemistry,_attraction_and_repulsion
1957-10-02_-_The_Mind_of_Light_-_Statues_of_the_Buddha_-_Burden_of_the_past
1958-02-19_-_Experience_of_the_supramental_boat_-_The_Censors_-_Absurdity_of_artificial_means
1958-07-16_-_Is_religion_a_necessity?
1962_01_12
1.anon_-_Less_profitable
1f.lovecraft_-_At_the_Mountains_of_Madness
1f.lovecraft_-_Deaf,_Dumb,_and_Blind
1f.lovecraft_-_Facts_concerning_the_Late
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Hoard_of_the_Wizard-Beast
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Lurking_Fear
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Night_Ocean
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Silver_Key
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Unnamable
1.jt_-_Oh,_the_futility_of_seeking_to_convey_(from_Self-Annihilation_and_Charity_Lead_the_Soul...)
1.lovecraft_-_The_Cats
1.poe_-_Eureka_-_A_Prose_Poem
1.rt_-_The_Homecoming
2.02_-_Habit_2__Begin_with_the_End_in_Mind
2.02_-_The_Ishavasyopanishad_with_a_commentary_in_English
2.02_-_The_Synthesis_of_Devotion_and_Knowledge
2.03_-_Karmayogin__A_Commentary_on_the_Isha_Upanishad
2.03_-_On_Medicine
2.03_-_The_Eternal_and_the_Individual
2.04_-_The_Divine_and_the_Undivine
2.05_-_VISIT_TO_THE_SINTHI_BRAMO_SAMAJ
2.06_-_On_Beauty
2.06_-_WITH_VARIOUS_DEVOTEES
2.08_-_Memory,_Self-Consciousness_and_the_Ignorance
2.09_-_On_Sadhana
2.0_-_THE_ANTICHRIST
2.1.03_-_Man_and_Superman
2.11_-_The_Boundaries_of_the_Ignorance
2.11_-_WITH_THE_DEVOTEES_IN_CALCUTTA
2.1.3.2_-_Study
2.14_-_AT_RAMS_HOUSE
2.14_-_The_Origin_and_Remedy_of_Falsehood,_Error,_Wrong_and_Evil
2.1.5.2_-_Languages
2.15_-_On_the_Gods_and_Asuras
2.15_-_Reality_and_the_Integral_Knowledge
2.16_-_The_15th_of_August
2.16_-_The_Integral_Knowledge_and_the_Aim_of_Life;_Four_Theories_of_Existence
2.17_-_THE_MASTER_ON_HIMSELF_AND_HIS_EXPERIENCES
2.18_-_January_1939
2.18_-_SRI_RAMAKRISHNA_AT_SYAMPUKUR
2.18_-_The_Evolutionary_Process_-_Ascent_and_Integration
2.18_-_The_Soul_and_Its_Liberation
2.19_-_Out_of_the_Sevenfold_Ignorance_towards_the_Sevenfold_Knowledge
2.19_-_The_Planes_of_Our_Existence
2.2.01_-_Work_and_Yoga
2.2.02_-_The_True_Being_and_the_True_Consciousness
2.2.03_-_The_Science_of_Consciousness
2.20_-_Nov-Dec_1939
2.20_-_THE_MASTERS_TRAINING_OF_HIS_DISCIPLES
2.21_-_1940
2.21_-_Towards_the_Supreme_Secret
2.22_-_Rebirth_and_Other_Worlds;_Karma,_the_Soul_and_Immortality
2.22_-_The_Supreme_Secret
2.22_-_Vijnana_or_Gnosis
2.23_-_The_Core_of_the_Gita.s_Meaning
2.24_-_The_Evolution_of_the_Spiritual_Man
2.26_-_Samadhi
2.26_-_The_Ascent_towards_Supermind
2.27_-_The_Gnostic_Being
2.28_-_The_Divine_Life
2.3.01_-_The_Planes_or_Worlds_of_Consciousness
2.3.07_-_The_Vital_Being_and_Vital_Consciousness
2.3.08_-_The_Mother's_Help_in_Difficulties
2.4.2_-_Interactions_with_Others_and_the_Practice_of_Yoga
30.09_-_Lines_of_Tantra_(Charyapada)
30.13_-_Rabindranath_the_Artist
30.18_-_Boris_Pasternak
3.02_-_The_Motives_of_Devotion
3.03_-_The_Godward_Emotions
3.03_-_THE_MODERN_EARTH
3.1.01_-_The_Problem_of_Suffering_and_Evil
3.1.02_-_Asceticism_and_the_Integral_Yoga
3.1.04_-_Transformation_in_the_Integral_Yoga
3.2.02_-_Yoga_and_Skill_in_Works
3.2.03_-_Jainism_and_Buddhism
32.05_-_The_Culture_of_the_Body
32.06_-_The_Novel_Alchemy
3.2.1_-_Food
3.2.3_-_Dreams
3.3.03_-_The_Delight_of_Works
33.09_-_Shyampukur
33.17_-_Two_Great_Wars
3.3.2_-_Doctors_and_Medicines
3.4.03_-_Materialism
3.4.1.06_-_Reading_and_Sadhana
3.4.1.11_-_Language-Study_and_Yoga
3-5_Full_Circle
37.06_-_Indra_-_Virochana_and_Prajapati
3.7.1.02_-_The_Reincarnating_Soul
3.7.1.04_-_Rebirth_and_Soul_Evolution
3.7.1.05_-_The_Significance_of_Rebirth
3.7.1.11_-_Rebirth_and_Karma
3.7.2.02_-_The_Terrestial_Law
3.7.2.03_-_Mind_Nature_and_Law_of_Karma
3.7.2.04_-_The_Higher_Lines_of_Karma
3.8.1.03_-_Meditation
3.8.1.06_-_The_Universal_Consciousness
3_-_Commentaries_and_Annotated_Translations
4.01_-_Proem
4.01_-_The_Presence_of_God_in_the_World
4.01_-_The_Principle_of_the_Integral_Yoga
4.02_-_Difficulties
4.04_-_Conclusion
4.04_-_Some_Vital_Functions
4.04_-_The_Perfection_of_the_Mental_Being
4.04_-_THE_REGENERATION_OF_THE_KING
4.11_-_The_Perfection_of_Equality
4.15_-_Soul-Force_and_the_Fourfold_Personality
4.18_-_Faith_and_shakti
4.24_-_The_supramental_Sense
4.3.3_-_Dealing_with_Hostile_Attacks
5.01_-_Message
5.02_-_Perfection_of_the_Body
5.4.01_-_Occult_Knowledge
7.02_-_The_Mind
7_-_Yoga_of_Sri_Aurobindo
Blazing_P2_-_Map_the_Stages_of_Conventional_Consciousness
Blazing_P3_-_Explore_the_Stages_of_Postconventional_Consciousness
BOOK_VI._-_Of_Varros_threefold_division_of_theology,_and_of_the_inability_of_the_gods_to_contri_bute_anything_to_the_happiness_of_the_future_life
BOOK_XI._-_Augustine_passes_to_the_second_part_of_the_work,_in_which_the_origin,_progress,_and_destinies_of_the_earthly_and_heavenly_cities_are_discussed.Speculations_regarding_the_creation_of_the_world
BOOK_XII._-_Of_the_creation_of_angels_and_men,_and_of_the_origin_of_evil
BOOK_XXII._-_Of_the_eternal_happiness_of_the_saints,_the_resurrection_of_the_body,_and_the_miracles_of_the_early_Church
BS_1_-_Introduction_to_the_Idea_of_God
ENNEAD_02.03_-_Whether_Astrology_is_of_any_Value.
ENNEAD_03.05_-_Of_Love,_or_Eros.
ENNEAD_04.04_-_Questions_About_the_Soul.
ENNEAD_06.05_-_The_One_and_Identical_Being_is_Everywhere_Present_In_Its_Entirety.345
ENNEAD_06.07_-_How_Ideas_Multiplied,_and_the_Good.
ENNEAD_06.08_-_Of_the_Will_of_the_One.
Epistle_to_the_Romans
Gorgias
Meno
r1912_12_11
r1913_07_07
r1913_12_23
r1913_12_25
r1914_01_03
r1914_01_15
r1914_03_20
r1914_04_10
r1914_05_28
r1914_07_06
r1914_08_27
r1914_10_31
r1914_11_19
r1914_11_26
r1914_12_17
r1914_12_20
r1914_12_29
r1915_01_02
r1915_01_11
r1915_02_03
r1915_02_27
r1917_01_22
r1917_01_24
r1918_05_07
r1918_05_10
Sophist
Symposium_translated_by_B_Jowett
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_1
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_2
The_Act_of_Creation_text
The_Book_of_Certitude_-_P2
The_Coming_Race_Contents
The_Dwellings_of_the_Philosophers
the_Eternal_Wisdom
The_Logomachy_of_Zos
The_Poems_of_Cold_Mountain
The_Riddle_of_this_World

PRIMARY CLASS

SIMILAR TITLES
utility

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

utility {utility software}

utility-coder "language" A language for data manipulation and report generation. ["User's Manual for utility-coder", Cambridge Computer Association, Jul 1977]. (1997-12-09)

utility-coder ::: (language) A language for data manipulation and report generation.[User's Manual for utility-coder, Cambridge Computer Association, Jul 1977]. (1997-12-09)

utility ::: n. --> The quality or state of being useful; usefulness; production of good; profitableness to some valuable end; as, the utility of manure upon land; the utility of the sciences; the utility of medicines.
Adaptation to satisfy the desires or wants; intrinsic value. See Note under Value, 2.
Happiness; the greatest good, or happiness, of the greatest number, -- the foundation of utilitarianism.


utility program {utility software}

utility :::

utility software "tool" (Or utility program, tool) Any {software} that performs some specific task that is secondary to the main purpose of using the computer (the latter would be called {application programs}) but is not essential to the operation of the computer ({system software}). Many utilities could be considered as part of the {system software}, which can in turn be considered part of the {operating system}. The following are some broad categories of utility software, specific types and examples. * Disks {disk formatter}: {FDISK}, {format} {defragmenter} {disk checker}: {fsck} {disk cleaner} {system profiler} {backup} {file system compression} * Files and directories list directory: {ls}, {dir} copy, move, remove: {cp}, {mv}, {rm}, {xcopy} {archive}: {tar} {compression}: {zip} format conversion: {atob} comparison: {diff} sort: {sort} * Security {authentication}: {login} {antivirus software}: {avast}, {Norton Antivirus} {firewall}: {Zone Alarm}, {Windows firewall} {encryption}: {gpg}) * Editors for general-purpose formats (as opposed to specific formats like a {word processing} document) {text editor}: {Emacs} {binary editor}, {hex editor} * Communications {mail transfer agent}: {sendmail} e-mail notification: {biff} file transfer: {ftp}, {rcp}, {Firefox} file synchronisation: {unison}, {briefcase} chat: {Gaim}, {cu} directory services: {bind}, {nslookup}, {whois} network diagnosis: {ping}, {traceroute} remote access: {rlogin}, {ssh} * Software development {compiler}: {gcc} build: {make}, {ant} {codewalker} {preprocessor}: {cpp} {debugger}: {adb}, {gdb} {installation}: {apt-get}, {msiexec}, {patch} {compiler compiler}: {yacc} * Hardware device configuration: {PCU}, {devman}, {stty} (2007-02-02)

Utility - 1. economic and highly subjective term describing satisfaction of a specified want. Utility and usefulness are not necessarily synonymous terms. Artwork may be functionally useless but yet provide great utility to an art lover. Or 2. value of a certain outcome or payoff to someone; the pleasure or displeasure that person would derive from that outcome.

Utility of work ::: That is one great utility of work that it tests the nature and puts the sadhana in front of the defects of his outer being which might otherwise escape him.


TERMS ANYWHERE

1. The fact, character, or quality of being useful or serviceable; fitness for some desirable purpose or valuable end; usefulness, serviceableness. 2. Philos. The ability, capacity, or power of a person, action, or thing to satisfy the needs or gratify the desires of the majority, or of the human race as a whole. 3. A useful, advantageous, or profitable thing, feature, etc.; a use. Chiefly in pl. utility"s, utilities.

Aladdin Systems, Inc. ::: (company) The company that developed and distributes Stuffit and other utility programs for the Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, and Palm handheld computers.Not to be confused with Aladdin Enterprises. .(2003-09-20)

Aladdin Systems, Inc. "company" The company that developed and distributes {Stuffit} and other {utility software} for the {Macintosh}, {Microsoft Windows}, and {Palm} {handheld computers}. Not to be confused with {Aladdin Enterprises}. {Aladdin Systems Home (http://aladdinsys.com/)}. (2003-09-20)

application program "programming, operating system" (Or "application", "app") A complete, self-contained program that performs a specific function directly for the user. This is in contrast to {system software} such as the {operating system} {kernel}, {server} processes, {libraries} which exists to support application programs and {utility programs}. Editors for various kinds of documents, {spreadsheets}, and text formatters are common examples of applications. Network applications include clients such as those for {FTP}, {electronic mail}, {telnet} and {WWW}. The term is used fairly loosely, for instance, some might say that a client and server together form a distributed application, others might argue that editors and compilers were not applications but {utility programs} for building applications. One distinction between an application program and the operating system is that applications always run in {user mode} (or "non-privileged mode"), while operating systems and related utilities may run in {supervisor mode} (or "privileged mode"). The term may also be used to distinguish programs which communicate via a {graphical user interface} from those which are executed from the {command line}. (2007-02-02)

As the cosmic stuff from which spring in their manifestations the living beings which constitute the universe, it is omnipresent, nor can there be anything without life. But there are many grades or conditions of life, just as there are many orders of living beings who are its aggregate expressions. Thus we can speak of the relatively animate and inanimate, as when comparing a mineral with a plant or a corpse with a living body. But the mineral has life of its own kind, and what has left the corpse is one kind of life, but the life in the physical atoms remains. Materialistic philosophy, for the purposes of its own analysis, has sought to separate life into two independent elements — an inert mass or particles, and more or less theoretical forces which actuate them. Unfortunately these forces are defined as functions of the movements of the particles themselves, which is a logical confusion. Others more logically have supposed a vital fluid; but if this fluid is entirely distinct in nature from the dead matter it is supposed to actuate, we cannot explain how the one can come into relation with the other. More recent advances in physics have shown the futility of trying to separate matter from motion or mass from energy.

atob ::: (tool) /A too B/ A utility that does ASCII to binary conversion. The reverse process is btoa.[Algorithm?] (1997-08-08)

atob "tool" /A too B/ {Utility software} that converts {ASCII} to {binary}. The reverse process is {btoa}. [Algorithm?] (1997-08-08)

Avatar ::: We have to remark c
   refully that the upholding of Dharma in the world is not the only object of the descent of the Avatar, that great mystery of the Divine manifest in humanity; for the upholding of the Dharma is not an all-sufficient object in itself, not the supreme possible aim for the manifestation of a Christ, a Krishna, a Buddha, but is only the general condition of a higher aim and a more supreme and divine utility. For there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhavam agatah. ; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve.
   Ref: CWSA Vol.19 , Page: 147-48


back door "security" (Or "{trap door}", "{wormhole}"). A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is not always sinister; some {operating systems}, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. See also {iron box}, {cracker}, {worm}, {logic bomb}. Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. The infamous {RTM} worm of late 1988, for example, used a back door in the {BSD} Unix "sendmail(8)" {utility}. {Ken Thompson}'s 1983 Turing Award lecture to the {ACM} revealed the existence of a back door in early {Unix} versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. The C compiler contained code that would recognise when the "login" command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him. Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to *use* the compiler - so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would *recognise when it was compiling a version of itself*, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled "login" the code to allow Thompson entry - and, of course, the code to recognise itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources. The talk that revealed this truly moby hack was published as ["Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Communications of the ACM 27", 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763]. [{Jargon File}] (1995-04-25)

back door ::: (security) (Or trap door, wormhole). A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. See also iron box, cracker, worm, logic bomb.Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. The infamous RTM worm of late 1988, for example, used a back door in the BSD Unix sendmail(8) utility.Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.The talk that revealed this truly moby hack was published as [Reflections on Trusting Trust, Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763].[Jargon File] (1995-04-25)

Baojing sanmei. (J. Hokyo sanmai/zanmai; K. Pogyong sammae 寶鏡三昧). In Chinese, "Jeweled-Mirror SAMADHI"; a definitive poem on enlightenment and practice from the standpoint of the Chinese CAODONG ZONG; otherwise known as the Baojing sanmei ge, or "GATHA of the Jeweled-Mirror SamAdhi." This lengthy Chinese song is attributed to the Chan master DONGSHAN LIANGJIE and, along with the CANTONG QI, is revered in the Chinese Caodong and Japanese SoTo schools of CHAN and ZEN as the foundational scripture of their tradition. Although the song is traditionally attributed to Dongshan, a number of sources note that Dongshan secretly received this song from his teacher Yunyan Tansheng (780-841), and Dongshan in turn transmitted it to his head disciple CAOSHAN BENJI. The earliest version of this song appears in the entry on Caoshan in the CHANLIN SENGBAO ZHUAN, written in 1123. The Baojing sanmei emphasizes the "inherent enlightenment" (BENJUE; cf. HONGAKU) of sentient beings and the futility of seeking that enlightenment through conscious reflection. Instead, the song urges its audience to allow one's inherently pure enlightened nature to "silently illuminate" itself through meditation (MOZHAO CHAN), as the Buddha did under the BODHI TREE. Numerous commentaries on this song are extant.

Basic Programming Support ::: (operating system) (BPS, colloquially: Barely Programming Support) A suite of utility routines from IBM to perform very simple procedures like formatting a disk or labelling a tape. BPS was only available on punched cards.[Dates?] (1998-07-08)

Basic Programming Support "operating system, tool" (BPS, colloquially: Barely Programming Support) A suite of utility routines from {IBM} to perform very simple procedures like formatting a disk or labelling a tape. BPS was only available on {punched cards}. [Dates?] (1998-07-08)

bells and whistles "jargon" (By analogy with the "toyboxes" on theatre organs). Features added to a program or system to make it more {flavourful} from a hacker's point of view, without necessarily adding to its utility for its primary function. Distinguished from {chrome}, which is intended to attract users. "Now that we've got the basic program working, let's go back and add some bells and whistles." No one seems to know what distinguishes a bell from a whistle. [{Jargon File}] (2007-04-03)

Benthamism: Name conventionally given to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) who regarded the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the supreme ethical goal of human society and individual men. The morality of men's actions is determined experimentally by their utility, which means the power of an action to produce happiness. The moral quality of any action is estimated in accordance with its pleasant or painful consequences, for the sovereign masters of man are pleasure, the only good, and, pain, the only evil. Ethics becomes a matter of calculation of consequences. -- J.J.R.

benthamism ::: n. --> That phase of the doctrine of utilitarianism taught by Jeremy Bentham; the doctrine that the morality of actions is estimated and determined by their utility; also, the theory that the sensibility to pleasure and the recoil from pain are the only motives which influence human desires and actions, and that these are the sufficient explanation of ethical and jural conceptions.

(b) Formalistically (or deontologically) regarded as not equivalent to the above, as perhaps, indefinable. For example, C. D. Broad holds that the rightness or wrongness of an action in a given situation is a function of its "fittingness" in that situation and of its utility in that situation. W. D. Ross holds that in given circumstances that action is right whose prima facie rightness in the respects in which it is prima facie right outweights its prima facie wrongness in the respects in which it is prima facie wrong to a greater degree than is the cast with any possible alternative action. -- C.A.B.

biff /bif/ To notify someone of incoming mail. From the {BSD} utility "biff(1)", which was in turn named after a friendly golden Labrador who used to chase frisbees in the halls at UCB while {4.2BSD} was in development (it had a well-known habit of barking whenever the mailman came). No relation to {BIFF}. [{Jargon File}]

binary file "file format" Any {file format} for {digital} {data} that does not consist of a sequence of printable {characters} ({text}). The term is often used for executable {machine code}. All digital data, including characters, is actually binary data (unless it uses some (rare) system with more than two discrete levels) but the distinction between binary and text is well established. On modern {operating systems} a text file is simply a binary file that happens to contain only printable characters, but some older systems distinguish the two file types, requiring programs to handle them differently. A common class of binary files is programs in {machine language} ("{executable} files") ready to load into memory and execute. Binary files may also be used to store data output by a program, and intended to be read by that or another program but not by humans. Binary files are more efficient for this purpose because the data (e.g. numerical data) does not need to be converted between the binary form used by the {CPU} and a printable (ASCII) representation. The disadvantage is that it is usually necessary to write special purpose programs to manipulate such files since most general purpose utilities operate on text files. There is also a problem sharing binary numerical data between processors with different {endian}ness. Some communications {protocols} handle only text files, e.g. most {electronic mail} systems before {MIME} became widespread in about 1995. The {FTP} utility must be put into "binary" mode in order to copy a binary file since in its default "ascii" mode translates between the different {newline} characters used on the sending and receiving computers. Confusingly, some {word processor} files, and {rich text} files, are actually binary files because they contain non-printable characters and require special programs to view, edit and print them. (2005-02-21)

binary file ::: (file format) Any file format for digital data that does not consist of a sequence of printable characters (text). The term is often used for executable machine code.All digital data, including characters, is actually binary data (unless it uses some (rare) system with more than two discrete levels) but the distinction but some older systems distinguish the two file types, requiring programs to handle them differently.A common class of binary files is programs in machine language (executable files) ready to load into memory and execute. Binary files may also be used to files. There is also a problem sharing binary numerical data between processors with different endianness.Some communications protocols handle only text files, e.g. most electronic mail systems before MIME became widespread in about 1995. The FTP utility must be put mode translates between the different newline characters used on the sending and receiving computers.Confusingly, some word processor files, and rich text files, are actually binary files because they contain non-printable characters and require special programs to view, edit and print them.(2005-02-21)

briefcase ::: (tool) A Win95/WinNT utility for keeping files on two computers without permanent connection in sync.The scenario briefcase was designed for is the combination of an office computer and a portable one. You connect the two before leaving your office, create a briefcase utility can automatically update the files you changed on the office computer. (1998-05-18)

briefcase "tool" A {Win95}/{WinNT} utility for keeping files on two computers without permanent connection in sync. The scenario briefcase was designed for is the combination of an office computer and a {portable} one. You connect the two before leaving your office, create a briefcase on the portable (if you don't already have one on it), then copy the files you want to work on while away into the briefcase. You can at this point disconnect the two computers, take the portable with you and work on the files in the briefcase at home or on the road. When you get back to your office the briefcase utility can automatically update the files you changed on the office computer. (1998-05-18)

btoa "tool, messaging, algorithm, file format" /B too A/ A {binary} to {ASCII} conversion utility. btoa is a {uuencode} or {base 64} equivalent which addresses some of the problems with the uuencode standard but not as many as the base 64 standard. It avoids problems that some {hosts} have with spaces (e.g. conversion of groups of spaces to tabs) by not including them in its character set, but may still have problems on non-ASCII systems (e.g. {EBCDIC}). btoa is primarily used to transfer {binary files} between systems across connections which are not {eight-bit clean}, e.g. {electronic mail}. btoa takes adjacent sets of four binary {octets} and encodes them as five ASCII {octets} using ASCII characters '!' through to 'u'. Special characters are also used: 'x' marks the beginning or end of the archive; 'z' marks four consecutive zeros and 'y' (version 5.2) four consecutive spaces. Each group of four octets is processed as a 32-bit integer. Call this 'I'. Let 'D' = 85^4. Divide I by D. Call this result 'R'. Make I = I - (R * D) to avoid {overflow} on the next step. Repeat, for values of D = 85^3, 85^2, 85 and 1. At each step, to convert R to the output character add decimal 33 (output octet = R + ASCII value for '!'). Five output octets are produced. btoa provides some {integrity checking} in the form of a line {checksum}, and facilities for patching corrupted downloads. The {algorithm} used by btoa is more efficient than uuencode or base 64. ASCII files are encoded to about 120% the size of their binary sources. This compares with 135% for uuencode or base 64. {C source (ftp://hpux.csc.liv.ac.uk/hpux/Misc/btoa-5.2/)}. (version 5.2 - ~1994). Pre-compiled {MS-DOS} versions are also available. (1997-08-08)

btoa ::: (tool, messaging, algorithm, file format) /B too A/ A binary to ASCII conversion utility.btoa is a uuencode or base 64 equivalent which addresses some of the problems with the uuencode standard but not as many as the base 64 standard. It avoids to tabs) by not including them in its character set, but may still have problems on non-ASCII systems (e.g. EBCDIC).btoa is primarily used to transfer binary files between systems across connections which are not eight-bit clean, e.g. electronic mail.btoa takes adjacent sets of four binary octets and encodes them as five ASCII octets using ASCII characters '!' through to 'u'. Special characters are also used: 'x' marks the beginning or end of the archive; 'z' marks four consecutive zeros and 'y' (version 5.2) four consecutive spaces.Each group of four octets is processed as a 32-bit integer. Call this 'I'. Let 'D' = 85^4. Divide I by D. Call this result 'R'. Make I = I - (R * D) to avoid each step, to convert R to the output character add decimal 33 (output octet = R + ASCII value for '!'). Five output octets are produced.btoa provides some integrity checking in the form of a line checksum, and facilities for patching corrupted downloads.The algorithm used by btoa is more efficient than uuencode or base 64. ASCII files are encoded to about 120% the size of their binary sources. This compares with 135% for uuencode or base 64. . (version 5.2 - ~1994).Pre-compiled MS-DOS versions are also available. (1997-08-08)

utility {utility software}

utility-coder "language" A language for data manipulation and report generation. ["User's Manual for utility-coder", Cambridge Computer Association, Jul 1977]. (1997-12-09)

utility-coder ::: (language) A language for data manipulation and report generation.[User's Manual for utility-coder, Cambridge Computer Association, Jul 1977]. (1997-12-09)

utility ::: n. --> The quality or state of being useful; usefulness; production of good; profitableness to some valuable end; as, the utility of manure upon land; the utility of the sciences; the utility of medicines.
Adaptation to satisfy the desires or wants; intrinsic value. See Note under Value, 2.
Happiness; the greatest good, or happiness, of the greatest number, -- the foundation of utilitarianism.


utility program {utility software}

utility :::

utility software "tool" (Or utility program, tool) Any {software} that performs some specific task that is secondary to the main purpose of using the computer (the latter would be called {application programs}) but is not essential to the operation of the computer ({system software}). Many utilities could be considered as part of the {system software}, which can in turn be considered part of the {operating system}. The following are some broad categories of utility software, specific types and examples. * Disks {disk formatter}: {FDISK}, {format} {defragmenter} {disk checker}: {fsck} {disk cleaner} {system profiler} {backup} {file system compression} * Files and directories list directory: {ls}, {dir} copy, move, remove: {cp}, {mv}, {rm}, {xcopy} {archive}: {tar} {compression}: {zip} format conversion: {atob} comparison: {diff} sort: {sort} * Security {authentication}: {login} {antivirus software}: {avast}, {Norton Antivirus} {firewall}: {Zone Alarm}, {Windows firewall} {encryption}: {gpg}) * Editors for general-purpose formats (as opposed to specific formats like a {word processing} document) {text editor}: {Emacs} {binary editor}, {hex editor} * Communications {mail transfer agent}: {sendmail} e-mail notification: {biff} file transfer: {ftp}, {rcp}, {Firefox} file synchronisation: {unison}, {briefcase} chat: {Gaim}, {cu} directory services: {bind}, {nslookup}, {whois} network diagnosis: {ping}, {traceroute} remote access: {rlogin}, {ssh} * Software development {compiler}: {gcc} build: {make}, {ant} {codewalker} {preprocessor}: {cpp} {debugger}: {adb}, {gdb} {installation}: {apt-get}, {msiexec}, {patch} {compiler compiler}: {yacc} * Hardware device configuration: {PCU}, {devman}, {stty} (2007-02-02)

Call Unix "communications, tool" (cu) The original {Unix} {virtual terminal} utility. cu allows a user on one computer to log in to another connected via {Ethernet}, direct {serial line} or {modem}. It shares some configuration files with {UUCP} in order to be able to use the same connections without conflict. {Unix manual page}: cu(1). (1997-12-01)

Call Unix ::: (communications, tool) (cu) The original Unix virtual terminal utility. cu allows a user on one computer to log in to another connected via Ethernet, direct serial line or modem. It shares some configuration files with UUCP in order to be able to use the same connections without conflict.Unix manual page: cu(1). (1997-12-01)

CHARYBDIS ::: (mathematics, utility) A Lisp program to display mathematical expressions. It is related to MATHLAB.[Sammet 1969, p. 522]. (1994-11-15)

codewalker "programming, tool" A program component that analyses other programs. {Compilers} have codewalkers in their front ends; so do {cross-reference generators} and some database front ends. Other utility programs that try to do too much with source code may turn into codewalkers. As in "This new 'vgrind' feature would require a codewalker to implement." [{Jargon File}] (1994-12-23)

compiler-compiler ::: A utility to generate the source code of a parser, interpreter or compiler from an annotated language description (usually in BNF). Most so called compiler-compilers are really just parser generators.Examples are Bison, Eli, FSL, META 5, MUG2, Parsley, Pre-cc, Yacc. (1995-01-23)

compiler-compiler A utility to generate the {source code} of a {parser}, {interpreter} or {compiler} from an annotated language description (usually in {BNF}). Most so called compiler-compilers are really just {parser generators}. Examples are {Bison}, {Eli}, {FSL}, {META 5}, {MUG2}, {Parsley}, {Pre-cc}, {Yacc}. (1995-01-23)

Consumer durable - A consumer good that lasts period of time, during which the consumer can continue gaining utility from it.

C preprocessor "tool, programming" (cpp) The standard {Unix} {macro}-expansion utility run as the first phase of the {C} compiler, {cc}. Cpp interprets lines beginning with "

C preprocessor ::: (tool, programming) (cpp) The standard Unix macro-expansion utility run as the first phase of the C compiler, cc. Cpp interprets lines beginning with

Criterion: Broadly speaking, any ground, basis, or means of judging anything as to its quality. Since validity, truth, goodness, justice, virtue, and beauty are some of the most fundamental qualities for philosophic enquiry, criteria for these are embodied in almost all philosophies and are either assumed or derived. In logic, consistency is a generally recognized criterion; in epistemology, evidence of the senses, comparison, or reason may be regarded as criteria; in metaphysical speculation have been suggested. as criteria for truth, among others, correspondence, representation, practicability, and coherence; in religion, evidences of faith, revelation or miracle; in ethics, pleasure, desirability, utility, self-determination of the will, duty, conscience, happiness, are among common criteria, while in aesthetics there have been cited interest, satisfaction, enjoyment, utility, harmony. -- K.F.L.

cuspy /kuhs'pee/ [WPI: from the {DEC} abbreviation CUSP, for "Commonly Used System Program", i.e. a utility program used by many people] 1. (of a program) Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy. See {rude}. [{Jargon File}]

cuspy ::: /kuhs'pee/ [WPI: from the DEC abbreviation CUSP, for Commonly Used System Program, i.e. a utility program used by many people] 1. (of a program) Well-written.2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy. See rude.[Jargon File]

data dictionary "database" A data structure that stores {metadata}, i.e. data about {data}. The term "data dictionary" has several uses. Most generally it is a set of {data descriptions} that can be shared by several applications. Usually it means a {table} in a {database} that stores the names, {field} {types}, length, and other characteristics of the fields in the database tables. An active data dictionary is automatically updated as changes occur in the database. A passive data dictionary must be manually updated. In a {DBMS}, this functionality is performed by the {system catalog}. The data dictionary is a more general software utility used by designers, users, and administrators for {information resource management}. The data dictionary may maintain information on system hardware, software, documentation, users, and other aspects. Data dictionaries are also used to document the database design process itself and can accumulate metadata ready to feed into the system catalog. [Does anybody call them "codebooks"?] (2001-04-24)

data dictionary ::: (database) A data structure that stores meta-data, i.e. data about data. The term data dictionary has several uses.Most generally it is a set of data descriptions that can be shared by several applications.Usually it means a table in a database that stores the names, field types, length, and other characteristics of the fields in the database tables.An active data dictionary is automatically updated as changes occur in the database. A passive data dictionary must be manually updated.In a DBMS, this functionality is performed by the system catalog. The data dictionary is a more general software utility used by designers, users, and administrators for information resource management.The data dictionary may maintain information on system hardware, software, documentation, users, and other aspects.Data dictionaries are also used to document the database design process itself and can accumulate meta-data ready to feed into the system catalog.[Does anybody call them codebooks?](2001-04-24)

dataless management utility "operating system" (DMU) A {Dataless Management Services} (DMS) utility for managing the sharing of installed operating software between DMS servers and clients. It allows users to install, configure, show and delete DMS environments and add, list, modify and remove DMS clients. (2005-09-15)

dataless management utility ::: (operating system) (DMU) A Dataless Management Services (DMS) utility for managing the sharing of installed operating software between DMS servers and clients. It allows users to install, configure, show and delete DMS environments and add, list, modify and remove DMS clients.(2005-09-15)

decision theory "probability" A branch of statistics concerning strategies for decision making in non-{deterministic} systems. Decision theory seeks to find strategies that maximise the expected value of a {utility function} measuring the desirability of possible outcomes. (1995-09-22)

decision theory ::: (probability) A branch of statistics concerning strategies for decision making in non-deterministic systems. Decision theory seeks to find strategies that maximise the expected value of a utility function measuring the desirability of possible outcomes. (1995-09-22)

Delivered Source Instruction ::: (programming, unit) (DSI) One line of source code (LOC) developed by a project.DSI is the primary input to many tools for estimating software cost. The term delivered is generally meant to exclude non-delivered support software such as utility software. It includes job control language, format statements, and data declarations. (1996-05-29)

Delivered Source Instruction "programming, unit" (DSI) One line of source code (LOC) developed by a project. DSI is the primary input to many tools for estimating software cost. The term "delivered" is generally meant to exclude non-delivered support software such as test drivers. However, if these are developed with the same care as delivered software, with their own reviews, test plans, documentation, etc., then they should be counted. The "source instructions" include all program instructions created by project personnel and processed into {machine code} by some combination of preprocessors, compilers, and assemblers. It excludes comments and unmodified utility software. It includes {job control language}, format statements, and data declarations. (1996-05-29)

diff /dif/ 1. A change listing, especially giving differences between (and additions to) different versions of a piece of source code or documentation (the term is often used in the plural "diffs"). "Send me your diffs for the Jargon File!" Compare {vdiff}. 2. Specifically, such a listing produced by the diff {Unix} command, especially when used as input to the {patch} utility (which actually performs the modifications). This is a common method of distributing patches and source updates. 3. To compare (whether or not by use of automated tools on machine-readable files). See also {vdiff}, {mod}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-10)

diff ::: /dif/ 1. A change listing, especially giving differences between (and additions to) different versions of a piece of source code or documentation (the term is often used in the plural diffs). Send me your diffs for the Jargon File!Compare vdiff.2. Specifically, such a listing produced by the diff Unix command, especially when used as input to the patch utility (which actually performs the modifications). This is a common method of distributing patches and source updates.3. To compare (whether or not by use of automated tools on machine-readable files).See also vdiff, mod.[Jargon File] (1995-02-10)

Diminishing marginal utility – 1. as more units of a good are consumed, additional units will provide less additional satisfaction than previous units. Or 2. where each additional dollar of income earned yield s less additional utility. - The principle of diminishing marginal utility. The more of a product a person consumes over a given period of time, the less will be the additional utility gained from one more unit.

disutilize ::: v. t. --> To deprive of utility; to render useless.

DMU ::: Data Management UnitData Manipulation UnitData Multiplexer Unit dataless management utility

DMU {Data Management Unit} {Data Manipulation Unit} {Data Multiplexer Unit} {dataless management utility}

Dongshan Liangjie. (J. Tozan Ryokai; K. Tongsan Yanggae 洞山良价) (807-869). Chinese CHAN master of the Tang dynasty and reputed founder of the CAODONG lineage of Chan; also known as Xinfeng. Dongshan was a native of Yuezhou in present-day Zhejiang province. He left home at an early age and became the student of the Chan master Lingmo (747-818). Having received full monastic precepts from a certain VINAYA master Rui on SONGSHAN, Dongshan visited the Chan masters NANQUAN PUYUAN and GUISHAN LINGYOU and later continued his studies under Yunyan Tancheng (782-841). Dongshan is said to have attained awakening under Yunyan's guidance and eventually inherited his lineage. During the HUICHANG FANAN, Dongshan remained in hiding until the persecution ran its course, eventually reemerging at Xinfeng tong in Jiangxi province. With the support of his followers, Dongshan later established the monastery Guangfusi (later renamed Puli yuan) on Mt. Dong (Dongshan), whence he acquired his toponym. Among his many disciples, Yunju Daoying (d. 902) and CAOSHAN BENJI are most famous. Dongshan was renowned for his poetry and verse compositions and his teaching of the "five ranks" (WUWEI). His teachings are recorded in the Dongshan yulu ("The Record of Dongshan"), but the most famous of his works is the BAOJING SANMEI ("Jeweled-Mirror Samādhi"), a definitive verse on enlightenment and practice from the standpoint of the CAODONGZONG. The Baojing sanmei emphasizes the "original enlightenment" (BENJUE; cf. HONGAKU) of sentient beings and the futility of seeking that enlightenment through conscious thought. Instead, the song urges its audience to allow one's inherently pure, enlightened nature to "silently illuminate" itself through meditation (see MOZHAO CHAN), as the Buddha did under the BODHI TREE.

Economic_man ::: refers to an idealized human being who acts rationally and with complete knowledge, who seeks to maximize personal utility or satisfaction. Economic man is an assumption of many economic models, and is also known as homo economicus. To explain a phenomenon, scientists often build models, and to build a model, scientists have to make assumptions that simplify reality. In economics, one of those simplifying assumptions is economic man. Unlike a real human, economic man always behaves rationally in a narrowly self-interested way that maximizes his or her satisfaction. This assumption enables economists to study how markets would work if populated by these theoretical persons. For example, it is often assumed that demand for a product is a linear function of price. While this may sometimes be the case with certain goods, it is not reflective of the actual consumer environment. Economists are aware of the deficiencies of using economic man, though some are more willing to abandon the concept than others. One obvious problem is that human beings don't always act "rationally," that is, in their narrow economic self-interest. The economic man concept also assumes that the options faced by economic man offer obvious differences in satisfaction. But it is not always clear that one option is superior to another. Two options may enhance a person's utility, or satisfaction, in two different ways, and it may not be clear that one is better than the other.

Ego is constituted by Nature and is at once a mental, vital and physical formation meant to aid in centralising and indivi- dualising the outer consciousness and action. When the true being is discovered, the utility of tbe ego is over and this forma- tion has to disappear — the true being is felt in its place.

EMDIR ::: The CERN Electronic Mail DIRectory utility.[Details?] (1995-02-23)

EMDIR The CERN {Electronic Mail DIRectory} utility. [Details?] (1995-02-23)

evolutility ::: n. --> The faculty possessed by all substances capable of self-nourishment of manifesting the nutritive acts by changes of form, of volume, or of structure.

Extensible VAX Editor "text, tool" (EVE) A {DEC} product implemented using DEC's {Text Processing Utility} (TPU). [Details?] (2000-05-08)

Extensible VAX Editor ::: (text, tool) (EVE) A DEC product implemented using DEC's Text Processing Utility (TPU).[Details?](2000-05-08)

Externality - An effect of consumption or production which is not taken into account by the consumer or the producer and which affects the utility or costs of other consumers or producers.

futility ::: n. --> The quality of being talkative; talkativeness; loquaciousness; loquacity.
The quality of producing no valuable effect, or of coming to nothing; uselessness.


FDISK "operating system, tool" (Fixed disk utility) An {MS-DOS} utility program which prepares a {hard disk} so that it can be used as a {boot disk} and {file systems} can be created on it. {OS/2}, {NT}, {Windows 95}, {Linux}, and other {Unix} versions all have this command or something similar. (1996-12-23)

FDISK ::: (operating system, tool) (Fixed disk utility) An MS-DOS utility program which prepares a hard disk so that it can be used as a boot disk and file systems can be created on it. OS/2, NT, Windows 95, Linux, and other Unix versions all have this command or something similar. (1996-12-23)

Flow ::: (tool) A companion utility to Floppy by Julian James Bunn . Flow allows the user to produce various reports on the structure of Fortran 77 code, such as flow diagrams and common block tables. It runs under VMS, Unix, CMS.Posted to comp.sources.misc volume 31. (1995-03-14)

Flow "tool" A companion utility to {Floppy} by Julian James Bunn "julian@vxcrna.cxern.ch". Flow allows the user to produce various reports on the structure of {Fortran 77} code, such as {flow diagrams} and common block tables. It runs under {VMS}, {Unix}, {CMS}. Posted to comp.sources.misc volume 31. (1995-03-14)

". . . for doubt is the mind"s persistent assailant.” Letters on Yoga ::: "The enemy of faith is doubt, and yet doubt too is a utility and necessity, because man in his ignorance and in his progressive labour towards knowledge needs to be visited by doubt, otherwise he would remain obstinate in an ignorant belief and limited knowledge and unable to escape from his errors.” The Synthesis of Yoga*

fossil 1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of {octal} as default base for string escapes in {C}, in spite of the better match of {hexadecimal} to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures. See {dusty deck}. 2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and {BSD} Unix tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. (In a perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later {USG Unix} releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.) 3. The FOSSIL (Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification for serial-port access to replace the {brain-dead} routines in the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most {MS-DOS} {BBS} software in preference to the "supported" ROM routines, which do not support interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the {bare metal} serial port programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in, drivers that use the {hook} but do not provide serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in "video fossil". [{Jargon File}]

fossil ::: 1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures. See dusty deck.2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and BSD Unix tty driver, designed for use goal, this functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later USG Unix releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.)3. The FOSSIL (Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification for serial-port access to replace the brain-dead routines in the IBM PC ROMs. do not provide serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in video fossil.[Jargon File]

futile ::: having no effective result; unsuccessful; pointless; unimportant. futility.

GDB ::: (programming, utility) GNU debugger. The FSF's symbolic debugger for C, C++ and other languages. Developed by many people but most recently Fred Fish all of Cygnus Support. GDB fills the same niche as dbx. Programs must be compiled to include debugging symbols.Version 4.11. Distributed under GNU CopyLeft. It runs on most Unix variants, VMS, VXWorks, Amiga and MS-DOS.FTP gdb-*.tar.[zZ] from a GNU archive site. E-mail: (bug reports). (1993-10-29)

Geographic Information System ::: (application) (GIS) A computer system for capturing, storing, checking, integrating, manipulating, analysing and displaying data related to positions on holds data about a particular kind of feature (e.g. roads). Each feature is linked to a position on the graphical image of a map.Layers of data are organised to be studied and to perform statistical analysis (i.e. a layer of customer locations could include fields for Name, Address, local authority and public utility management, environmental, resource management, engineering, business, marketing, and distribution. . . (1995-12-21)

Geographic Information System "application" (GIS) A computer system for capturing, storing, checking, integrating, manipulating, analysing and displaying data related to positions on the Earth's surface. Typically, a GIS is used for handling maps of one kind or another. These might be represented as several different layers where each layer holds data about a particular kind of feature (e.g. roads). Each feature is linked to a position on the graphical image of a map. Layers of data are organised to be studied and to perform statistical analysis (i.e. a layer of customer locations could include fields for Name, Address, Contact, Number, Area). Uses are primarily government related, town planning, local authority and public utility management, environmental, resource management, engineering, business, marketing, and distribution. {GIS dictionary (http://geo.ed.ac.uk/root/agidict/html/welcome.html)}. {(http://ncl.ac.uk/~ngraphic/wotzagis.html)}. (1995-12-21)

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

Green Book 1. "publication" Informal name for one of the four standard references on {PostScript}. The other three official guides are known as the {Blue Book}, the {Red Book}, and the {White Book}. ["PostScript Language Program Design", Adobe Systems, Addison-Wesley, 1988 (ISBN 0-201-14396-8)]. 2. "publication" Informal name for one of the three standard references on {SmallTalk}. Also associated with blue and red books. ["Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice", by Glenn Krasner (Addison-Wesley, 1983; QA76.8.S635S58; ISBN 0-201-11669-3)]. 3. "publication" The "X/Open Compatibility Guide", which defines an international standard {Unix} environment that is a proper superset of {POSIX}/SVID. It also includes descriptions of a standard utility toolkit, systems administrations features, and the like. This grimoire is taken with particular seriousness in Europe. See {Purple Book}. 4. "publication" The {IEEE} 1003.1 {POSIX} Operating Systems Interface standard has been dubbed "The Ugly Green Book". 5. "publication" Any of the 1992 standards issued by the {ITU-T}'s tenth plenary assembly. These include, among other things, the dreadful {X.400} {electronic mail} standard and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. 6. {Green Book CD-ROM}. See also {book titles}. [{Jargon File}] (1996-12-03)

Grim File Reaper "storage, operating system" (GFR) An {ITS} and {LISP Machine} utility to remove files according to some program-automated or semi-automatic manual procedure, especially one designed to reclaim mass storage space or reduce name-space clutter (the original GFR actually moved files to tape). See also {prowler}, {reaper}. Compare {GC}, which discards only provably worthless stuff. (1996-06-20)

Grim File Reaper ::: (storage, operating system) (GFR) An ITS and LISP Machine utility to remove files according to some program-automated or semi-automatic manual procedure, especially one designed to reclaim mass storage space or reduce name-space clutter (the original GFR actually moved files to tape).See also prowler, reaper. Compare GC, which discards only provably worthless stuff. (1996-06-20)

gunzip "tool, compression" The decompression utility corresponding to {gzip}. In operating systems with links, gunzip is just a link to gzip and its function can be invoked by passing a "-d" flag to gzip. (1996-01-03)

gunzip ::: (tool, compression) The decompression utility corresponding to gzip. In operating systems with links, gunzip is just a link to gzip and its function can be invoked by passing a -d flag to gzip. (1996-01-03)

gzip ::: (tool, compression) GNU compression utility. Gzip reduces the size of the named files using Lempel-Ziv LZ77 compression. Whenever possible, each file is replaced by one with the filename extension .gz. Compressed files can be restored to their original form using gzip -d or gunzip or zcat.The Unix compress utility is patented (by two separate patents, in fact) and is thus shunned by the GNU Project since it is not free software. They have area (gnu.org/pub/gnu) are in gzip format and their names end in .gz (as opposed to compress-compressed files, which end in .Z).Gzip can uncompress compress-compressed files and pack files (which end in .z). The decompression algorithms are not patented, only compression is.The gzip program is available from any GNU archive site in shar, tar, or gzipped tar format (for those who already have a prior version of gzip and want faster data transmission). It works on virtually every Unix system, MS-DOS, OS/2 and VMS.

gzip "tool, compression" {GNU} compression utility. Gzip reduces the size of the named files using {Lempel-Ziv} {LZ77 compression}. Whenever possible, each file is replaced by one with the {filename extension} ".gz". Compressed files can be restored to their original form using gzip -d or gunzip or zcat. The Unix "{compress}" utility is patented (by two separate patents, in fact) and is thus shunned by the GNU Project since it is not {free software}. They have therefore chosen gzip, which is free of any known {software patents} and which tends to compress better anyway. All compressed files in the {GNU} {anonymous FTP} area (gnu.org/pub/gnu) are in gzip format and their names end in ".gz" (as opposed to "compress"-compressed files, which end in ".Z"). Gzip can uncompress "compress"-compressed files and "pack" files (which end in ".z"). The decompression algorithms are not patented, only compression is. The gzip program is available from any {GNU archive site} in {shar}, {tar}, or gzipped tar format (for those who already have a prior version of gzip and want faster data transmission). It works on virtually every {Unix} system, {MS-DOS}, {OS/2} and {VMS}.

hand hack "jargon" 1. (Or "{hand cruft}") To Translate a {hot spot} of a program in a {HLL} into {assembly language} {by hand}, as opposed to trying to coerce the {compiler} into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon. See {tune}, {bum}. 2. More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans. [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-16)

hand hack ::: (jargon) 1. (Or hand cruft) To Translate a hot spot of a program in a HLL into assembly language by hand, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon.See tune, bum.2. More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans.[Jargon File] (1995-02-16)

hypermath: Principles of esoteric mathematics, often beyond the minds of unEnlightened people. (See hypertech, Inspired Science, Primal Utility, reality physics.)

IBM System/36 "computer" A mid-range {computer} introduced in 1983, which remained popular in the 1990s because of its low cost and high performance. Prices started in the $20k range for the small 5362 to $100+k for the expanded 5360. In 1994, IBM introduced the Advanced 36 for $9,000. The largest 5360 had 7MB of {RAM} and 1432MB of {hard disk}. The smallest 5362 had 256K of RAM and 30MB of hard disk. The Advanced 36 had 64MB of RAM and 4300MB of hard disk, but design issues limit the amount of storage that can actually be addressed by the {operating system}; underlying {microcode} allowed additional RAM to cache disk reads and writes, allowing the Advanced 36 to outperform the S/36 by 600 to 800%. There was only one operating system for the S/36: SSP ({System Support Product}). SSP consumed about 7-10MB of hard drive space. Computer programs on the S/36 reside in "libraries," and the SSP itself resides in a special system library called

IBM System/36 ::: (computer) A mid-range computer introduced in 1983, which remained popular in the 1990s because of its low cost and high performance. Prices started in the $20k range for the small 5362 to $100+k for the expanded 5360. In 1994, IBM introduced the Advanced 36 for $9,000.The largest 5360 had 7MB of RAM and 1432MB of hard disk. The smallest 5362 had 256K of RAM and 30MB of hard disk. The Advanced 36 had 64MB of RAM and 4300MB of to cache disk reads and writes, allowing the Advanced 36 to outperform the S/36 by 600 to 800%.There was only one operating system for the S/36: SSP (System Support Product). SSP consumed about 7-10MB of hard drive space. Computer programs on the S/36 reside in libraries, and the SSP itself resides in a special system library called

If experienced in trance it will be a superconscient state only for some part of the inner being but not real to the whole conscious- ness. Experience and trance have their utility for opening the being and preparing it but it is only when the realisation is constant in the waking state that it is truly possessed.

If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. As with the One Existence, so with its Consciousness and Force. The One Consciousness is separated into many independent forms of consciousness and knowledge; each follows out its own line of truth which it has to realise. The one total and many-sided Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself. The one Consciousness-Force is liberated into its million forces, and each of these forces has the right to fulfil itself or to assume, if needed, a hegemony and take up for its own utility the other forces. So too the Delight of Existence is loosed out into all manner of delights and each can carry in itself its independent fullness or sovereign extreme. Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the character of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the endlessly variable…

import ::: (data) To read data that is not in the native format of the application. For example, a web browser will have its own way of storing bookmarks but it alternative is to provide an independent external conversion utility but this is usually less convenient for the user.(2004-11-15)

import "data" To read data that is not in the native format of the application. For example, a {web browser} will have its own way of storing {bookmarks} but it will usually provide a function to import bookmarks from {Internet Explorer}. The alternative is to provide an independent external conversion utility but this is usually less convenient for the user. (2004-11-15)

inutility ::: n. --> Uselessness; the quality of being unprofitable; unprofitableness; as, the inutility of vain speculations and visionary projects.

Indifference curve – An economic concept, an indifference curve is a graph or diagram which shows the combinations of two different goods at which point an individual or firm is indifferent, that is to say has equal utility, or has no difference in their preference for one combination as compared to the other.

inefficacy ::: n. --> Want of power to produce the desired or proper effect; inefficiency; ineffectualness; futility; uselessness; fruitlessness; as, the inefficacy of medicines or means.

installable file system "operating system" (IFS or "File System Driver", "FSD") An {API} that allows you to extend {OS/2} to access files stored on disk in formats other than {FAT} and {HPFS}, and access files that are stored on a {network file server}. For example an IFS could provide programs running under OS/2 (including DOS and Windows programs) with access to files stored under {Unix} using the {Berkeley fast file system}. The other variety of IFS (a "remote file system" or "redirector") allows file sharing over a {LAN}, e.g. using Unix's {Network File System} {protocol}. In this case, the IFS passes a program's file access requests to a remote file server, possibly also translating between different file attributes used by OS/2 and the remote system. Documentation on the IFS API has been available only by special request from IBM. An IFS is structured as an ordinary 16-bit {DLL} with entry points for opening, closing, reading, and writing files, the swapper, file locking, and {Universal Naming Convention}. The main part of an IFS that runs in {ring} 0 is called by the OS/2 {kernel} in the context of the caller's process and {thread}. The other part that runs in ring 3 is a utility library with entry points for FORMAT, RECOVER, SYS, and CHKDSK. {EDM/2 article (http://edm2.com/0103/)}. (1999-04-07)

installable file system ::: (operating system) (IFS or File System Driver, FSD) An API that allows you to extend OS/2 to access files stored on disk in formats other than FAT and HPFS, and access files that are stored on a network file server.For example an IFS could provide programs running under OS/2 (including DOS and Windows programs) with access to files stored under Unix using the Berkeley fast file system.The other variety of IFS (a remote file system or redirector) allows file sharing over a LAN, e.g. using Unix's Network File System protocol. In this possibly also translating between different file attributes used by OS/2 and the remote system.Documentation on the IFS API has been available only by special request from IBM.An IFS is structured as an ordinary 16-bit DLL with entry points for opening, closing, reading, and writing files, the swapper, file locking, and Universal that runs in ring 3 is a utility library with entry points for FORMAT, RECOVER, SYS, and CHKDSK. . (1999-04-07)

installer "operating system" A {utility program} to ease the installation of another, probably larger, {application}. It is also possible for {hardware} to have an installer accompany it, to install any low level {device drivers} required. The installer commonly asks the user to enter desired configuration options for the main program or hardware, and sets up various initialisation files accordingly, as well as copying the main program to a {hard disc}. Some badly designed operating systems require applications to provide an {uninstaller} because of the number of different files modified or created during the installation process. (1998-02-09)

installer ::: (operating system) A utility program to ease the installation of another, probably larger, application. It is also possible for hardware to have an installer accompany it, to install any low level device drivers required.The installer commonly asks the user to enter desired configuration options for the main program or hardware, and sets up various initialisation files accordingly, as well as copying the main program to a hard disc.Some badly designed operating systems require applications to provide an uninstaller because of the number of different files modified or created during the installation process. (1998-02-09)

ivory ::: n. --> The hard, white, opaque, fine-grained substance constituting the tusks of the elephant. It is a variety of dentine, characterized by the minuteness and close arrangement of the tubes, as also by their double flexure. It is used in manufacturing articles of ornament or utility.
The tusks themselves of the elephant, etc.
Any carving executed in ivory.
Teeth; as, to show one&


jiriki. (C. zili; K. charyok 自力). In Japanese, "self power." The term jiriki came to be used frequently in the pure land schools by the followers of HoNEN and SHINRAN and their JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu traditions. Jiriki, or "self power," is often contrasted with the term TARIKI, or "other power." While tariki refers to the practitioner's reliance on the power or grace of the buddha AMITĀBHA, jiriki is often used pejoratively to refer to practices requiring personal effort, such as keeping the precepts (sĪLA) and cultivating the six perfections (PĀRAMITĀ). Reliance on jiriki was often condemned as a difficult path to enlightenment, especially as compared to practices based on tariki, such as reciting Amitābha's name (J. nenbutsu; see C. NIANFO). Exegetes also attempted to underscore the futility of jiriki practices by suggesting that the world was currently in the mappo (C. MOFA), or dharma-ending age, when personal power alone was no longer sufficient to bring one to enlightenment, requiring instead the intervention of an external force. The jiriki-tariki dichotomy was often used polemically by Jodoshu and Jodo Shinshu exegetes to condemn the practices of rival Japanese traditions, such as the TENDAISHu and ZENSHu, which they claimed were ineffective in the current degenerate age of the dharma.

List Enhanced ::: (operating system, tool) An MS-DOS file browsing utility written by Vern Buerg in 1983. A former mainframe systems programmer, Buerg wrote DOS utilities mainframes. The software became an instant success, and his list utility was in use on an estimated 5 million PCs. . (1997-05-16)

List Enhanced "operating system, tool" An {MS-DOS} file browsing utility written by Vern Buerg in 1983. A former {mainframe} systems programmer, Buerg wrote DOS utilities when he began using an {IBM PC} and missed the file-scanning ability he had on mainframes. The software became an instant success, and his list utility was in use on an estimated 5 million PCs. {shareware version (http://buerg.com/ftp.html)}. (1997-05-16)

locals ::: The users on one's local network (as opposed, say, to people one reaches via public Internet or UUCP connections). The marked thing about this usage is how little it has to do with real-space distance. I have to do some tweaking on this mail utility before releasing it to the locals. (1994-11-29)

locals The users on one's local network (as opposed, say, to people one reaches via public {Internet} or {UUCP} connections). The marked thing about this usage is how little it has to do with real-space distance. "I have to do some tweaking on this mail utility before releasing it to the locals." (1994-11-29)

lzexe ::: An executable file compression utility for MS-DOS. It adds a minimal header to the executable to decompress it when it is executed. See also pklite.

lzexe An executable file {compression} utility for {MS-DOS}. It adds a minimal header to the executable to decompress it when it is executed. See also {pklite}.

magic number "jargon, programming" 1. In {source code}, some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line ({hard-coded}), rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a commented "

magic number ::: (jargon, programming) 1. In source code, some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line (hard-coded), rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a commented

Mainstream_economics ::: is a term used to describe schools of economic thought considered to be orthodox. Many of the underlying categories within and concepts central to mainstream economics are readily taught at universities. Many of the underpinning models and beliefs are based on concepts that involve economic scarcity, the role of governmental regulation or other action in effecting an actor's decision, the concept of utility and the idea that people are purely rational actors who will make decisions that are based purely on available information and not emotion.

Marginal utility - The additional satisfaction obtained by a consumer from consuming one unit more of a good or service; mathematically, the rate of change of utility with respect to consumption.

Marginal consumer surplus - The excess of utility from the consumption of one more unit of good.

Marginal disutility of work - The extra sacrifice or hardship to a worker of working an extra unit ( time in any given time period (e.g. an extra hour. per day).

memory ::: “… memory is only a process of consciousness, a utility; it cannot be the substance of being or the whole of our personality: it is simply one of the workings of consciousness as radiation is one of the workings of Light.” The Life Divine

microfortnight ::: One millionth of the fundamental unit of time in the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of measurement; 1.2096 sec. (A furlong is 1/8th of a mile; a firkin is 1/4th of a barrel; the mass unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of water).The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and time at boot if it realises that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in microfortnights!Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and nanofortnight have also been reported.

microfortnight One millionth of the fundamental unit of time in the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of measurement; 1.2096 sec. (A furlong is 1/8th of a mile; a firkin is 1/4th of a barrel; the mass unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of water). The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and time at boot if it realises that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in microfortnights! Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and {nanofortnight} have also been reported.

Microsoft Basic ::: (language) (MS-BASIC) A dialect of BASIC from Microsoft, originally developed by Bill Gates in a garage back in the CP/M days. It was originally known as GWBasic, then QBASIC and finally MS-BASIC.When the MS-DOS operating system came out, it incorporated the GWBASIC.EXE or BASICA.EXE interpreters. GWBASIC (Gee Whiz) incorporated graphics and a screen editor and was compatible with earlier BASICs.QBASIC was more sophisticated. Version 4.5 had a full screen editor, debugger and compiler. The compiler could also produce executable files but to run these a utility program (BRUN44.EXE) had to be present. Thus source code could be kept private.From DOS 5.0 or 6.0 onward, MS-BASIC was standard.Current version: 1.1, also produces stand-alone executables and can display graphics.Usenet newsgroup: comp.lang.basic.misc.[Relationship to BASIC in ROM on first IBM PC?] (1995-05-12)

Microsoft Basic "language" (MS-BASIC) A dialect of {BASIC} from {Microsoft}, originally developed by {Bill Gates} in a garage back in the {CP/M} days. It was originally known as GWBasic, then QBASIC and finally MS-BASIC. When the {MS-DOS} {operating system} came out, it incorporated the GWBASIC.EXE or BASICA.EXE interpreters. GWBASIC ("Gee Whiz") incorporated graphics and a {screen editor} and was compatible with earlier BASICs. QBASIC was more sophisticated. Version 4.5 had a full screen editor, debugger and compiler. The compiler could also produce executable files but to run these a utility program (BRUN44.EXE) had to be present. Thus {source code} could be kept private. From DOS 5.0 or 6.0 onward, MS-BASIC was standard. Version 1.1 produced {stand-alone} executables and could display graphics. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.lang.basic.misc}. [Relationship to BASIC in ROM on first IBM PC?] (1995-05-12)

MUMPS "language" (Or "M") Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System. A programming language with extensive tools for the support of {database management systems}. MUMPS was originally used for medical records and is now widely used where multiple users access the same databases simultaneously, e.g. banks, stock exchanges, travel agencies, hospitals. Early MUMPS implementations for {PDP-11} and {IBM PC} were complete {operating systems}, as well as programming languages, but current-day implementations usually run under a normal host {operating system}. A MUMPS program hardly ever explicitly performs low-level operations such as opening a file - there are programming constructs in the language that will do so implicitly, and most MUMPS programmers are not even aware of the {operating system} activity that MUMPS performs. Syntactically MUMPS has only one data-type: strings. Semantically, the language has many data-types: text strings, {binary strings}, {floating point} values, {integer} values, {Boolean} values. Interpretation of strings is done inside functions, or implicitly while applying mathematical {operators}. Since many operations involve only moving data from one location to another, it is faster to just move uninterpreted strings. Of course, when a value is used multiple times in the context of arithmetical operations, optimised implementations will typically save the numerical value of the string. MUMPS was designed for portability. Currently, it is possible to share the same MUMPS database between radically different architectures, because all values are stored as text strings. The worst an implementation may have to do is swap pairs of bytes. Such multi-CPU databases are actually in use, some offices share databases between {VAX}, {DEC Alpha}, {SUN}, {IBM PC} and {HP} {workstations}. Versions of MUMPS are available on practically all {hardware}, from the smallest ({IBM PC}, {Apple Macintosh}, {Acorn} {Archimedes}), to the largest {mainframe}. MSM ({Micronetics Standard MUMPS}) runs on {IBM PC RT} and {R6000}; DSM (Digital Standard Mumps) on the {PDP-11}, {VAX}, {DEC Alpha}, and {Windows-NT}; {Datatree MUMPS} from {InterSystems} runs on {IBM PC}; and {MGlobal MUMPS} on the {Macintosh}. Multi-{platform} versions include {M/SQL}, available from {InterSystems}, {PFCS} "mumps@pfcs.com" and {MSM}. {Greystone Technologies}' GT/M runs on {VAX} and {DEC Alpha}. This is a compiler whereas the others are {interpreters}. {GT/SQL} is their {SQL} pre-processor. ISO standard 11756 (1991). ANSI standard: "MUMPS Language Standard", X11.1 (1977, 1984, 1990, 1995?). The MUMPS User's Group was the {M Technology Association}. {Usenet} newsgroups: {news:comp.lang.mumps}. (2003-06-04)

MUMPS ::: (language) (Or M) Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System.A programming language with extensive tools for the support of database management systems. MUMPS was originally used for medical records and is now widely used where multiple users access the same databases simultaneously, e.g. banks, stock exchanges, travel agencies, hospitals.Early MUMPS implementations for PDP-11 and IBM PC were complete operating systems, as well as programming languages, but current-day implementations usually run under a normal host operating system.A MUMPS program hardly ever explicitly performs low-level operations such as opening a file - there are programming constructs in the language that will do so implicitly, and most MUMPS programmers are not even aware of the operating system activity that MUMPS performs.Syntactically MUMPS has only one data-type: strings. Semantically, the language has many data-types: text strings, binary strings, floating point values, times in the context of arithmetical operations, optimised implementations will typically save the numerical value of the string.MUMPS was designed for portability. Currently, it is possible to share the same MUMPS database between radically different architectures, because all values are of bytes. Such multi-CPU databases are actually in use, some offices share databases between VAX, DEC Alpha, SUN, IBM PC and HP workstations.Versions of MUMPS are available on practically all hardware, from the smallest (IBM PC, Apple Macintosh, Acorn Archimedes), to the largest mainframe. MSM versions include M/SQL, available from InterSystems, PFCS and MSM.Greystone Technologies' GT/M runs on VAX and DEC Alpha. This is a compiler whereas the others are interpreters. GT/SQL is their SQL pre-processor.ISO standard 11756 (1991). ANSI standard: MUMPS Language Standard, X11.1 (1977, 1984, 1990, 1995?).The MUMPS User's Group was the M Technology Association.Usenet newsgroups: comp.lang.mumps.(2003-06-04)

My Favourite Toy Language ::: (jargon, language) (MFTL) Describes a talk on a programming language design that is heavy on syntax (with lots of BNF), sometimes even talks about and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content. Well, it was a typical MFTL talk.2. A language about which the developers are passionate (often to the point of prosyletic zeal) but no one else cares about. Applied to the language by those outside the originating group. He cornered me about type resolution in his MFTL.The first great goal in the mind of the designer of an MFTL is usually to write a compiler for it, then bootstrap the design away from contamination by lesser compiler?. On the other hand, a language that *cannot* be used to write its own compiler is beneath contempt.Doug McIlroy once proposed a test of the generality and utility of a language and the operating system under which it is compiled: Is the output of a Fortran to have worked only under modern systems which lack OS-supported and -imposed file types.See break-even point, toolsmith. (1995-03-07)

My Favourite Toy Language "jargon, language" (MFTL) Describes a talk on a {programming language} design that is heavy on {syntax} (with lots of {BNF}), sometimes even talks about {semantics} (e.g. {type systems}), but rarely, if ever, has any content (see {content-free}). More broadly applied to talks - even when the topic is not a programming language --- in which the subject matter is gone into in unnecessary and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content. "Well, it was a typical MFTL talk". 2. A language about which the developers are passionate (often to the point of prosyletic zeal) but no one else cares about. Applied to the language by those outside the originating group. "He cornered me about type resolution in his MFTL." The first great goal in the mind of the designer of an MFTL is usually to write a compiler for it, then bootstrap the design away from contamination by lesser languages by writing a compiler for it in itself. Thus, the standard put-down question at an MFTL talk is "Has it been used for anything besides its own compiler?". On the other hand, a language that *cannot* be used to write its own compiler is beneath contempt. {Doug McIlroy} once proposed a test of the generality and utility of a language and the {operating system} under which it is compiled: "Is the output of a {Fortran} program acceptable as input to the Fortran compiler?" In other words, can you write programs that write programs? Alarming numbers of (language, OS) pairs fail this test, particularly when the language is Fortran. Aficionados are quick to point out that {Unix} (even using Fortran) passes it handily. That the test could ever be failed is only surprising to those who have had the good fortune to have worked only under modern systems which lack OS-supported and -imposed "file types". See {break-even point}, {toolsmith}. (1995-03-07)

Neo-Idealism: Primarily a name given unofficially to the Italian school of neo-Hegelianism headed by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, founded on a basic distinction that it proposes between two kinds of "concrete universals" (s.v.). In addition to the Hegelian concrete universal, conceived as a dialectical synthesis of two abstract opposltes, is posited a second type in which the component elements are "concretes" rather than dialectical abstracts, i.e. possess relative mutual independence and lack the characteristic of logical opposition. The living forms of Mind, both theoretical and practical, are universal in this latter sense. This implies that fine art, utility, and ethics do not comprise a dialectical series with philosophy at their head, i.e. they are not inferior forms of metaphysics. Thus neo-Idealism rejects Hegel's panlogism. It also repudiates his doctrine of the relative independence of Nature, the timeless transcendence of the Absolute with respect to the historical process, and the view that at any point of history a logically final embodiment of the Absolute Idea is achieved. -- W.L.

Nirgrantha-JNātīputra. (P. Nigantha-Nātaputta; T. Gcer bu pa gnyen gyi bu; C. Nijiantuo Ruotizi; J. Nikenda'nyakudaishi; K. Nigonda Yajeja 尼揵陀若提子) (599-527 BCE). The name commonly used in Buddhist texts to refer to the leader of the JAINA group of non-Buddhists (TĪRTHIKA), also known by his title MAHĀVĪRA (Great Victor). In Pāli sources, Nātaputta (as he is usually called) is portrayed as the Buddha's senior contemporary. He teaches a practice called the fourfold restraint, enjoining his followers to be restrained regarding water, to be restrained regarding evil, to wash away evil, and to live in the realization that evil was held at bay; a person who could perfect the fourfold restraint was called free from bonds (P. nigantha; S. NIRGRANTHA). Like the Buddha and the leaders of many other renunciant (P. sāmana, S. sRAMAnA) sects, Nātaputta claimed omniscience. According to Buddhist accounts, he taught that the consequences of past deeds could be eradicated only through severe penance. He also taught that the accrual of future consequences could be prevented only through the suspension of action. The cessation of action would lead to the cessation of suffering and feeling, and with this the individual would be freed from the cycle of rebirth. In Pāli materials, Nātaputta is portrayed in a most unfavorable light and his teachings are severely ridiculed, suggesting that in the early years of the Buddhist community the Jainas were formidable opponents and competitors of the Buddhists. Nātaputta is described as often declaring the postmortem fate of his deceased disciples, although he did not in fact know it. He is said to have been irritable and resentful, and unable to answer difficult questions. His disciple CITTA abandoned him for this reason and became a follower of the Buddha. In fact, Nātaputta is described as losing many followers to the Buddha, the most famous of whom was the householder UPĀLI. Nātaputta was convinced that Upāli could resist the Buddha's charisma and defeat him in argument. When he discovered that Upāli, too, had lost the debate and accepted the Buddha as his teacher, he vomited blood in rage and died soon thereafter. Buddhist sources claim that, on his deathbed, Nātaputta realized the futility of his own teachings and hoped that his followers would accept the Buddha as their teacher. In order to sow the discord that would result in their conversion, Nātaputta taught contradictory doctrines at the end of his life, teaching one disciple that his view was a form of annihilationism and another that his view was a form of eternalism. As a result, the Nigantha sect fell into discord and fragmented soon after his death. (This account, predictably, does not appear in Jaina sources.) News of Nātaputta's death prompted Sāriputta (S. sĀRIPUTRA) to recite a synopsis of the Buddha's teachings to the assembled SAMGHA in a discourse titled SAnGĪTISUTTA. Nātaputta is often listed in Buddhist texts as one of six non-Buddhist (tīrthika) teachers. See NIRGRANTHA; JAINA.

Novell DOS ::: (operating system, product) Novell's fully compatible alternative to MS-DOS. It is intended as an operating system for workstations on Novell networking using the same DOS Requester and VLMs for a common client with native Novell NetWare.A data compression utility effectively doubles storage capacity of the hard disk. It supports disk defragmentation, a read/write disk cache for better reference guide, command help, and menu-driven install and setup utilities for easy configuration changes.Novell DOS has internal and external commands like MS-DOS. The following commands have been significantly enhanced in Novell DOS: CHKDSK, DISKCOPY, HELP, MEM, REPLACE, UNDELETE, and XCOPY. Novell DOS also includes many new commands such as XDIR, CURSOR, XDEL, TOUCH, SCRIPT, and RENDIR.Version: 7. (1995-04-14)

Novell DOS "operating system, product" {Novell}'s fully compatible alternative to {MS-DOS}. It is intended as an {operating system} for {workstations} on {Novell} networks. It features enhanced {memory management} that moves the operating system, {network drivers}, and {memory-resident programs} ({TSRs}) out of conventional memory on all systems with an {Intel 80286} or later processor and {extended memory} or {expanded memory}. It supports {preemptive multitasking} and {peer-to-peer networking} using the same {DOS Requester} and {VLMs} for a "common client" with native {Novell NetWare}. A data {compression} utility effectively doubles storage capacity of the hard disk. It supports disk {defragmentation}, a read/write {disk cache} for better performance of both DOS and {Microsoft Windows} {application programs}. An undelete utility recovers erased files, even on network drives. It has a complete on-line reference guide, command help, and menu-driven install and setup utilities for easy configuration changes. Novell DOS has internal and external commands like {MS-DOS}. The following commands have been significantly enhanced in Novell DOS: CHKDSK, DISKCOPY, HELP, MEM, REPLACE, UNDELETE, and XCOPY. Novell DOS also includes many new commands such as XDIR, CURSOR, XDEL, TOUCH, SCRIPT, and RENDIR. Version: 7. (1995-04-14)

nslookup ::: A Unix utility by Andrew Cherenson for querying Internet domain name servers. The basic use is to find the Internet address corresponding to a given hostname well-known services. Other types (ANY, AXFR, MB, MD, MF, NULL) are described in RFC 1035. . (1994-10-27)

nslookup "networking" A {Unix} {utility program}, originally by Andrew Cherenson, for querying {Internet} {domain name servers}. The basic use is to find the {IP address} corresponding to a given {hostname} (or vice versa). By changing the query type (e.g. "set type=CNAME") other types of information can be obtained including CNAME - the {canonical name} for an alias; HINFO - the host {CPU} and {operating system} type; MINFO - mailbox or mail list information; {MX} - {mail exchanger} information; NS - the {name server} for the named zone; PTR - the hostname if the query is an IP address, otherwise the pointer to other information; SOA the domain's start-of-authority information; TXT - text information; UINFO - user information; WKS - supported {well-known services}. Other types (ANY, AXFR, MB, MD, MF, NULL) are described in {RFC 1035}. {(ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing/operating-systems/unix/bsd-sources/usr.sbin/named/tools/nslookup/)}. (1994-10-27)

nugacity ::: n. --> Futility; trifling talk or behavior; drollery.

padded cell Where you put {lusers} so they can't hurt anything. A program that limits a luser to a carefully restricted subset of the capabilities of the host system (for example, the "{rsh}" utility on {USG Unix}). Note that this is different from an {iron box} because it is overt and not aimed at enforcing security so much as protecting others (and the {luser}) from the consequences of the luser's boundless naivet'e (see {naive}). Also "padded cell environment". [{Jargon File}] (1994-11-30)

Pascal "language" (After the French mathematician {Blaise Pascal} (1623-1662)) A programming language designed by {Niklaus Wirth} around 1970. Pascal was designed for simplicity and for teaching programming, in reaction to the complexity of {ALGOL 68}. It emphasises {structured programming} constructs, data structures and {strong typing}. Innovations included {enumeration types}, {subranges}, sets, {variant records}, and the {case statement}. Pascal has been extremely influential in programming language design and has a great number of variants and descendants. ANSI/IEEE770X3.97-1993 is very similar to {ISO Pascal} but does not include {conformant arrays}. ISO 7185-1983(E). Level 0 and Level 1. Changes from Jensen & Wirth's Pascal include name equivalence; names must be bound before they are used; loop index must be local to the procedure; formal procedure parameters must include their arguments; {conformant array schemas}. An ALGOL-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and {Ada} (see also {bondage-and-discipline language}). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of {K&R} fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favourite Programming Language", which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after ten years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote: 9. There is no escape This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed. People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for {separate compilation}, Fortran-like COMMON, string data types, internal static variables, initialisation, {octal} numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others. I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming. Pascal has since been almost entirely displaced (by {C}) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, but retains some popularity as a hobbyist language in the {MS-DOS} and {Macintosh} worlds. See also {Kamin's interpreters}, {p2c}. ["The Programming Language Pascal", N. Wirth, Acta Informatica 1:35-63, 1971]. ["PASCAL User Manual and Report", K. Jensen & N. Wirth, Springer 1975] made significant revisions to the language. [BS 6192, "Specification for Computer Programming Language Pascal", {British Standards Institute} 1982]. [{Jargon File}] (1996-06-12)

Pascal ::: (language) (After the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)) A programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth around 1970. Pascal was designed records, and the case statement. Pascal has been extremely influential in programming language design and has a great number of variants and descendants.ANSI/IEEE770X3.97-1993 is very similar to ISO Pascal but does not include conformant arrays.ISO 7185-1983(E). Level 0 and Level 1. Changes from Jensen & Wirth's Pascal include name equivalence; names must be bound before they are used; loop index must be local to the procedure; formal procedure parameters must include their arguments; conformant array schemas.An ALGOL-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, bondage-and-discipline languages. At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:9. There is no escapeThis last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the standard procedures. The language is closed.People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others.I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming.Pascal has since been almost entirely displaced (by C) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, but retains some popularity as a hobbyist language in the MS-DOS and Macintosh worlds.See also Kamin's interpreters, p2c.[The Programming Language Pascal, N. Wirth, Acta Informatica 1:35-63, 1971].[PASCAL User Manual and Report, K. Jensen & N. Wirth, Springer 1975] made significant revisions to the language.[BS 6192, Specification for Computer Programming Language Pascal, British Standards Institute 1982].[Jargon File] (1996-06-12)

patch ::: (software) 1. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a quick-and-dirty remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A patch may or may not directly to the binary executable of a program originally written in an HLL. Compare one-line fix.2. To insert a patch into a piece of code.3. [in the Unix world] A diff.4. A set of modifications to binaries to be applied by a patching program. IBM systems often receive updates to the operating system in the form of absolute on top of them (patches were said to grow scar tissue). The result was often a convoluted patch space and headaches galore.There is a classic story of a tiger team penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any patches installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures.5. Larry Wall's patch utility, which automatically applies a patch to a set of source code or other text files. Patch accepts input in any of the four forms to those on which the diffs were based, patch uses heuristics to determine how to proceed.Diff and patch are the standard way of producing and applying updates under Unix. Both have been ported to other operating systems. .[Jargon File](2005-05-16)

patch "software" 1. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a {quick-and-dirty} remedy to an existing {bug} or {misfeature}. A patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be incorporated permanently into the program. Distinguished from a {diff} or {mod} by the fact that a patch is generated by more primitive means than the rest of the program; the classical examples are instructions modified by using the front panel switches, and changes made directly to the binary executable of a program originally written in an {HLL}. Compare {one-line fix}. 2. To insert a patch into a piece of code. 3. [in the Unix world] A {diff}. 4. A set of modifications to binaries to be applied by a patching program. {IBM} systems often receive updates to the {operating system} in the form of absolute {hexadecimal} patches. If you have modified your OS, you have to disassemble these back to the {source code}. The patches might later be corrected by other patches on top of them (patches were said to "grow scar tissue"). The result was often a convoluted {patch space} and headaches galore. There is a classic story of a {tiger team} penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any patches that you can't - or don't - inspect and examine before installing). They couldn't find any {trap doors} or any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures. 5. {Larry Wall}'s "patch" {utility program}, which automatically applies a patch to a set of {source code} or other text files. Patch accepts input in any of the four forms output by the {Unix} {diff} utility. When the files being patched are not identical to those on which the diffs were based, patch uses {heuristics} to determine how to proceed. Diff and patch are the standard way of producing and applying updates under {Unix}. Both have been ported to other {operating systems}. {Patch Home (http://gnu.org/software/patch/patch.html)}. [{Jargon File}] (2005-05-16)

pattern matching 1. A function is defined to take arguments of a particular type, form or value. When applying the function to its actual arguments it is necessary to match the type, form or value of the actual arguments against the formal arguments in some definition. For example, the function length []   = 0 length (x:xs) = 1 + length xs uses pattern matching in its argument to distinguish a null list from a non-null one. There are well known {algorithm} for translating pattern matching into conditional expressions such as "if" or "case". E.g. the above function could be transformed to length l = case l of [] -" 0 x:xs -" 1 : length xs Pattern matching is usually performed in textual order though there are languages which match more specific patterns before less specific ones. 2. Descriptive of a type of language or utility such as {awk} or {Perl} which is suited to searching for strings or patterns in input data, usually using some kind of {regular expression}. (1994-11-28)

pattern matching ::: 1. A function is defined to take arguments of a particular type, form or value. When applying the function to its actual arguments it is necessary to match the type, form or value of the actual arguments against the formal arguments in some definition. For example, the function length [] = 0length (x:xs) = 1 + length xs uses pattern matching in its argument to distinguish a null list from a non-null one.There are well known algorithm for translating pattern matching into conditional expressions such as if or case. E.g. the above function could be transformed to length l = case l of[] -> 0 languages which match more specific patterns before less specific ones.2. Descriptive of a type of language or utility such as awk or Perl which is suited to searching for strings or patterns in input data, usually using some kind of regular expression. (1994-11-28)

PCI Configuration Utility "tool" (PCU) A piece of {software} for configuring a specific {PCI} {hardware} device. [What software? What hardware?] (1998-11-22)

PCI Configuration Utility ::: (tool) (PCU) A piece of software for configuring a specific PCI hardware device.[What software? What hardware?] (1998-11-22)

PCU {PCI Configuration Utility}

PDP-7 ::: (computer) A minicomputer sold by DEC in 1964. It had a memory cycle time of 1.75 microseconds and add time of 4 microseconds. I/O included a keyboard, printer, paper-tape and dual transport DECtape drives (type 555).DEC provided an advanced Fortran II compiler, a Symbolic Assembler, Editor, DDT Debugging System, Maintenance routines and a library of arithmetic, utility and programming aids developed on the program-compatible PDP-4.[DEC sales brochure].The PDP-7 was considered reliable enough (when properly programmed) to be used for control of nuclear reactors and such.Around 1970 Ken Thompson built the operating system that became Unix on a scavenged PDP-7 so he could play a descendant of the SPACEWAR game. (1995-03-10)

PDP-7 "computer" A minicomputer sold by DEC in 1964. It had a memory cycle time of 1.75 microseconds and add time of 4 microseconds. I/O included a keyboard, printer, {paper-tape} and dual transport DECtape drives (type 555). DEC provided an "advanced" {Fortran II} {compiler}, a Symbolic {Assembler}, Editor, {DDT} Debugging System, Maintenance routines and a library of arithmetic, utility and programming aids developed on the program-compatible {PDP-4}. [DEC sales brochure]. The PDP-7 was considered reliable enough (when properly programmed) to be used for control of nuclear reactors and such. Around 1970 {Ken Thompson} built the {operating system} that became {Unix} on a scavenged {PDP-7} so he could play a descendant of the {SPACEWAR} game. (1995-03-10)

PIP ::: (tool) Peripheral Interchange Program.A program on CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, TOPS-10, and OS/8 (derived from a utility on the PDP-6) that was used for file copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about atlatl for a spear-thrower, with connotations of utility and primitivity that were no doubt quite intentional).See also BLT, dd, cat.[Jargon File] (1995-03-28)

PIP "tool" Peripheral Interchange Program. A program on {CP/M}, {RSX-11}, {RSTS/E}, {TOPS-10}, and {OS/8} (derived from a utility on the {PDP-6}) that was used for file copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about every other file operation you might want to do). It is said that when the program was written, during the development of the PDP-6 in 1963, it was called ATLATL ("Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord"; this played on the Nahuatl word "atlatl" for a spear-thrower, with connotations of utility and primitivity that were no doubt quite intentional). See also {BLT}, {dd}, {cat}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-03-28)

PKLITE "compression, tool" An executable file {compression} utility for {MS-DOS} from {PKWARE, Inc.}. PKLITE compresses the body of the executable and adds a small, fast decompress routine in the header. In many cases it performs better than {lzexe}. With {headpack} the output is smaller and cannot be decompressed. (1999-01-07)

PKLITE ::: (compression, tool) An executable file compression utility for MS-DOS from PKWARE, Inc.. PKLITE compresses the body of the executable and adds a small, fast decompress routine in the header. In many cases it performs better than lzexe. With headpack the output is smaller and cannot be decompressed. (1999-01-07)

PKZIP "tool" A file {compression} and archiver utility for {MS-DOS} and {Microsoft Windows} from {PKWARE, Inc.}. PKZIP uses a variation on the {sliding window} compression {algorithm}. It comes with {pkunzip} and {pklite} and is available as {shareware} from most {FTP archives} in a self-expanding {MS-DOS} executable. Current versions as of 1999-10-07: PKZIP 2.60 GUI for {Microsoft Windows 3.1}x, {Windows 9x}, {Windows NT}; PKZIP 2.50 Command Line for Windows 9x NT; PKZIP 2.04g for {MS-DOS}; PKZIP 2.51 for {Unix}, ({Linux}, {SPARC} {Solaris}, {Digital}, {HP-UX}, {IBM AIX} and {SCO} Unix); PKZIP 2.50 for {OS/2}; PKZIP for {Open VMS}/{VAX}. {WINZIP} is a version with a {GUI} for {Microsoft Windows}. A distribution in about 1995-06-22 claiming to be "PKZIP 3" was actually a {Trojan horse} which attempted to reformat the hard disk and delete all files on it. {(http://pkware.com/catalog/pkzip_win.html)}. [Status, history of WINZIP, PKLITE?] (1999-01-16)

PKZIP ::: (tool) A file compression and archiver utility for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows from PKWARE, Inc.. PKZIP uses a variation on the sliding window compression algorithm. It comes with pkunzip and pklite and is available as shareware from most FTP archives in a self-expanding MS-DOS executable.Current versions as of 1999-10-07: PKZIP 2.60 GUI for Microsoft Windows 3.1x, Windows 9x, Windows NT; PKZIP 2.50 Command Line for Windows 9x NT; PKZIP 2.04g for MS-DOS; PKZIP 2.51 for Unix, (Linux, SPARC Solaris, Digital, HP-UX, IBM AIX and SCO Unix); PKZIP 2.50 for OS/2; PKZIP for Open VMS/VAX.WINZIP is a version with a GUI for Microsoft Windows.A distribution in about 1995-06-22 claiming to be PKZIP 3 was actually a trojan horse which attempted to reformat the hard disk and delete all files on it. .[Status, history of WINZIP, PKLITE?] (1999-01-16)

plumbing ::: (Unix) Term used for shell code, so called because of the prevalence of pipelines that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other operating systems such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities.The tee utility is specifically designed for plumbing.[Jargon File] (1995-02-23)

plumbing (Unix) Term used for {shell} code, so called because of the prevalence of "{pipelines}" that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under {Unix}, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temporary file {grind}ing encapsulated in a {shell script}. This is much less effort than writing {C} every time, and the capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other {operating systems} such as {IBM}'s {VM/CMS} support similar facilities. The {tee} utility is specifically designed for plumbing. [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-23)

pragmatism ::: A philosophy that originated in the United States in the late 19th century. Pragmatism is characterized by the insistence on consequences, utility and practicality as vital components of meaning and truth. Pragmatism objects to the view that human concepts and intellect represent reality, and therefore stands in opposition to both formalist and rationalist schools of philosophy. Rather, pragmatism holds that it is only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that theories acquire significance, and only with a theory's success in this struggle that it becomes true.

Primal Utility: The psychological hypermath juncture between human desire and reality physics; in short, the Syndicate’s version of the Prime Sphere.

raks.asa (rakshasa) ::: same as raks.as; giant, ogre; a kind of anti-divine raksasa being of the middle vital plane; the fifth of the ten types of consciousness (dasa-gavas) in the evolutionary scale: mind concentrated on the thinking manas (sensational mind). It is the raks.asa "who first begins really to think, but his thought is . . . egoistic & turned towards sensation", seeking "a gross egoistic satisfaction in all the life of the mind, prana & body"; the "divine use of the Rakshasa force" would come when it is "changed from a nervous egoism to a sort of powerful dynamic utility on that plane".

rc ::: 1. (filename extension) (run commands) The filename extension common to many Unix configuration files, e.g. .newsrc, .cshrc, .twmrc, elmrc, etc.The suffix rc derives from a script-creation utility in CTSS called runcom (for run commands). .2. A shell from AT&T's Plan 9, by Tom Duff. rc offers much the same capabilities as a traditional Bourne shell, but with a much cleaner syntax.An open source reimplementation was made by Byron Rakitzis, and is now maintained by Tim Goodwin .Latest version: 1.6, as of 2000-06-15. .(2000-06-17)

rcp "networking, tool" (Remote copy) The {Unix} utility for copying files over {Ethernet}. Rcp is similar to {FTP} but uses the {hosts.equiv} user authentication method. {Unix manual page}: rcp(1). (1997-01-12)

rcp ::: (networking, tool) (Remote copy) The Unix utility for copying files over Ethernet. Rcp is similar to FTP but uses the hosts.equiv user authentication method.Unix manual page: rcp(1). (1997-01-12)

retrocomputing /ret'-roh-k*m-pyoo'ting/ Refers to emulations of way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or software, or implementations of never-was-state-of-the-art; especially if such implementations are elaborate practical jokes and/or parodies, written mostly for {hack value}, of more "serious" designs. Perhaps the most widely distributed retrocomputing utility was the "pnch(6)" or "bcd(6)" program on V7 and other early Unix versions, which would accept up to 80 characters of text argument and display the corresponding pattern in {punched card} code. Other well-known retrocomputing hacks have included the programming language {INTERCAL}, a {JCL}-emulating shell for Unix, the card-punch-emulating editor named 029, and various elaborate {PDP-11} hardware emulators and RT-11 OS emulators written just to keep an old, sourceless {Zork} binary running. [{Jargon File}]

rlogin "networking, tool" (Remote login) The {4.2BSD} {Unix} utility to allow a user to log in on another {host} via a network. Rlogin communicates with a {daemon} on the remote host. {Unix manual page}: rlogin(1). See also {telnet}. (1997-01-12)

rlogin ::: (networking, tool) (Remote login) The 4.2BSD Unix utility to allow a user to log in on another host via a network. Rlogin communicates with a daemon on the remote host.Unix manual page: rlogin(1).See also telnet. (1997-01-12)

run commands "operating system" The expansion of the file name suffix, "rc", common to many {Unix} configuration files, e.g. {.newsrc}, {.cshrc}, {.twmrc}, elmrc, etc. Always abbreviated to /R C/ when spoken. Note, "rc" is not a typical {filename extension} as it doesn't start with a {dot}. The suffix "rc" derives from a script-creation utility in {CTSS} called "{runcom}". {Unix FAQ (http://cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/unix-faq/faq/top.html)}. (2014-11-19)

saMvṛtisatya. (P. sammutisacca; T. kun rdzob bden pa; C. shisu di/sudi; J. sezokutai/zokutai; K. sesok che/sokche 世俗諦/俗諦). In Buddhist Sanskrit, "conventional truth" or "relative truth"; the term carries the pejorative connotation of deception, concealment, and obscuration. Conventional truth (saMvṛtisatya) and ultimate truth (PARAMĀRTHASATYA) constitute the "two truths" (SATYADVAYA), a philosophical bifurcation that is widely referenced and analyzed in Buddhism. All dharmas are said to be included in one of these two categories. SaMvṛtisatya is variously defined by the Buddhist philosophical schools, but it is generally understood to refer to objects of ordinary experience that involve misperceptions tainted by ignorance, in distinction to the true or ultimate nature of those objects, which are ultimate truths (paramārthasatya). It is important to note that conventional truths, although misperceived, nonetheless exist conventionally or have conventional utility. The object of the most consequential misconception, a perduring self (ĀTMAN), is not a conventional truth because it is utterly nonexistent. SaMvṛtisatya is also understood to mean the unavoidable domain through which sentient beings must navigate and communicate with one another in the mundane world. Thus buddhas and BODHISATTVAs use their knowledge of conventional truths to teach unenlightened beings and lead them away from suffering. Some Buddhist schools further subdivide saMvṛtisatya into two categories: tathyasaMvṛtisatya (correct conventional truth) and atathyasaMvṛtisatya (or mithyāsaMvṛtisatya, incorrect or false conventional truth), a distinction based upon whether or not the object can perform functions in accordance with their appearance. For example, a face would be a tathyasaMvṛtisatya but a reflection of a face in a mirror would be a mithyāsaMvṛtisatya.

Scheme Library "library" (SLIB) A portable {Scheme} library providing compatibiliy and utility functions for all standard Scheme implementations. Version 2c5 supports {Bigloo}, {Chez}, {ELK}, {GAMBIT}, {MacScheme}, {MITScheme}, {PocketScheme}, {RScheme}, {Scheme-"C}, {Scheme48}, {SCM}, {SCSH}, {T3.1}, {UMB-Scheme}, and {VSCM}. {(http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/SLIB.html)}. (1999-06-07)

Scheme Library ::: (library) (SLIB) A portable Scheme library providing compatibiliy and utility functions for all standard Scheme implementations.Version 2c5 supports Bigloo, Chez, ELK, GAMBIT, MacScheme, MITScheme, PocketScheme, RScheme, Scheme->C, Scheme48, SCM, SCSH, T3.1, UMB-Scheme, and VSCM. . (1999-06-07)

screen ::: 1. (hardware) A generic term for a display device that shows text and/or images on a roughly flat rectangular surface. The most common type is usually displays have, since around 2000, become increasingly competitive in price and performance.(2005-07-28)2. A screen multiplexer utility which lets you run multiple interactive terminal sessions (and curses programs) through a single terminal connection (on one virtual console, one terminal, through one modem link, telnet session or xterm).Screen can detach processes from one terminal and attach them to another. Auto-detach lets you continue working after being disconnected and reconnected. It supports keyboard driven cut and paste from any text and/or curses application (like Lynx) to any other (like xemacs).Screen comes with many Linux distributions and is available (free) on many other Unix platforms.(2005-07-29)

screen 1. "hardware" A generic term for a {display device} that shows text and/or images on a roughly flat rectangular surface. The most common type is usually refered to as a "{monitor}" and is based on a {cathode-ray tube}, though {flat panel} displays have, since around 2000, become increasingly competitive in price and performance. (2005-07-28) 2. A {screen multiplexer} utility which lets you run multiple {interactive} {terminal sessions} (and {curses} programs) through a single terminal connection (on one {virtual console}, one terminal, through one {modem} link, {telnet} session or {xterm}). Screen can detach processes from one terminal and attach them to another. "Auto-detach" lets you continue working after being disconnected and reconnected. It supports keyboard driven cut and paste from any text and/or curses application (like {Lynx}) to any other (like {xemacs}). Screen comes with many {Linux} distributions and is available (free) on many other {Unix} {platforms}. (2005-07-29)

Selfishness Making the gratification of the personal self or ego the paramount aim in conduct; a disregard of the interests of others. While individualism is a necessary stage in evolution, yet humanity on the upward arc of evolution is on the road towards realization of the essential unity of all selves. Hence selfishness is our greatest obstacle in spiritual unfolding or development. It is not its grosser manifestations that are most harmful, but the subtler forms in which it may wear the mask of the virtues. It is overcome by aspiration towards the source of our being, by recognizing the barrenness and futility of self-seeking and its destructive results, and by the cultivation of that primal instinct of altruism which is at the heart of every being.

shar ::: (tool, file format) (Shell archive, after ar and tar) Any of the many Unix programs that creates a flattened representation of one or more files, with a shar file or sharchive, can be distributed to anyone running Unix, and no special unpacking software is required.Sharchives are intriguing in that they are typically created by shell scripts; the script that produces sharchives is thus a script which produces possible; sharchives can and do make use of arbitrarily-powerful shell features and other Unix commands.Different implementations of shar vary in sophistication. Some just uuencode each input file and output commands to uudecode the result, others include extensive checking to make sure the files have been transferred without corruption and that all parts of a multi-file sharchive have been unpacked.The unshar utility strips off mail and news headers before passing the remainder of its input to sh. (1996-10-18)

shar "tool, file format" ("Shell archive", after {ar} and {tar}) Any of the many {Unix} programs that creates a {flatten}ed representation of one or more files, with the unique property that it can be unflattened (the original files extracted) merely by feeding it through a standard {Unix} {shell}. The output of shar, known as a "shar file" or "sharchive", can be distributed to anyone running {Unix}, and no special unpacking software is required. Sharchives are intriguing in that they are typically created by shell scripts; the script that produces sharchives is thus a script which produces self-unpacking scripts, which may themselves contain scripts. The disadvantage of sharchives are that they are an ideal venue for {Trojan horse} attacks and that, for recipients not running Unix, no simple un-sharchiving program is possible; sharchives can and do make use of arbitrarily-powerful shell features and other Unix commands. Different implementations of shar vary in sophistication. Some just {uuencode} each input file and output commands to {uudecode} the result, others include extensive checking to make sure the files have been transferred without corruption and that all parts of a multi-file sharchive have been unpacked. The {unshar} utility strips off mail and news headers before passing the remainder of its input to sh. (1996-10-18)

SIFT ::: SHARE Internal Fortran Translator. Translation utility designed for converting Fortran II to Fortran IV. The word sift was often used as a verb to describe converting code from one language to another. Sammet 1969, p.153.

SIFT SHARE Internal Fortran Translator. Translation utility designed for converting Fortran II to Fortran IV. The word "sift" was often used as a verb to describe converting code from one language to another. Sammet 1969, p.153.

snacc "tool" (Sample Neufeld {ASN.1} to {C/C++} Compiler) A program by Mike Sample "msample@opentext.com" which compiles 1990 {ASN.1} data structures (including some {macros}) into {C}, {C++} or type tables. The generated {C/C++} includes a .h file with the equivalent data struct and a .c/.C file for the {BER} encode and decode, print and free routines. snacc includes the compiler, run-time BER libraries, and utility programs. snacc is compiled under {GNU} {General Public License}. It requires {yacc} or {bison}, {lex} or {flex}, and {cc} (ANSI or non-ANSI). ITU TS X.208/ISO 8824. {Home (http://fokus.gmd.de/ovma/freeware/snacc/entry.html)}. E-mail: "snacc-bugs@cs.ubc.ca". [Michael Sample and Gerald Neufeld, "Implementing Efficient Encoders and Decoders for Network Data Representations", IEEE INFOCOM '93 Proceedings, Vol 3, pp. 1143-1153, Mar 1993]. [Michael Sample, "How Fast Can ASN.1 Encoding Rules Go?", M.Sc. Thesis, University of British Columbia, Apr 1993]. (1998-08-09)

snacc ::: (tool) (Sample Neufeld ASN.1 to C/C++ Compiler) A program by Mike Sample which compiles 1990 ASN.1 data structures (including with the equivalent data struct and a .c/.C file for the BER encode and decode, print and free routines.snacc includes the compiler, run-time BER libraries, and utility programs. snacc is compiled under GNU General Public License. It requires yacc or bison, lex or flex, and cc (ANSI or non-ANSI).ITU TS X.208/ISO 8824.Latest version: 1.1, as of 1993-07-12. .E-mail: .[Michael Sample and Gerald Neufeld, Implementing Efficient Encoders and Decoders for Network Data Representations, IEEE INFOCOM '93 Proceedings, Vol 3, pp. 1143-1153, Mar 1993].[Michael Sample, How Fast Can ASN.1 Encoding Rules Go?, M.Sc. Thesis, University of British Columbia, Apr 1993]. (1998-08-09)

sort 1. "application, algorithm" To arrange a collection of items in some specified order. The items - {records} in a file or data structures in memory - consist of one or more {fields} or members. One of these fields is designated as the "sort key" which means the records will be ordered according to the value of that field. Sometimes a sequence of key fields is specified such that if all earlier keys are equal then the later keys will be compared. Within each field some ordering is imposed, e.g. ascending or descending numerical, {lexical ordering}, or date. Sorting is the subject of a great deal of study since it is a common operation which can consume a lot of computer time. There are many well-known sorting {algorithms} with different time and space behaviour and programming {complexity}. Examples are {quicksort}, {insertion sort}, {bubble sort}, {heap sort}, and {tree sort}. These employ many different data structures to store sorted data, such as {arrays}, {linked lists}, and {binary trees}. 2. "tool" The {Unix} utility program for sorting lines of files. {Unix manual page}: sort(1). (1997-02-12)

sort ::: 1. (application, algorithm) To arrange a collection of items in some specified order. The items - records in a file or data structures in memory - some ordering is imposed, e.g. ascending or descending numerical, lexical ordering, or date.Sorting is the subject of a great deal of study since it is a common operation which can consume a lot of computer time. There are many well-known sorting algorithms with different time and space behaviour and programming complexity.Examples are quicksort, insertion sort, bubble sort, heap sort, and tree sort. These employ many different data structures to store sorted data, such as arrays, linked lists, and binary trees.2. (tool) The Unix utility program for sorting lines of files.Unix manual page: sort(1). (1997-02-12)

अर्थ artha: advantage, profit, benefit, use, utility; concern, business, affair, matter; substance, property, wealth, opulence; worldly prosperity.

sponge ::: A special case of a Unix filter that reads its entire input before writing any output; the canonical example is a sort utility. Unlike most filters, a sponge distinction loses its usefulness, because directing filter output would just write a new version.See also slurp.[Jargon File] (1995-01-18)

Sri Aurobindo: ". . . memory is only a process of consciousness, a utility; it cannot be the substance of being or the whole of our personality: it is simply one of the workings of consciousness as radiation is one of the workings of Light.” The Life Divine

STREAMS "operating system" A collection of {system calls}, {kernel} resources, and kernel utility routines that can create, use, and dismantle a {stream}. A "stream head" provides the interface between the stream and the user processes. Its principal function is to process STREAMS-related user system calls. A "stream module" processes data that travel bewteen the stream head and driver. The "stream end" provides the services of an external input/output device or an internal software driver. The internal software driver is commonly called a {pseudo-device} driver. The STREAMS concept has been formalised in {Unix} {System V}. For example, {SVR4} implements {sockets} and {pipes} using STREAMS, resulting in pipe(2) openning bidirectional pipes. [IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts, SC23-2206-03]. (1999-06-29)

STREAMS ::: (operating system) A collection of system calls, kernel resources, and kernel utility routines that can create, use, and dismantle a stream. A stream internal software driver. The internal software driver is commonly called a pseudo-device driver.The STREAMS concept has been formalised in Unix System V. For example, SVR4 implements sockets and pipes using STREAMS, resulting in pipe(2) openning bidirectional pipes.[IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts, SC23-2206-03]. (1999-06-29)

Stuffit ::: (tool, file format) (filename extension: .sit) A file archiving and compression utility, developed by Aladdin Systems, Inc.. Stuffit was originally available for Microsoft Windows and Linux. Compared to the standard Windows tool, WinZip, it is faster and gives better compression.Stuffit archives can be extracted with Stuffit Expander. .(2003-09-20)

Stuffit "tool, file format" (filename extension: .sit) A file {archiving} and {compression} utility, developed by {Aladdin Systems, Inc.}. Stuffit was originally developed for the {Macintosh} and is still the Mac standard tool for compression and archiving (compressing multiple files into one). Stuffit is now also available for {Microsoft Windows} and {Linux}. Compared to the standard Windows tool, {WinZip}, it is faster and gives better compression. Stuffit archives can be extracted with Stuffit Expander. {Stuffit Home (http://stuffit.com/)}. (2003-09-20)

sum 1. "theory" In {domain theory}, the sum A + B of two {domains} contains all elements of both domains, modified to indicate which part of the union they come from, plus a new {bottom} element. There are two constructor functions associated with the sum: inA : A -" A+B   inB : B -" A+B inA(a) = (0,a)    inB(b) = (1,b) and a disassembly operation: case d of {isA(x) -" E1; isB(x) -" E2} This can be generalised to arbitrary numbers of domains. See also {smash sum}, {disjoint union}. 2. "tool" A {Unix} utility to calculate a 16-bit {checksum} of the data in a file. It also displays the size of the file, either in {kilobytes} or in 512-byte blocks. The checksum may differ on machines with 16-bit and 32-bit ints. {Unix manual page}: sum(1). (1995-03-16)

sum ::: 1. (theory) In domain theory, the sum A + B of two domains contains all elements of both domains, modified to indicate which part of the union they come from, plus a new bottom element. There are two constructor functions associated with the sum: inA : A -> A+B inB : B -> A+BinA(a) = (0,a) inB(b) = (1,b) and a disassembly operation: case d of {isA(x) -> E1; isB(x) -> E2} This can be generalised to arbitrary numbers of domains.See also smash sum, disjoint union.2. (tool) A Unix utility to calculate a 16-bit checksum of the data in a file. It also displays the size of the file, either in kilobytes or in 512-byte blocks. The checksum may differ on machines with 16-bit and 32-bit ints.Unix manual page: sum(1). (1995-03-16)

SuperZap ::: (tool, IBM) An IBM utility program used to apply patches (zaps) to the MVS operating system or application program code.(2004-01-22)

SuperZap "tool, IBM" An {IBM} {utility program} used to quickly {patch} {operating system} or {application program} executable {code} in preference to editing the {source code} and recompiling. The SuperZAP program was a quick hack written by one IBM Engineer, possibly from IBM UK, in the late 1960s to directly fix executable files. He needed to fix a bug but it would have taken hours to rebuild the vast {OS/360} executables. The {S/360} architecture has an instruction ZAP (Zero and Add Packed) for {packed decmial} arithmetic, that sets the byte at a given address to a given value. Superzap used this to write data given as a string of hex digits to a given location in an executable file in a matter of seconds. Soon the IBM development labs were releasing all Programming Temporary Fixes (PTFs) to OS/360 in this form. OS/360 included a version called IMASPZAP or AMASPZAP which persisted through {MVS}, {MVS/SP}, {MVS/XA}, {OS/390} and probably still remains in {z/OS}, the distant descendent of OS/360. [Private 2004-02-05 e-mail from Chris Gage, IBM employee and SuperZap user, 1970-]. (2007-03-15)

Symantec ::: (company) Software manufacturer of utility and development applications for Windows and Macintosh platforms. Products include ACT!, Norton Utilities, Norton AntiVirus, Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh, Symantec Cafe. . (1997-03-10)

Symantec "company" Software manufacturer of utility and development applications for {Windows} and {Macintosh} platforms. Products include ACT!, Norton Utilities, Norton AntiVirus, Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh, Symantec Cafe. {(http://symantec.com/)}. (1997-03-10)

SYSKEY ::: (cryptography, operating system, security) A utility that encrpyts the hashed password information in a SAM database using a 128-bit encryption key.SYSKEY was an optional feature added in Windows NT 4.0 SP3. It was meant to protect against offline password cracking attacks so that the SAM database would indicates that a certain form of cryptoanalytic attack is possible offline. A brute-force attack then appeared to be possible.Microsoft later collaborated with BindView to issue a fix (dubbed the 'Syskey Bug') which appears to have been settled and SYSKEY pronounced secure enough to resist brute-force attack.According to Todd Sabin of the BindView team RAZOR, the pre-RC3 versions of Windows 2000 were also affected. . . .(2000-07-16)

SYSKEY "cryptography, operating system, security" A utility that {encrpyts} the {hashed} {password} information in a {SAM} database using a 128-bit {encryption key}. SYSKEY was an optional feature added in {Windows NT} 4.0 SP3. It was meant to protect against {offline} password {cracking} attacks so that the SAM database would still be secure even if someone had a copy of it. However, in December 1999, a security team from {BindView (http://bindview.com/)} found a security hole in SYSKEY which indicates that a certain form of {cryptoanalytic} attack is possible offline. A {brute-force attack} then appeared to be possible. Microsoft later collaborated with BindView to issue a fix (dubbed the 'Syskey Bug') which appears to have been settled and SYSKEY pronounced secure enough to resist brute-force attack. According to Todd Sabin of the BindView team RAZOR, the pre-RC3 versions of {Windows 2000} were also affected. {BindView Security Advisory (http://packetstorm.securify.com/9912-exploits/bindview.syskey.txt)}. {BindView press release (http://bindview.com/news/99/1222.html)}. {Microsoft bulletin (http://microsoft.com/Security/Bulletins/ms99-056.asp)}. (2000-07-16)

System Account Manager "cryptography, operating system, security" (SAM) A {password} {database} stored as a {registry file} in {Windows NT} and {Windows 2000}. The System Account Manager (SAM) database stores users' passwords in a {hashed} format. Since a {hash function} is one-way, this provides some measure of security for the storage of the passwords. In an attempt to enhance the security of the SAM database against {offline cracking}, Microsoft introduced the {SYSKEY} utility in {Windows NT} 4.0. (2000-07-19)

System Account Manager ::: (cryptography, operating system, security) (SAM) A password database stored as a registry file in Windows NT and Windows 2000.The System Account Manager (SAM) database stores users' passwords in a hashed format. Since a hash function is one-way, this provides some measure of security SAM database against offline cracking, Microsoft introduced the SYSKEY utility in Windows NT 4.0.(2000-07-19)

system software ::: (operating system) Any software required to support the production or execution of application programs but which is not specific to any particular application.System software typically includes an operating system to control the execution of other programs; user environment software such as a command-line interpreter, generators, version control, make; debugging, profiling and monitoring tools; utility programs, e.g. for sorting, printing, and editting.Different people would classify some or all of the above system software as part of the operating system while others might say the operating system was just the kernel. (1997-09-22)

system software "operating system" Any {software} required to support the production or execution of {application programs} but which is not specific to any particular application. System software typically includes an {operating system} to control the execution of other programs; user environment software such as a {command-line interpreter}, {window system}, {desktop}; development tools for building other programs such as {assemblers}, {compilers}, {linkers}, {libraries}, {interpreters}, {cross-reference generators}, {version control}, {make}; {debugging}, {profiling} and monitoring tools; utility programs, e.g. for sorting, printing, and editting. Different people would classify some or all of the above as part of the operating system while others might say the operating system was just the {kernel}. Some might say system software includes {utility programs} like {sort}. (2007-02-02)

Taoism, however, became too mystical, and Confucianism too formalistic. "Hundred schools" grew and flourished, many in direct opposition to Taoism and Confucianism. There was Mohism (Mo, founded by Mo Tzu, between 500 and 396 B.C.) which rejected formalism in favor of "benefit" and "utility" which are to be promoted through universal love (chien ai), practical observation and application, and obedience to the will of Heaven. There was Neo-Mohism (Mo che, 300 B.C.) which, in trying to prove the thesis of Mohism, developed an intricate system of logic. There was Sophism (ming chia, 400 B.C.) which displayed much sophistry about terms and concepts, particularly about the relationship between substance and quality (chien pai). There was Legalism (fa chia, 500-200 B.C.) which advocated law, statecraft, and authority as effective instruments of government. finally, there was the Yin Yang school (400-200 B.C.) which emphasized yin and yang as the two fundamental principles, always contrasting but complementary, and underlying all conceivable objects, qualities, situations, and relationships. It was this school that provided a common ground for the fusion of ancient divergent philosophical tendencies in medieval China.

tar ::: (file format) (Tape ARchive, following ar) Unix's general purpose archive utility and the file format it uses. Tar was originally intended for use tape, it is now used more often for packaging files together on other media, e.g. for distribution via the Internet.The resulting archive, a tar file (humourously, tarball) is often compressed, using gzip or some other form of compression (see tar and feather).There is a GNU version of tar called gnutar with several improvements over the standard versions.Filename extension: .tarMIME type: unregistered, but commonly application/x-tarUnix manual page: tar(1).Compare shar, zip. (1998-05-02)

tar "file format" ("Tape ARchive", following {ar}) {Unix}'s general purpose {archive} utility and the file format it uses. Tar was originally intended for use with {magnetic tape} but, though it has several {command line options} related to tape, it is now used more often for packaging files together on other media, e.g. for distribution via the {Internet}. The resulting archive, a "tar file" (humourously, "tarball") is often compressed, using {gzip} or some other form of compression (see {tar and feather}). There is a {GNU} version of tar called {gnutar} with several improvements over the standard versions. {Filename extension}: .tar {MIME type}: unregistered, but commonly application/x-tar {Unix manual page}: tar(1). Compare {shar}, {zip}. (1998-05-02)

Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) A type of {DOS} utility which, once loaded, stays in memory and can be reactivated by pressing a certain combination of keys.

Terminate and Stay Resident ::: (TSR) A type of DOS utility which, once loaded, stays in memory and can be reactivated by pressing a certain combination of keys.

text editor "tool, text" A utility program for creating and modifying {text files}. This differs from a {word processor} in that the word processors often embed special control codes or {escape sequences} in the file to control formatting. (1996-11-15)

text editor ::: (tool, text) A utility program for creating and modifying text files. This differs from a word processor in that the word processors often embed special control codes or escape sequences in the file to control formatting. (1996-11-15)

Text Processing Utility "language" (TPU) A {DEC} language for creation of text-processing interfaces, used to implement DEC's {Extensible VAX Editor} (EVE). (2000-05-08)

Text Processing Utility ::: (language) (TPU) A DEC language for creation of text-processing interfaces, used to implement DEC's Extensible VAX Editor (EVE).(2000-05-08)

“The enemy of faith is doubt, and yet doubt too is a utility and necessity, because man in his ignorance and in his progressive labour towards knowledge needs to be visited by doubt, otherwise he would remain obstinate in an ignorant belief and limited knowledge and unable to escape from his errors.” The Synthesis of Yoga

The history of philosophy presents a rivalry of schools where materialism is contrasted with idealism, but all these rival schools originated outside of the Mysteries of the sanctuary, although many if not all contain substantial elements of occult verities. The attempt entirely to separate the notions of spirit and matter, of mind and body, of noumenon and phenomenon, results in futility and confusion; a purely ideal world is as unreal as a purely material one.

"The ‘I" or the little ego is constituted by Nature and is at once a mental, vital and physical formation meant to aid in centralising and individualising the outer consciousness and action. When the true being is discovered, the utility of the ego is over and this formation has to disappear — the true being is felt in its place.” Letters on Yoga

“The ‘I’ or the little ego is constituted by Nature and is at once a mental, vital and physical formation meant to aid in centralising and individualising the outer consciousness and action. When the true being is discovered, the utility of the ego is over and this formation has to disappear—the true being is felt in its place.” Letters on Yoga

There is no sufTicient utility in fasting, since the higher energy and receptivity ought to come not by artificial or physical means but by intensity of the consciousness and strong will for the saclliana.

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

To enter into relations with God is Yoga, the highest rapture & the noblest utility.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 05


toolbook "tool" A {Microsoft Windows} utility to make easy-to-use applications with a {graphical user interface}. E.g. a guided tour of some software. (1995-03-14)

toolbook ::: (tool) A Microsoft Windows utility to make easy-to-use applications with a graphical user interface. E.g. a guided tour of some software. (1995-03-14)

Total utility - The total satisfaction resulting from the consumption of a given product or group of products by a consumer in a period of time.

Total consumer surplus - The excess of a persons total utility from the consumption of a good over the amount that person spends on it.

TPU {Text Processing Utility}

traceroute ::: A (typically Unix) TCP/IP utility which allows the user to determine the route packets are taking to a particular host. Traceroute works by increasing the the given destination; thus, a lengthening trail of hosts passed through is built up.

traceroute "networking" A {TCP/IP} utility, originally {Unix}, which allows the user to determine the {route} {packets} are taking to a particular {host}. Traceroute works by increasing the "{time to live}" value of packets and seeing how far they get, until they reach the given destination; thus, a lengthening trail of hosts passed through is built up. (2007-02-02)

Two-part tariff - A method of charging for a good or a service, usually a utility such as electricity, in which the consumer pays a flat access fee and a specified amount per unit purchased.

uninstaller ::: (operating system) A utility program to remove another application program from a computer's disks.Most commonly found on IBM PCs, as applications tend to leave files in various places on the hard disc, so special software is required to tidy up after them.Ken Spreitzer claims to have written the original PC program called UnInstaller, first licensed to MicroHelp and now (Feb 1998) sold by CyberMedia.Compare with installer. (1998-02-09)

uninstaller "operating system" A {utility} program to remove another {application program} from a computer's disks. Most commonly found on {IBM PCs}, as applications tend to leave files in various places on the {hard disc}, so special software is required to tidy up after them. Ken Spreitzer "ken@maximized.com" claims to have written the original PC program called "UnInstaller", first licensed to {MicroHelp} and now (Feb 1998) sold by {CyberMedia}. Compare with {installer}. (1998-02-09)

Unix to Unix Copy "networking, messaging" (uucp) A {Unix} utility program and {protocol} that allows one Unix system to send files to another via a {serial line} which may be a cable going directly from one machine's {serial port} to another's or may involve a {modem} at each end of a telephone line. Software is also available to allow uucp to work over {Ethernet} though there are better alternatives in this case, e.g. {FTP} or {rcp} for file transfer, {SMTP} for {electronic mail} or {NNTP} for {news}. The term is now also used to describe the large international network which uses UUCP to pass {Usenet} {news} and {electronic mail}, also known as "UUCPNET". {Unix manual page}: uucp(1). See also {cu}, {uuencode}. (1997-01-12)

Unix to Unix Copy ::: (networking, messaging) (uucp) A Unix utility program and protocol that allows one Unix system to send files to another via a serial line which may be a cable going directly from one machine's serial port to another's or may involve a modem at each end of a telephone line.Software is also available to allow uucp to work over Ethernet though there are better alternatives in this case, e.g. FTP or rcp for file transfer, SMTP for electronic mail or NNTP for news.The term is now also used to describe the large international network which uses UUCP to pass Usenet news and electronic mail, also known as UUCPNET.Unix manual page: uucp(1).See also cu, uuencode. (1997-01-12)

unshar ::: A Unix utility that removes e-mail and news header lines from its input, and feeds the remainder (which is presumed to be a shar file) to /bin/sh to unpack it. unshar is designed for unpacking archives directly from the news or mail systems simply by piping a message into it.

unshar A {Unix} utility that removes {e-mail} and {news} {header} lines from its input, and feeds the remainder (which is presumed to be a {shar file}) to /bin/sh to unpack it. unshar is designed for unpacking archives directly from the news or mail systems simply by {piping} a message into it.

usefulness ::: n. --> The quality or state of being useful; utility; serviceableness; advantage.

Usenet "messaging" /yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ (Or "Usenet news", from "Users' Network") A distributed {bulletin board} system and the people who post and read articles thereon. Originally implemented in 1979 - 1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott and Steve Daniel at Duke University, and supported mainly by {Unix} machines, it swiftly grew to become international in scope and, before the advent of the {web}, probably the largest decentralised information utility in existence. Usenet encompassed government agencies, universities, high schools, businesses of all sizes and home computers of all descriptions. As of early 1993, it hosted over 1200 {newsgroups} ("groups" for short) and an average of 40 megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of new technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and {flamage} every day. By November 1999, the number of groups had grown to over 37,000. To join in, you need a {Usenet provider (https://www.usenetstorm.com)}. Originally you needed a {news reader} program but there are now several web gateways, cheifly {Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/)} (originally {Deja News}). Some {web browsers} used to include news readers and {URLs} beginning "news:" referred to Usenet newsgroups. {Network News Transfer Protocol} is a {protocol} used to transfer news articles between a news {server} and a {news reader}. In the beginning, not all Usenet hosts were on the Internet. The {uucp} {protocol} was sometimes used to transfer articles between servers, though this became increasingly rare with the spread of the {Internet}. [Gene Spafford "spaf@cs.purdue.edu", "What is Usenet?", regular posting to {news:news.announce.newusers}]. (2017-09-26)

Usenet ::: (messaging) /yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ (Or Usenet news, from Users' Network) A distributed bulletin board system and the people who post and read the advent of the World-Wide Web, probably the largest decentralised information utility in existence.Usenet encompasses government agencies, universities, high schools, businesses of all sizes, and home computers of all descriptions. In the beginning, not all chatter, and flamage every day. By November 1999, the number of groups had grown to over 37,000.To join in you originally needed a news reader program but there are now several web gateways such as . Several web browsers include news readers and URLs beginning news: refer to Usenet newsgroups.Network News Transfer Protocol is a protocol used to transfer news articles between a news server and a news reader. The uucp protocol was sometimes used to transfer articles between servers, though this is probably rare now that most sites are on the Internet.Stanford University runs a service to send news articles by electronic mail. Send electronic mail to with help in the message body. [Still? URL?] . .[Gene Spafford (1999-12-17)

use ::: v. t. --> The act of employing anything, or of applying it to one&

utilitarian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to utility; consisting in utility; /iming at utility as distinguished from beauty, ornament, etc.; sometimes, reproachfully, evincing, or characterized by, a regard for utility of a lower kind, or marked by a sordid spirit; as, utilitarian narrowness; a utilitarian indifference to art.

Of or pertaining to utilitarianism; supporting utilitarianism; as, the utilitarian view of morality; the Utilitarian Society.


Utilitarianism: (a) Traditionally understood as the view that the right act is the act which, of all those open to the agent, will actually or probably produce the greatest amount of pleasure or happiness in the world at large (this is the so called Principle of Utility). This view has been opposed to intuitionism in the traditional sense in a long and well-known controversy. It received its classical form in Bentham and the two Mills. Earlier it took a theological form in Gay and Paley, later an evolutionistic form in Spencer, and an intuitionistic form (in the wider sense) in Sidgwick.

utilitarianism ::: n. --> The doctrine that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the end and aim of all social and political institutions.
The doctrine that virtue is founded in utility, or that virtue is defined and enforced by its tendency to promote the highest happiness of the universe.
The doctrine that utility is the sole standard of morality, so that the rectitude of an action is determined by its


Utility - 1. economic and highly subjective term describing satisfaction of a specified want. Utility and usefulness are not necessarily synonymous terms. Artwork may be functionally useless but yet provide great utility to an art lover. Or 2. value of a certain outcome or payoff to someone; the pleasure or displeasure that person would derive from that outcome.

Utility of work ::: That is one great utility of work that it tests the nature and puts the sadhana in front of the defects of his outer being which might otherwise escape him.

V.42bis "communications, standard" An extension of the {ITU-T} {V.42} standard {modem} {protocol} to included {compression} using a {Lempel-Ziv} related technique, which detects frequently occurring character strings and replaces them with tokens. This is similar to the {Unix} {compress} utility. Typical {compression} for text is 50% or better; with nearly 20% gain from {synchronous} conversion this gives reduces transmission time by almost 60%. [Details? On-line spec?] (2004-08-02)

value ::: n. --> The property or aggregate properties of a thing by which it is rendered useful or desirable, or the degree of such property or sum of properties; worth; excellence; utility; importance.
Worth estimated by any standard of purchasing power, especially by the market price, or the amount of money agreed upon as an equivalent to the utility and cost of anything.
Precise signification; import; as, the value of a word; the value of a legal instrument


verbiage ::: When the context involves a software or hardware system, this refers to documentation. This term borrows the connotations of mainstream verbiage to suggest that the documentation is of marginal utility and that the motives behind its production have little to do with the ostensible subject.[Jargon File]

Virtual LAN "networking" Software defined groups of {host} on a {local area network} (LAN) that communicate as if they were on the same wire, even though they are physically on different {LAN segments} throughout a site. To define a virtual LAN, the {network administrator} uses a virtual LAN management utility to establish membersip rules that determine which hostss are in a specific virtual LAN. Many models may exist but two seem to dominate: (1) Vitual Segment (or Port-Group) Virtual LAN. These are switched at the {data link layer} ({OSI} layer 2). Virtual segments turn an arbitrary number of physical segments into a single virtual segment that funtions as a self-contained traffic domain. (2) Virtual Subnet Virtual LAN: These are switched at the {Network Layer} ({OSI} layer 3). Subnet-oriented virtual LANs are based on {subnet address}es used by {IP}, {IPX}, and other {network layer} {protocols} to normally identify physical networks. Administrators assign one subnet address to a number of switch {ports} (which may be on different switches and over a backbone). Once identified as a virtual subnet, the selected LANs function as a {bridge group} - traffic is bridged at Layer 2 within the virtual subnet and routed at Layer 3 between virtual subnets. ["The many faces of virtual LANs", Steven King, Network World, 1994/5?]. (1995-04-03)

visualisation ::: (graphics) Making a visible presentation of numerical data, particularly a graphical one. This might include anything from a simple X-Y graph of one dependent variable against one independent variable to a virtual reality which allows you to fly around the data.Gnuplot is the Free Software Foundation's utility for producing various kinds of graphs.Usenet newsgroup: comp.graphics.The Computer Graphics Resource Listing contains pointers to several visualisation tools. . .(2002-02-21)

visualisation "graphics" Making a visible presentation of numerical data, particularly a graphical one. This might include anything from a simple X-Y graph of one dependent variable against one independent variable to a {virtual reality} which allows you to fly around the data. {Gnuplot} is the {Free Software Foundation}'s utility for producing various kinds of graphs. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.graphics}. The {Computer Graphics Resource Listing} contains pointers to several visualisation tools. {comp.graphics FAQ (ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/usenet/news-info/comp.graphics/)}. {Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago (http://ncsa.uiuc.edu/EVL/docs/Welcome.html)}. (2002-02-21)

vyāpāda. (T. gnod sems; C. chen; J. shin; K. chin 瞋). In Sanskrit and Pāli, "malice" or "ill will"; the ninth of ten unwholesome courses of action (AKUsALA-KARMAPATHA), referring to the hateful wish that harm will befall another. The ten courses of action are divided into three groups according to whether they are performed by the body, speech, or mind. Malice is classified as an unwholesome mental action (AKUsALA-KARMAN), and forms a triad along with covetousness (ABHIDHYĀ) and wrong views (MITHYĀDṚstI). Only extreme forms of defiled thinking are deemed an unwholesome course of mental action, such as the covetous wish to misappropriate someone else's property, the harmful intent to hurt someone, or the adherence to pernicious doctrines. Lesser forms of defiled thinking are still unwholesome (akusala), but do not constitute a course of action. ¶ "Malice" is also listed as one of the five hindrances (NĪVARAnA) to DHYĀNA, obstructing the dhyāna factor of rapture (PRĪTI). Malice is fostered by unwise attention (AYONIsOMANASKĀRA) to objects causing aversion and is removed through frequent wise attention to loving-kindness (MAITRĪ), developing the meditation on loving-kindness, and recognizing the fact that every person's actions are his or her own and acknowledging the futility of anger. Malice is countered by faith (sRADDHĀ), the first of the five spiritual faculties (INDIYA), and by the enlightenment factors (BODHYAnGA) of physical rapture (prīti) and equanimity (UPEKsĀ). "Malice" is also included among the ten fetters (SAMYOJANA) and is completely overcome only upon becoming an ARHAT.

web2c "tool" A utility by Karl Berry "karl@claude.cs.umb.edu" to translate {WEB} to {C}. {FTP UCI (ftp://ics.uci.edu/TeX/web2c.tar.Z)}. {FTP Gernamy (ftp://ftp.th-darmstadt.de/pub/tex/src/web2c/web2c.tar.Z)}. (1996-05-10)

web2c ::: (tool) A utility by Karl Berry to translate WEB to C.Current version: 5-851d. . (1996-05-10)

What for Instance would be the utility of a supramental creation on earth if it were just the same thing as a supramental creation on the supramental plane? It is that, in principle, but yet some- thing else, a triumphant new self-discovery of the Divine in conditions that arc not elsewhere.

Within the context of these views there is evidently allowance for divergent doctrines, but certain general tendencies can be noticed. The metaphysics of naturalism is always monistic and if any teleological element is introduced it is emergent. Man is viewed as coordinate with other parts of nature, and naturalistic psychology emphasizes the physical basis of human behavior; ideas and ideals are largely treated as artifacts, though there is disagreement as to the validity to be assigned them. The axiology of naturalism can seek its values only within the context of human character and experience, and must ground these values on individual self-realization or social utility; though again there is disagreement as to both the content and the final validity of the values there discovered. Naturalistic epistemologies have varied between the extremes of rationalism and positivism, but they consistently limit knowledge to natural events and the relationships holding between them, and so direct inquiry to a description and systematization of what happens in nature. The beneficent task that naturalism recurrently performs is that of recalling attention from a blind absorption in theory to a fresh consideration of the facts and values exhibited in nature and life.

wizard 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who {groks} it); especially someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency. Someone is a {hacker} if he or she has general hacking ability, but is a wizard with respect to something only if he or she has specific detailed knowledge of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard for something given the time to study it. 2. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who has {wheel} privileges on a system. 3. A Unix expert, especially a Unix systems programmer. This usage is well enough established that "Unix Wizard" is a recognised job title at some corporations and to most headhunters. See {guru}, {lord high fixer}. See also {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}, {incantation}, {magic}, {mutter}, {rain dance}, {voodoo programming}, {wave a dead chicken}. 4. An interactive help utility that guides the user through a potentially complex task, such as configuring a {PPP} driver to work with a new {modem}. Wizards are often implemented as a sequence of {dialog boxes} which the user can move forward and backward through, filling in the details required. The implication is that the expertise of a human wizard in one of the above senses is encapsulated in the software wizard, allowing the average user to perform expertly. [{Jargon File}] (1998-09-07)

wizard ::: 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who groks it); especially someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an knowledge of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard for something given the time to study it.2. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who has wheel privileges on a system.3. A Unix expert, especially a Unix systems programmer. This usage is well enough established that Unix Wizard is a recognised job title at some corporations and to most headhunters.See guru, lord high fixer. See also deep magic, heavy wizardry, incantation, magic, mutter, rain dance, voodoo programming, wave a dead chicken.4. An interactive help utility that guides the user through a potentially complex task, such as configuring a PPP driver to work with a new modem. Wizards encapsulated in the software wizard, allowing the average user to perform expertly.[Jargon File] (1998-09-07)

working as designed "jargon" (IBM) Conforming to a wrong or inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility or as a bogus reason for not accepting a criticism or suggestion. At {IBM}, this sense is used in official documents! See {BAD}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-04-04)

working as designed ::: (jargon) (IBM) Conforming to a wrong or inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility or as a bogus reason for not accepting a criticism or suggestion. At IBM, this sense is used in official documents!See BAD.[Jargon File] (1995-04-04)

zip 1. "tool, compression, file format" A compressed {archive} containing one or more files, the act of creating it and its {filename extension}. Originally, such a "zip file" was created using {PKWare, Inc.}'s {PKZIP} {utility program} for {MS-DOS}. Due to the popularity of the original program, the format has spread to {Windows}, {Unix} and other {operating systems} and the function is often built into {file managers}. {unzip} is the corresponding de-archiver or the act of extracting files from an archive. The first two {bytes} of a zip file are the {ASCII} characters "PK" after {Phil Katz} who developed the original PKZIP. See also {gzip}, {tar and feather}. (1996-08-26) 2. "storage" {Zip Drive}. [{Jargon File}] 3. "functional programming" {zip function}. (2017-02-26)

zip ::: 1. (tool, compression, file format) To create a compressed archive (a zip file) from one or more files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its use is spreading from MS-DOS now that portable implementations of the algorithm have been written.zip is also the name of a Unix archiving utility compatible with PKZIP. unzip is the corresponding de-archiver.See also gzip, tar and feather.2. (storage) Zip Drive.[Jargon File] (1996-08-26)



QUOTES [17 / 17 - 631 / 631]


KEYS (10k)

   11 Sri Aurobindo
   1 Ramesh Balsekar
   1 Monty Oum
   1 Mahavaga
   1 Henri Poincare
   1 Carl Jung
   1 The Mother

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   14 Anonymous
   10 Sri Aurobindo
   7 William Stanley Jevons
   7 W Chan Kim
   7 Kurt Vonnegut
   6 Nir Eyal
   6 F Scott Fitzgerald
   4 Steven Erikson
   4 Roger Scruton
   4 Michel de Montaigne
   4 Martin Luther King Jr
   4 Ludwig von Mises
   4 Fernando Pessoa
   4 Emil M Cioran
   4 Barry Schwartz
   3 Warren Buffett
   3 Thorstein Veblen
   3 Sherrilyn Kenyon
   3 Neal Stephenson
   3 Monty Oum

1:Good, not utility, must be the principle and standard of good. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Suprarational Good,
2:Memory is only a process of consciousness, a utility. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance,
3:When the sun of the gnosis has risen, doubt itself will pass away because its cause and utility have ended. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Faith and Shakti,
4:It seeks the highest truth for the highest practical utility, not for intellectual or even for spiritual satisfaction. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge,
5:A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,
She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter's dust
To reach utility's immense bazaar. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind,
6:The Spirit has made itself Matter in order to place itself there as an instrument for the well-being and joy, yogakṣema, of created beings, for a self. offering of universal physical utility and service. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being,
7:Work is part of the sadhana, and in sadhana the question of usefulness does not arise, that is an outward practical measure of things, though even in the outward ordinary life utility is not the only measure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Work and Yoga,
8:One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice. (417) ~ Henri Poincare,
9:Process is merely a utility; it is a habitual adoption of certain effective relations which might in the infinite possibility of things have been arranged otherwise, for the production of effects which might equally have been quite different. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance,
10:for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities. A supreme difficulty is Nature's indication to us of a supreme conquest to be won and an ultimate problem to be solved; it is not a warning of an inextricable snare to be shunned or of an enemy too strong for us from whom we must flee. Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there for a great utility; they too demand the divine realisation of their possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
11:Ishwara-Shakti is not quite the same as Purusha-Prakriti; for Purusha and Prakriti are separate powers, but Ishwara and Shakti contain each other. Ishwara is Purusha who contains Prakriti and rules by the power of the Shakti within him. Shakti is Prakriti ensouled by Purusha and acts by the will of the Ishwara which is her own will and whose presence in her movement she carries always with her. The Purusha-Prakriti realisation is of the first utility to the seeker on the Way of Works; for it is the separation of the conscient being and the Energy and the subjection of the being to the mechanism of the Energy that are the efficient cause of our ignorance and imperfection; by this realisation the being can liberate himself from the mechanical action of the nature and become free and arrive at a first spiritual control over the nature. Ishwara-Shakti stands behind the relation of Purusha-Prakriti and its ignorant action and turns it to an evolutionary purpose. The Ishwara-Shakti realisation can bring participation in a higher dynamism and a divine working and a total unity and harmony of the being in a spiritual nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 216,
12:uniting life and Yoga :::
   No synthesis of Yoga can be satisfying which does not, in its aim, reunite God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life or, in its method, not only permit but favour the harmony of our inner and outer activities and experiences in the divine consummation of both. For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower. To avoid the life which is given him for the realisation of that possibility, can never be either the indispensable condition or the whole and ultimate object of his supreme endeavour or of his most powerful means of self-fulfilment. It can only be a temporary necessity under certain conditions or a specialised extreme effort imposed on the individual so as to prepare a greater general possibility for the race. The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes. like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous withlife itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: All life is Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, Life and Yoga,
13:challenge for the Integral Yogin :::
   Nor is the seeker of the integral fulfilment permitted to solve too arbitrarily even the conflict of his own inner members. He has to harmonise deliberate knowledge with unquestioning faith; he must conciliate the gentle soul of love with the formidable need of power; the passivity of the soul that lives content in transcendent calm has to be fused with the activity of the divine helper and the divine warrior. To him as to all seekers of the spirit there are offered for solution the oppositions of the reason, the clinging hold of the senses, the perturbations of the heart, the ambush of the desires, the clog of the physical body; but he has to deal in another fashion with their mutual and internal conflicts and their hindrance to his aim, for he must arrive at an infinitely more difficult perfection in the handling of all this rebel matter. Accepting them as instruments for the divine realisation and manifestation, he has to convert their jangling discords, to enlighten their thick darknesses, to transfigure them separately and all together, harmonising them in themselves and with each other, -- integrally, omitting no grain or strand or vibration, leaving no iota of imperfection anywhere. All exclusive concentration, or even a succession of concentrations of that kind, can be in his complex work only a temporary convenience; it has to be abandoned as soon as its utility is over. An all-inclusive concentration is the difficult achievement towards which he must labour.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 78, [T9],
14:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being ( caitya guru or antaryamin ), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62 [T1],
15:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, - these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel.

The example is more powerful than the instruction; but it is not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal character which is of most importance. These have their place and their utility; but what will most stimulate aspiration in others is the central fact of the divine realisation within him governing his whole life and inner state and all his activities. This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to individual person and circumstance. It is this dynamic realisation that the sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of right and natural fruits.

Influence is more important than example. Influence is not the outward authority of the Teacher over his disciple, but the power of his contact, of his presence, of the nearness of his soul to the soul of another, infusing into it, even though in silence, that which he himself is and possesses. This is the supreme sign of the Master. For the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive around him.

And it shall also be a sign of the teacher of the integral Yoga that he does not arrogate to himself Guruhood in a humanly vain and self-exalting spirit. His work, if he has one, is a trust from above, he himself a channel, a vessel or a representative. He is a man helping his brothers, a child leading children, a Light kindling other lights, an awakened Soul awakening souls, at highest a Power or Presence of the Divine calling to him other powers of the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga,
16:Can it be said in justification of one's past that whatever has happened in one's life had to happen?

The Mother: Obviously, what has happened had to happen; it would not have been, if it had not been intended. Even the mistakes that we have committed and the adversities that fell upon us had to be, because there was some necessity in them, some utility for our lives. But in truth these things cannot be explained mentally and should not be. For all that happened was necessary, not for any mental reason, but to lead us to something beyond what the mind imagines. But is there any need to explain after all? The whole universe explains everything at every moment and a particular thing happens because the whole universe is what it is. But this does not mean that we are bound over to a blind acquiescence in Nature's inexorable law. You can accept the past as a settled fact and perceive the necessity in it, and still you can use the experience it gave you to build up the power consciously to guide and shape your present and your future.

Is the time also of an occurrence arranged in the Divine Plan of things?

The Mother: All depends upon the plane from which one sees and speaks. There is a plane of divine consciousness in which all is known absolutely, and the whole plan of things foreseen and predetermined. That way of seeing lives in the highest reaches of the Supramental; it is the Supreme's own vision. But when we do not possess that consciousness, it is useless to speak in terms that hold good only in that region and are not our present effective way of seeing things. For at a lower level of consciousness nothing is realised or fixed beforehand; all is in the process of making. Here there are no settled facts, there is only the play of possibilities; out of the clash of possibilities is realised the thing that has to happen. On this plane we can choose and select; we can refuse one possibility and accept another; we can follow one path, turn away from another. And that we can do, even though what is actually happening may have been foreseen and predetermined in a higher plane.

The Supreme Consciousness knows everything beforehand, because everything is realised there in her eternity. But for the sake of her play and in order to carry out actually on the physical plane what is foreordained in her own supreme self, she moves here upon earth as if she did not know the whole story; she works as if it was a new and untried thread that she was weaving. It is this apparent forgetfulness of her own foreknowledge in the higher consciousness that gives to the individual in the active life of the world his sense of freedom and independence and initiative. These things in him are her pragmatic tools or devices, and it is through this machinery that the movements and issues planned and foreseen elsewhere are realised here.

It may help you to understand if you take the example of an actor. An actor knows the whole part he has to play; he has in his mind the exact sequence of what is to happen on the stage. But when he is on the stage, he has to appear as if he did not know anything; he has to feel and act as if he were experiencing all these things for the first time, as if it was an entirely new world with all its chance events and surprises that was unrolling before his eyes. 28th April ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,
17:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Free trade is not based on utility but on justice. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove
2:Nothing is more useful to man that those arts which have no utility. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove
3:A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove
4:All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove
5:Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove
6:Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove
7:Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove
8:Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove
9:What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove
10:Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove
11:Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove
12:The sceptics assert, though absurdly, that the origin of all religious worship was derived from the utility of inanimate objects,as the sun and moon, to the support and well-being of mankind. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove
13:Legalize racing in every State. Sure people will bet, but they get to see the horses run and you certain can't see General Motors and General Electric and General Utility run when you bet on them. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove
14:... popular fundamentalist theology has emphasized the utility of the cross rather than the beauty of the One who died on it... The "work" of Christ has been stressed until it has eclipsed the person of Christ. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove
15:Has it not. . . invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility and justice? ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove
16:One of the most difficult things to learn is to render service without bossing, without making a fuss about it, and without any consciousness of high and low. In the world of spirituality, humility counts at least as much as utility. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove
17:[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove
18:Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove
19:It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove
20:Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove
21:A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove
22:Things in which we do not take joy are either a burden upon our minds to be got rid of at any cost; or they are useful, and therefore in temporary and partial relation to us, becoming burdensome when their utility is lost; or they are like wandering vagabonds, loitering for a moment on the outskirts of our recognition, and then passing on. A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove
23:In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove
24:What meaning has such meditation? There is no meaning; there is no utility. But in that meditation there is a movement of great ecstasy which is not to be confounded with pleasure. It is this ecstasy which gives to the eye, to the brain and to the heart, the quality of innocency. Without seeing life as something totally new, it is a routine, a boredom, a meaningless affair. So meditation is of the greatest importance. It opens the door to the incalculable, to the measureless. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove
25:Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove
26:The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove
27:In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the questions cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty, than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail; as soon as farther experience and sounder reasoning have given us juster notions of human affairs, we retract our first sentiment, and adjust anew the boundaries of moral good and evil. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. ~ Bill Gates,
2:Free trade is not based on utility but on justice. ~ Edmund Burke,
3:Is beauty enhanced or adulterated by utility?
~ Sena Jeter Naslund,
4:Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. ~ Karl Marx,
5:Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
6:Nothing is more useful to man that those arts which have no utility. ~ Ovid,
7:Current utility and historical origin are different subjects. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,
8:A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion. ~ George Washington,
9:Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it maximized his utility. ~ Charles Wheelan,
10:There's a utility in the democracy refreshing itself on an ongoing basis. ~ Barack Obama,
11:Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: ~ Nicholas Carr,
12:Folk art has never been much about politics; it's about action and utility. ~ Cass McCombs,
13:Any item in your wardrobe should satisfy one of two criteria: utility and joy. ~ Stacy London,
14:Truth and right are above utility in all realms of thought and action. ~ Charles William Eliot,
15:The utility of the robot needs to come first. It's business model over technology. ~ Colin Angle,
16:I love the idea of making records that people can use, records that have a sense of utility. ~ Moby,
17:When exceptional utility is combined with strategic pricing, imitation is discouraged. ~ W Chan Kim,
18:There's a limit, I think, to the utility of reading celebrity lives like tea leaves. ~ Jia Tolentino,
19:Why breed for weakness? Kane did not understand the utility of a hairless Chihuahua. ~ Vaughn Heppner,
20:there are two core things that bring people value: 1) entertainment, and 2) utility. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,
21:Therefore the highest utility for mankind is to find this happiness in the Spirit. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
22:To seek for utility everywhere is entirely unsuited to men that are great-souled and free. ~ Aristotle,
23:Public utility pleads most forcibly for the general distribution of the Holy Scriptures. ~ James McHenry,
24:Call today and we’ll throw in a carabiner with totally vague utility, a $29.99 value! ~ Michael R Underwood,
25:True art is but the anti-type of nature; the embodiment of discovered beauty in utility. ~ James A Garfield,
26:The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke ~ Barbara W Tuchman,
27:Every institution goes through three stages - utility, privilege, and abuse. ~ Francois Rene de Chateaubriand,
28:Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; its a privately owned space on the Internet. ~ John Scalzi,
29:Hank was full of absolutes, pronouncements like “Art has no utility” and “Warhol is irrelevant. ~ Rob Spillman,
30:Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery. ~ C S Lewis,
31:a relationship of pure utility humiliates man—it ignores the rights and needs of his deeper nature; ~ Anonymous,
32:Utility then is not the measure of exchangeable value, although it is absolutely essential to it. ~ David Ricardo,
33:To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure? ~ Jeremy Bentham,
34:Utility is the emotion pleading to be let into the house of pure reason and thereby enriching it. ~ Dennis Lindley,
35:When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret. ~ Michael Lewis,
36:If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it. ~ Roger Scruton,
37:increases in the productivity of work-time compelled people to maximise the utility of their leisure time. ~ Anonymous,
38:Modern science has its value in terms of utility, but it cannot open up existence to human experience. ~ Jaggi Vasudev,
39:Nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs, Losing both beauty and utility. ~ William Shakespeare,
40:Good, not utility, must be the principle and standard of good. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Suprarational Good,
41:Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success. ~ Thomas A Edison,
42:The calculus of utility aims at supplying the ordinary wants of man at the least cost of labour. ~ William Stanley Jevons,
43:No one can live happily who has regard for himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility ~ Seneca,
44:Most people, even in simple risky situations, don't behave the way the theory of utility would have them behave. ~ Howard Raiffa,
45:Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance. ~ Friedrich Schiller,
46:Yeah. What about electricity and utility bills?” “I don’t know, Mr. Dean. What about them?” Mr. Williams responded ~ Patty Blount,
47:Books are the basis; purity is the force; preaching is the essence; utility is the principle. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada,
48:secrets should never be opened without evident utility. It could be of no manner of use to me or her to communicate ~ Daniel Defoe,
49:what we objectively get (wealth) is not the same as what we subjectively experience when we get it (utility). ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert,
50:Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions. ~ George Santayana,
51:There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment ~ Jordan Peterson,
52:Explaining why he was forced to cut a utility player: You just got caught in a position where you have no position. ~ Sparky Anderson,
53:Memory is only a process of consciousness, a utility. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance,
54:The greatest blocks to utility often represent the greatest and most pressing opportunities to unlock exceptional value. ~ W Chan Kim,
55:There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment. ~ Jordan Peterson,
56:There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment ~ Jordan B Peterson,
57:History insists that when a technology has obvious utility, it will be used. But how we use a new technology is our choice. ~ Anonymous,
58:I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time. ~ Robert Browning,
59:There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
60:Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility. ~ Olympe de Gouges,
61:But then it dawned on me that the opinion of someone who is always wrong has its own special utility to decision-makers. ~ Warren Buffett,
62:Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. ~ Daniel Gilbert,
63:We stitch together quilts of meaning to keep us warm and safe, with whatever patches of beauty and utility we have on hand. ~ Anne Lamott,
64:Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life. ~ Roger Scruton,
65:The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. ~ Mario Savio,
66:Judi, a person’s worth isn’t measured by her utility. We’re not tools. We’re here to think. To feel. To be good to each other ~ John Dufresne,
67:Repeated reflection and inquiry have led me to the somewhat novel opinion, that value depends entirely upon utility. ~ William Stanley Jevons,
68:Social distinctions can be based only on common utility.” —Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, article 1, 1789 ~ Thomas Piketty,
69:The difficulties of economics are mainly the difficulties of conceiving clearly and fully the conditions of utility. ~ William Stanley Jevons,
70:Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert,
71:Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics. ~ Edward Dahlberg,
72:Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason. ~ Amit Chaudhuri,
73:Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy. ~ C S Lewis,
74:Facebook is such a basic utility. It's something that is such a part of peoples' lives, I think it's hard to imagine it going away. ~ Sean Parker,
75:Maximising the average utility allows a person to kill everyone else if that would make him ecstatic, and so happier than average. ~ Robert Nozick,
76:Design—that is, utility enhanced by significance—has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success ~ Daniel H Pink,
77:My own suspicion is that a stand-alone artificial mind will be more a tool of narrow utility than something especially apocalyptic. ~ Jamais Cascio,
78:The way that the meal or the music or the movie makes you feel in the moment—either good or bad—could be called experienced utility. ~ Barry Schwartz,
79:For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. ~ Nir Eyal,
80:Regarding wetsuits, I always liked the Marilyn Minter quote, 'Everything's better when wet,' injecting some style into sports utility. ~ Cynthia Rowley,
81:This suggests that the more money you have, the larger the dollar increments that will be required, at the margin, to increase your utility. ~ Anonymous,
82:Do not waste the remainder of thy life in thoughts about others, when thou dost not refer thy thoughts to some object of common utility. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
83:Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm. ~ Aldo Leopold,
84:Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain. ~ Hermann von Helmholtz,
85:For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. Take ~ Nir Eyal,
86:[The] utility resulting from any small increase in wealth will be inversely proportionate to the quantity of goods previously possessed. ~ Peter L Bernstein,
87:Timberland is an all-American brand focused on work, utility and the outdoors, that managed to find a place in the fashion world as well ~ Pharrell Williams,
88:Sometimes, when I couldn’t afford to pay the utility bill at the end of the month, I was forced to read by the light of the stories themselves. ~ Steve Stern,
89:We can't ever forget that the Internet now is just a staid utility. The exciting platforms are software applications that are very, very simple. ~ Mark Cuban,
90:Every utility bill had to be scrutinized, every mysterious extra fee from the phone company had to be questioned. There is no peace in poverty. ~ Lisa Kleypas,
91:The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
92:Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul. ~ Karl Jaspers,
93:Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. ~ Marshall McLuhan,
94:What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer. ~ Peter Drucker,
95:In the dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More. ~ Colson Whitehead,
96:She flips open the uppermost notebook, to the page where she has just written: In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish. ~ Richard Powers,
97:What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man. ~ Ray Charles,
98:Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. ~ Emma Goldman,
99:...the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. ~ Karl Marx,
100:I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise. ~ Peter Singer,
101:The assumption that bleeding-edge technology is equivalent to bleeding-edge utility for buyers—something that, our research found, is rarely the case. ~ W Chan Kim,
102:We need a new law that owners of SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles) are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil. ~ Jello Biafra,
103:A purely materialistic art would be like a tree which is expected to bear fruit without flowering and to sacrifice grace and beauty for mere utility ~ Haile Selassie,
104:I rank myself no higher in the scheme of things than a policeman - whose utility would disappear if there were no criminals. ~ Robert Cecil 3rd Marquess of Salisbury,
105:When the sun of the gnosis has risen, doubt itself will pass away because its cause and utility have ended. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Faith and Shakti,
106:I'm a utility infielder. There's always somebody who is better at a specific task than I am, but I can pitch in at a bunch of different things as needed. ~ Gabe Newell,
107:There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility. ~ Karl Lehmann,
108:as a utility served more customers, it would become more efficient, allowing it to cut the cost of power further and in turn attract even more customers. ~ Nicholas Carr,
109:That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet. ~ Matthew Zapruder,
110:We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves—or more plausibly, for how they appear in themselves. ~ Roger Scruton,
111:Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
112:It doesn't happen like this! Everybody, you put him in a death trap, he pulls something outta his utility belt and he's away. Same bat time, same bat channel. ~ Neil Gaiman,
113:These emotions are quite beside the point now, like an artifact looted from an ancient grave, an oddly shaped tool whose utility no one can quite decipher. ~ Daniel Alarc n,
114:Perfection does not take into account the viewer.' Pheidias had once said to me. 'It exists on it own, independent of and unconcerned with opinions or utility. ~ Karen Essex,
115:Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility... It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. ~ Vannevar Bush,
116:While I used to deride small hatchbacks as little more than  pregnant roller skates , I can now appreciate the utter and complete utility of the entire concept.  ~ Anonymous,
117:Only those who love color are admitted to its beauty and immanent presence. It affords utility to all, but unveils its deeper mysteries only to its devotees. ~ Johannes Itten,
118:Facebook's successor will no doubt provide an easy "migration utility" through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to. ~ Douglas Rushkoff,
119:If companies give in to the tempting route of either bumping up the strategic price or cutting back on utility, they are not on the path to lucrative blue waters. ~ W Chan Kim,
120:Possessing utility, commodities derive their exchangeable value from two sources: from their scarcity, and from the quantity of labour required to obtain them. ~ David Ricardo,
121:say, a 2:1 ratio than it is to have far greater coverage provided by a single utility. A catastrophic event can render a single utility insolvent—witness what ~ Warren Buffett,
122:Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes. ~ Charles Darwin,
123:Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,
124:Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,
125:Failures of perspective in decision-making can be due to aspects of the social utility paradox, but more often result from simple mistakes caused by inadequate thought. ~ Herman Kahn,
126:Nature is a constant reminder of the beauty of consistence, the utility of patience and persistence, the vanity of arrogance, and the necessity of impermanence. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana,
127:Bernoulli's real contribution was to coin a word. The word has been translated into English as "utility". It describes this subjective value people place on money. ~ William Poundstone,
128:What vast additions to the Conveniences and Comforts of Living might Mankind have acquired, if the Money spent in Wars had been employ'd in Works of public utility! ~ Benjamin Franklin,
129:the practical utility of Formal Logic to-day lies not so much in the establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure of invalid inference. ~ Dorothy L Sayers,
130:Clay is molded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not. ~ Lao Tzu,
131:Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification. ~ George Santayana,
132:Man is a deeply illogical being, and must be ruled illogically. Whatever that frigid prig Bentham may say, there are innumerable motives that have nothing to do with utility. ~ Patrick O Brian,
133:Years ago I used to commiserate with all people who suffered. Now I commiserate only with those who suffer in ignorance, who do not understand the purpose and ultimate utility of pain ~ Bill W,
134:The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright,
135:We know the utility of prayer from the efforts of the wicked spirits to distract us during the divine office; and we experience the fruit of prayer in the defeat of our enemies. ~ John Climacus,
136:Multi-lateralism's dilemma: that the inclusion of more actors increases the legitimacy of a process or organization at the same time as it decreases its efficiency and utility. ~ Richard N Haass,
137:Clay is moulded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. . . . Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not. ~ Laozi,
138:It seeks the highest truth for the highest practical utility, not for intellectual or even for spiritual satisfaction. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge,
139:Model utility depends not on whether its driving scenarios are realistic (since no one can know that for sure), but on whether it responds with a realistic pattern of behavior. ~ Donella H Meadows,
140:Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world. ~ Alain de Botton,
141:it was good for games. What seemed complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier; ~ Iain M Banks,
142:James Davis Nicoll, on the 1962 nominees: "Terry Pratchett has his own sword forged by his own hands from meteoric iron, which must be of considerable utility when negotiating contracts. ~ Jo Walton,
143:Police: NY bus driver drove drunk with 35 students on board CORTLANDT, N.Y. (AP) — Police say a school bus driver was driving drunk with 35 students on board when she sideswiped a utility ~ Anonymous,
144:They were all three amazingly beautiful; they were also amazingly good secretaries. In Harshaw’s opinion the principle of least action required that utility and beauty be combined. ~ Robert A Heinlein,
145:People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet - how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online. ~ Jeff Bezos,
146:The walking stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure. ~ Thorstein Veblen,
147:The sceptics assert, though absurdly, that the origin of all religious worship was derived from the utility of inanimate objects,as the sun and moon, to the support and well-being of mankind. ~ David Hume,
148:It is only by being exchanged that the products of labor acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility. ~ Juliet B Schor,
149:It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility. ~ Henry John Stephen Smith,
150:For three things, according to VITRUVIUS, ought to be conſidered in every fabrick, without which no edifice will deſerve to be commended; and theſe are utility or convenience, duration and beauty. ~ Anonymous,
151:No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself. —SENECA ~ Jonathan Haidt,
152:Trying to gin up political violence for its electoral utility is - I think inarguably what we're seeing here. And I know that the Donald Trump campaign will not say that is what they're doing. ~ Donna Brazile,
153:A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,
She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter’s dust
To reach utility’s immense bazaar. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind,
154:The utility, or intrinsic value of gold as a commodity is now considerably less than in the past; its monetary status has become extraordinarily ambiguous; and its future is highly uncertain. ~ Benjamin Graham,
155:True utility happens in the moment of need. Not the brand’s moment of need, but the consumer’s moment of need. If you can meet that need when the customer needs it met, you are on to something big. ~ Mitch Joel,
156:for a behavior to become routine it must occur with significant frequency and perceived utility. Attitude change is the movement up the perceived utility axis until the behavior enters the Habit Zone. ~ Nir Eyal,
157:Once you prove yourself, that you're a utility player, they're going to contact you and say, hey, yeah, we need you for a film next Thursday at Fox or Sony or whatever. You kind of get a reputation. ~ Bob Bergen,
158:The point of equilibrium will be known by the criterion that an infinitely small amount of commodity exchanged in addition, at the same rate, will bring neither gain nor loss of utility. ~ William Stanley Jevons,
159:Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity. ~ Anonymous,
160:We are not getting rid of carriers any time soon. This is both because of their utility and also because of their role in Navy culture and in the defense-industrial complex. It is an academic debate. ~ P W Singer,
161:When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility. ~ Winston S Churchill,
162:In economic terms, we've always thought of work as a disutility - as something you do to get something else. Now it's increasingly a utility - something that's valuable and worthy in its own right. ~ Daniel H Pink,
163:Thus natural science is not a way of knowing the real world; its value lies not in its truth but in its utility; by scientific thought we do not know nature, we dismember it in order to master it. ~ R G Collingwood,
164:Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. ~ Giambattista Vico,
165:The proprietor of the grocery store on the corner was bidding a silent farewell to a tomato which even he, though a dauntless optimist, had been compelled to recognize as having outlived its utility. ~ P G Wodehouse,
166:With a painter or a sculptor, one cannot begin to alter his works, but an architect has to put up with anything, because he makes utility objects - the building is there to be used, and times change. ~ Arne Jacobsen,
167:[on the theory of the firm] It is exactly analogous to the analysis of the reactions of a consumer by means of indifferent curves. Indeed, a consumer is merely a 'firm' whose product is 'utility.' ~ Kenneth E Boulding,
168:If customers are concerned about their consumption, they can sign up for the company's thermostat control program, which allows the utility to adjust the temperature when peak loads occur on hot summer days. ~ Anonymous,
169:I'm fortunate in that I'm what you call a utility player, in that I can take a scene, if there's five or six minor characters in a scene, that need voice and personality [and] I can supply those characters. ~ Bob Bergen,
170:The true basis of morality is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives that we may serve and bless mankind. ~ Annie Besant,
171:No human being has the faculty of originally creating matter, which is more than nature itself can do. But any one may avail himself of the agents offered him by nature, to invest matter with utility. ~ Jean Baptiste Say,
172:Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. ~ Neal Stephenson,
173:The utility model of computing - computing resources delivered over the network in much the same way that electricity or telephone service reaches our homes and offices today - makes more sense than ever. ~ Scott McNealy,
174:Knowledge is power, not mere argument or ornament; "it is not an opinion to be held... but a work to be done; and I... am laboring to lay the foundation not of any sect or doctrine, but of utility and power. ~ Will Durant,
175:As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. ~ Henry David Thoreau,
176:High-prowed fishing smacks bobbed at their moorings along the riverbank, nets draped over the gunwales to dry. Stork nests, intricately thatched and big as a queen’s bed, crowned utility poles along the road. ~ Rick Atkinson,
177:Love consists in giving without getting in return; in giving what is not owed, what is not due the other. That's why true love is never based, as associations for utility or pleasure are, on a fair exchange. ~ Mortimer Adler,
178:If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,
179:The script is a blueprint for the film - there are very few bad scripts that make good movies. If you really like the character and understand the utility it serves within the movie, that's a part of my process. ~ Topher Grace,
180:We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends... Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not. ~ Carl Jung,
181:A good man will never suspect his friends of shady actions: this is part of his goodness. A good man will never be suspected by the public of using his goodness to screen villains: this is part of his utility ~ Bertrand Russell,
182:Skilled work, of no matter what kind, is only done well by those who take a certain pleasure in it, quite apart from its utility, either to themselves in earning a living, or to the world through its outcome. ~ Bertrand Russell,
183:Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. ~ William James,
184:Status, prestige, authority, degree, licence, credential, badge of office, reputation, manners — all of these marks of social approval mean nothing to the NTs when the issue is the utility of goal-directed action. ~ David Keirsey,
185:When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary. ~ Jeanette Winterson,
186:It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility. ~ G H Hardy,
187:Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious.
If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. ~ James Williams,
188:But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless. ~ Milan Kundera,
189:If you had a really good - battery, it wouldn't matter that the sun goes down at night and the wind stops blowing sometimes. But at the moment, battery technology is nowhere near good enough to use at utility scale. ~ Nathan Myhrvold,
190:Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. ~ Benito Mussolini,
191:Goals change, ideas of technology are transformed, but action always remains action. Action always seeks means to realize ends, and it is in this sense always rational and mindful of utility. It is, in a word, human. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
192:The sharing of goods and resources, from which authentic development proceeds, is not guaranteed by merely technical progress and relationships of utility, but by the potential of love that overcomes evil with good. ~ Pope Benedict XVI,
193:The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
194:Has it not. . . invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility and justice? ~ Alexander Hamilton,
195:One of the first principles of decorative art is that in all manufactures ornament must hold a place subordinate to that of utility; and when, by its exuberance, ornament interferes with utility, it is misplaced and vulgar. ~ George Mason,
196:The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel,
197:The potential for Home Star to create jobs is proven and real. In Vermont, our statewide energy efficiency utility, Efficiency Vermont, created more than 430 jobs in 2007 and 2008, generating more than $40 million in income. ~ Peter Welch,
198:I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes ... Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. Its utility is entirely in building an organization and getting the resources out to the poorest in the world. ~ Bill Gates,
199:I was good with maps, plain and simple. But what obsessed me about them was never their scientific utility. I did not look on them as mere tools but as mysterious and almost sentient beings.37 Maps spoke to me. They still do. ~ Miles Harvey,
200:Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility. ~ Joan Robinson,
201:Nearly all of our existing power sources are generators which use a heat cycle. This includes our coal, oil, and gas fired utilities, our automobiles, trucks, and trains, and even our nuclear fission utility power plants. ~ Wilson Greatbatch,
202:The potential for alternative energy sources, mainly solar and wind power, to completely replace coal and gas for utility generation globally is, I think, certain. The question is only whether it takes 30 years or 70 years. ~ Jeremy Grantham,
203:If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An ‘ideology’ is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And ~ Roger Scruton,
204:What trends have a high probability of impacting your industry, are irreversible, and are evolving in a clear trajectory? How will these trends impact your industry? Given this, how can you open up unprecedented customer utility? ~ W Chan Kim,
205:Based on my own experience, when you're going through adolescence you don't know how the world works. You can't set a story in the world you live in because you don't know what a utility bill is, or how to budget your paycheck. ~ Patton Oswalt,
206:De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore. ~ Steven Johnson,
207:One of the most difficult things to learn is to render service without bossing, without making a fuss about it, and without any consciousness of high and low. In the world of spirituality, humility counts at least as much as utility. ~ Meher Baba,
208:History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go. ~ Benjamin Cardozo,
209:As soon as the theoretician attempts to take account of so-called 'utility' and 'reality' instead of absolute truth, his work will cease to be a polar star of seeking humanity and instead will become a prescription for everyday life. ~ Adolf Hitler,
210:Black magic never stops. What goes from you comes to you. Once you start this shit, you gotta keep it up. Just like the utility bill. Just like the grocery store. Or they kill you. You got to keep it up. Two, five, ten, twenty years. ~ John Berendt,
211:The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up. ~ William H Gass,
212:Pieper argues that leisure is not the mere absence of work, but an attitude of mind or soul in which you are able to contemplate and enjoy things as they are in themselves, without regard to their value or their immediate utility. ~ Timothy J Keller,
213:The Indian vessels, a contemporary British observer wrote, ‘united elegance and utility and are models of patience [sic] and fine workmanship.’ Indian workers were considered expert in all shipbuilding materials—wood, iron and brass ~ Shashi Tharoor,
214:[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head. ~ Warren Buffett,
215:What I look for is identifying what the utility of a character is to the telling of the story overall. If I can identify that from reading the script, then I've got a clear idea of whether or not I think the character is worth playing. ~ Harrison Ford,
216:One of the most outstanding aspects of Ayurveda is its teaching that nothing is absolute. The utility, value and effect of anything is relative. Hence, the efficacy of its healing is dependent on the receiver, the time and the environment. It ~ Om Swami,
217:The basic skill of an actor is, in fact, empathy, and that's maybe not a skill, it's a disposition. I am an assistant storyteller. I enjoy feeling useful to a team effort. It's my way of finding a use for myself, a utility in this world. ~ Harrison Ford,
218:Always remember this: Make it about your customers’ needs. A great utility is something that adds tremendous value to individuals’ lives – and in doing so, makes them more naturally aligned with your brand. It’s not about you… it’s about them. ~ Mitch Joel,
219:Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself. ~ Henri Bergson,
220:Giving government aid to a bank basically transforms it into a utility. The huge salaries in this sector are only a symptom of a more profound misalignment. The profitability of the finance industry has been excessive. [...] That was absurd. ~ George Soros,
221:The Spirit has made itself Matter in order to place itself there as an instrument for the well-being and joy, yogakṣema, of created beings, for a self. offering of universal physical utility and service. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being,
222:Every Assassin knew that real black often stood out in the dark, because the night in the city is usually never full black, and that gray or dark green merge much better. But they wore black anyway, because style trumps utility every time. ~ Terry Pratchett,
223:A company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions). ~ Nir Eyal,
224:Our attitude towards plants is a singularly narrow one. If we see any immediate utility in a plant we foster it. If for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith. ~ Rachel Carson,
225:The income men derive from producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence. The production reflects the low marginal utility of the goods to society. The income reflects the high total utility of a livelihood to a person. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith,
226:They were simple, functional, and elegant in their utility. An illiterate mechanic in Mali could fix a Land Rover. The AK-47 was a blockbuster hit for the same reason. Unfortunately, these days, AK-47s were easier to find than vintage Land Rovers. ~ Eliot Peper,
227:choices are based upon expected utility. And once you have had experience with particular restaurants, CDs, or movies, future choices will be based upon what you remember about these past experiences, in other words, on their remembered utility. ~ Barry Schwartz,
228:Good design is innovative Gives a product utility Is aesthetic Makes a product easy to understand Is unobtrusive Is honest Is long-lived Is consistent down to the smallest detail Protects the environment Good design is as little design as possible. ~ Dieter Rams,
229:The very term ‘public utility’ … is an absurd one. Every good is useful ‘to the public,’ and almost every good … may be considered ‘necessary.’ Any designation of a few industries as ‘public utilities’ is completely arbitrary and unjustified. ~ Murray N Rothbard,
230:Work is part of the sadhana, and in sadhana the question of usefulness does not arise, that is an outward practical measure of things, though even in the outward ordinary life utility is not the only measure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Work and Yoga,
231:It is true that the vast majority of gun deaths in America are not the consequence of the use of an 'assault weapon.' But that begs the question of whether assault weapons have any real utility either in terms of any sporting or self protection needs. ~ Joe Biden,
232:Humanity seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility others may find in their works. ~ John Perry Barlow,
233:Instead of drilling down and finding ways to creatively meet the target cost as Ford did, if companies give in to the tempting route of either bumping up the strategic price or cutting back on utility, they are not on the path to lucrative blue waters. ~ W Chan Kim,
234: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,
235:company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions). Googling ~ Nir Eyal,
236:It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility. ~ Michael Faraday,
237:More and more, I got the feeling that people who needed government assistance were assumed to be a very uneducated bunch and were treated accordingly. How degrading, to learn that since I needed money, I must not know how to keep my utility costs low. ~ Stephanie Land,
238:... In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong. ~ Michael Shermer,
239:What a noble gift to man are the Forests! What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe to their beauty and their utility! How pleasantly the shadows of the wood fall upon our heads when we turn from the glitter and turmoil of the world of man! ~ Susan Fenimore Cooper,
240:Let what I here set down meet with correction or applause, it shall be of equal welcome and utility to me [...]And yet, always submitting to the authority of their
censure, which has an absolute power over me, I thus rashly venture at everything. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
241:Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility. ~ Robert Charles Wilson,
242:Labour once spent has no influence on the future value of any article; it isgone and lost for ever. In commerce bygones are forever bygones; and we are alwaysstarting clearat each moment, judging the values of things with a view to future utility. ~ William Stanley Jevons,
243:My principal work now lies in tracing out the exact nature and conditions of utility. It seems strange indeed that economists have not bestowed more minute attention on a subject which doubtless furnishes the true key to the problems of economics. ~ William Stanley Jevons,
244:HABIT AS STRATEGY Sometimes a behavior does not occur as frequently as flossing or Googling, but it still becomes a habit. For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. ~ Nir Eyal,
245:In the case of money, subjective use-value and subjective exchange-value coincide. Both are derived from objective exchange-value, for money has no utility other than that arising from the possibility of obtaining other economic goods in exchange for it. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
246:Is it life?' he answered.'I would rather be without it' he said, ' for there is a queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, [...] It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like red-bars and foreign bacon. ~ Flann O Brien,
247:A recent Chicago study, for example, has shown that it costs $60,000 to hook up a new house in an outer suburb to the utility infrastructure as against $5,000 for the same house in an existing suburb. “Who foots the bill? Taxpayers in the established suburbs.”72 ~ Mike Davis,
248:Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful. ~ Henri Matisse,
249:The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important. ~ Kenneth E Iverson,
250:I don't ever think about the utility of fiction. I don't believe in it or certainly don't require anybody to consider it. A novel or short story might be useful to a reader in all kinds of ways, many of which no writer would ever foresee, which is a good thing. ~ Francisco Goldman,
251:Clay is molded to form a cup, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the cup depends. Doors and windows are cut out to make a room, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the room depends. Therefore turn being into advantage, and turn non-being into utility. ~ Laozi,
252:The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted. ~ Gregor Mendel,
253:If the satisfaction to be derived from each successive increase in wealth is smaller than the satisfaction derived from the previous increase in wealth, then the disutility caused by a loss will always exceed the positive utility provided by a gain of equal size. ~ Peter L Bernstein,
254:Pascal in his bitter rendition of the practices of the Jesuit intellectuals he despised, including their demonstration of "the utility of interpretation," a device of manufacturing consent based on reinterpretation of sacred texts to serve wealth, power, and privilege. ~ Noam Chomsky,
255:The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs, Losing both beauty and utility. ~ William Shakespeare,
256:Ideally, a fine painting, like a house, is neither a speculation nor an investment; it is a purchase. Its value consists solely of the pleasure and utility it provides now and in the future. The dividend the painting provides is of the non-financial variety. How, ~ William J Bernstein,
257:Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance - thrown hard and with precision. ~ Roger Angell,
258:It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
259:Utility representatives will not show up at your door unannounced and will not ask for banking information in unsolicited phone calls. If you get a request for personal information that leaves you skeptical, contact my office and we can help determine if the call was legitimate. ~ Mike Beebe,
260:Acting is not about competing. Acting is about cooperating. Acting is about collaboration. It's about your utility, your usefulness, your capacity to add to the work that has already been done and will be done. You're just part of a team. I never feel competitive about acting. ~ Harrison Ford,
261:Ideology is essentially a matter of meaning; but the condition of advanced capitalism, some would suggest, is one of pervasive non-meaning. The sway of utility and technology bleach social life of significance, subordinating use-value to the empty formalism of exchange-value. ~ Terry Eagleton,
262:Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm. ~ Neal Stephenson,
263:Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance. In this great balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time. ~ Friedrich Schiller,
264:When trees mature, it is fair and moral that they are cut for man's use, as they would soon decay and return to the earth. Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth. ~ George Nakashima,
265:The S&P 500 Index originally contained exactly 425 industrial, 25 rail, and 50 utility firms, but these groupings were abandoned in 1988 in order to maintain, as Standard & Poor’s claimed, an index that included “500 leading companies in leading industries of the economy. ~ Jeremy J Siegel,
266:I regarded as quite useless the reading of large treatises of pure analysis: too large a number of methods pass at once before the eyes. It is in the works of application that one must study them; one judges their utility there and appraises the manner of making use of them. ~ Joseph Louis Lagrange,
267:Palestinian and Israeli leaders finally recover the Road Map to Peace, only to discover that, while they were looking for it, the Lug Nuts of Mutual Interest came off the Front Left Wheel of Accommodation, causing the Sport Utility Vehicle of Progress to crash into the Ditch of Despair. ~ Dave Barry,
268:Where the world comes in my way - and it comes in my way everywhere - I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but - my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. ~ Max Stirner,
269:Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth. ~ Walter Savage Landor,
270:Ah, the power of two. There's nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons? ~ Sloane Crosley,
271:Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language. ~ Daniel O Connell,
272:GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages. ~ Neal Stephenson,
273:I have no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se—especially since social inequalities are not in themselves a problem as long as they are justified, that is, “founded only upon common utility,” as article 1 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen proclaims. ~ Thomas Piketty,
274:I sincerely wish you may find it convenient to come here. the pleasure of the trip will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. it will make you adore your own country, it's soil, it's climate, it's equality, liberty, laws, people & manners. my god! how little do my countrymen know. ~ Thomas Jefferson,
275:Sam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control, of utility, of the opposite of the powerlessness that comes with having a smallish, underdeveloped body that doesn't dependably respond to the mental commands of a largish, overstimulated brain. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,
276:The Century of the Self delineated expertly how the theories of Sigmund Freud were deployed by his nephew Edward Bernays to create the profession of PR and generate the consumer boom of the fifties. Prior to the inclusion of psychological principles in sales, products were sold on the basis of utility: ~ Anonymous,
277:[My picture A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ] was a way of demonstrating that there was a broad range of possibilities and fairly unlimited utility for a black figure that didn't have to comprise its blackness in order to preserve a place in the field of representation. ~ Kerry James Marshall,
278:The height and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and pleasure of its exercise; so far from difficulty, that boys, as well as men, and the innocent as well as the subtle, may make it their own; and it is by order and good conduct, and not by force, that it is to be acquired. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
279:finance was to become a public utility, situated in the public domain or at least alongside a public banking option. Instead, the past century’s expansion of predatory credit has been reinforced by de-taxing interest, land rent, financial speculation, debt leveraging and “capital” (asset-price) gains. ~ Michael Hudson,
280:I trust in Nature for the stable laws Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant And Autumn garner to the end of time. I trust in God,-the right shall be the right And other than the wrong, while he endures. I trust in my own soul, that can perceive The outward and the inward,-Nature's good And God's. ~ Robert Browning,
281:When one makes sculptures of horses, one remembers all of that great relationship that humans had with them.....Even today one raises horses only for dressage, the races, for the pleasure of horseback riding. It has become an animal of romance, an animal of pleasure which has lost its utility in the West. ~ Joe Fafard,
282:Process is merely a utility; it is a habitual adoption of certain effective relations which might in the infinite possibility of things have been arranged otherwise, for the production of effects which might equally have been quite different. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance,
283:Life has no use at all, declared Adiyogi. It is simply a phenomenon. Little acts have purpose. But life is not framed within the narrow grid of utility. It is beyond frames. It is beyond grids. It is beyond utility. If you have a taste of this existence beyond purpose, of life beyond sense, you are enlightened. ~ Sadhguru,
284:We build our personalities laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes just because we might value their utility; no button reading "positive attitude" protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into immediate action by a single and painless pressing. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,
285:With the publication of Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution and its subsequent censure by the American Medical Association, the nature of the professional discussions on carbohydrate-restricted diets turned from their clinical utility to the reasons to avoid them. The actual science suddenly mattered less than ever. ~ Gary Taubes,
286:To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind, closely allied to that which first created it. ~ William R. Alger, "The Utility and the futility of Aphorism" in: Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Art and Politics, Vol. 11, Atlantic Monthly, 1863, p. 180.,
287:Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy, and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. ~ Mark Forsyth,
288:People tend to be clueless about prices. Contrary to economic theory, we don't really decide between A and B by consulting our invisible price tags and purchasing the one that yields the higher utility, he says. We make do with guesstimates and a vague recollection of what things are “supposed to cost.” ~ William Poundstone,
289:The eighteenth-century view of the garden was that it should lead the observer to the enjoyment of the aesthetic sentiments of regularity and order, proportion, colour and utility, and, furthermore, be capable of arousing feelings of grandeur, gaiety, sadness, wildness, domesticity, surprise and secrecy. ~ Penelope Hobhouse,
290:For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. ~ Henry David Thoreau,
291:Your teacher did not want to be a teacher. He wanted to be a meter reader at the electric utility. Meter readers do not have to put up with children, work comparatively little, and what is more important, have greater opportunity for corruption and are hence both better off and held in higher regard by society. ~ Mohsin Hamid,
292:Cancelling debts was politically easiest when governments or public institutions (temples, palaces or civic authorities) were the major creditors, because they were cancelling debts owed to themselves. This is an argument for why governments should be the main suppliers of money and credit as a public utility. ~ Michael Hudson,
293:Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment. ~ H L Mencken,
294:The cost side of a company’s business model ensures that it creates a leap in value for itself in the form of profit—that is, the price of the offering minus the cost of production. It is the combination of exceptional utility, strategic pricing, and target costing that allows companies to achieve value innovation—a ~ W Chan Kim,
295:The difference ‘twixt poet and coxcomb is precisely that the latter stops gaps like a ship fitter caulking seams, merely to keep the boat afloat, while the former doth his work as doth a man with a maid: he fills the gap, but with vigor, finesse, and care; there’s beauty and delight as well as utility in his plugging ~ John Barth,
296:The greatest and perhaps only utility of all philosophy of pure reason is thus only negative, namely that it does not serve for expansion, as an organon, but rather, as a discipline, serves for the determination of boundaries, and instead of discovering truth it has only the silent merit of guarding against errors ~ Immanuel Kant,
297:I had more trouble than I had a sense of utility or satisfaction. But it served to occupy me and to keep me occupied in a field that I love - which was cinema - while I was waiting to realize the film that I wanted to do, which was Once Upon a Time in America, which took ten years of thinking and working to realize. ~ Sergio Leone,
298:There is a vulgar persuasion, that the ignorance of women, by favoring their subordination, ensures their utility. 'Tis the same argument employed by the ruling few against the subject many in aristocracies; by the rich against the poor in democracies; by the learned professions against the people in all countries. ~ Frances Wright,
299:If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy... It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action. ~ Amartya Sen,
300:In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before. ~ Mitt Romney,
301:The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to philosophers is very recent. ~ Bertrand Russell,
302:It is the acquisition of skills in particular, irrespective of their utility, that is potent in making life meaningful. Since man has no inborn skills, the survival of the species has depended on the ability to acquire and perfect skills. Hence the mastery of skills is a uniquely human activity and yields deep satisfaction. ~ Eric Hoffer,
303:The ubiquitous semi-sentient utility routine running in her macrocellular clusters responded immediately by unfolding a basic array of mental icons, slender lines of blue fairy light that superimposed themselves within her wobbly vision. She frowned. If she was reading their efficiency modes correctly, her biononics had ~ Peter F Hamilton,
304:As the magnitude of the gain increases, the amount of additional satisfaction people get out of each additional unit decreases. The shape of this curve conforms to what economists have long talked about as the “law of diminishing marginal utility.” As the rich get richer, each additional unit of wealth satisfies them less. ~ Barry Schwartz,
305:Tolstoi explains somewhere in his writings why, in his opinion, “Science for Science's sake” is an absurd conception. We cannot know all the facts, since they are practically infinite in number. We must make a selection. Is it not better to be guided by utility, by our practical, and more especially our moral, necessities? ~ Henri Poincare,
306:The superior excellence imputed to the book, which imitates the products of antique and obsolete processes, is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech. ~ Thorstein Veblen,
307:Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
308:One of the most important axioms is, that as the quantity of any commodity, for instance, plain food, which a man has to consume, increases, so the utility or benefit derived from the last portion used decreases in degree. The decrease in enjoyment between the beginning and the end of a meal may be taken as an example. ~ William Stanley Jevons,
309:To hinder, besides, the farmer from selling his goods at all times to the best market, is evidently to sacrifice the ordinary laws of justice to an idea of public utility, to a sort of reasons of state; an act of legislative authority which ought to be exercised only, which can be pardoned only in cases of the most urgent necessity. ~ Adam Smith,
310:With the DRC, DARPA is asking the robotics community to build and demonstrate high-functioning humanoid robots by the end of 2014. According to an initial specification supplied by the agency, they will have to be able to drive a utility vehicle, remove debris blocking an entryway, climb a ladder, close a valve, and replace a pump.34 ~ Anonymous,
311:For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones; since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival. ~ Wilfrid Sheed,
312:One need only open the eyes to see that the conquests of industry which have enriched so many practical men would never have seen the light, if these practical men alone had existed and if they had not been preceded by unselfish devotees who died poor, who never thought of utility, and yet had a guide far other than caprice. (417) ~ Henri Poincare,
313:Magical beliefs are revelatory and fascinating not because they are ill-conceived instruments of utility but because they are poetic echoes of the cadences that guide the innermost course of the world. Magic takes language, symbols, and intelligibility to their outermost limits, to explore life and thereby to change its destination. ~ Michael Taussig,
314:Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
315:The utility of "structural" racism for demagogues like Jackson is that even while acknowledging that the vast majority of whites are no longer overtly racist, the concept makes all whites guilty nonetheless. No individual white has to be a racist in actual thought or deed to participate in the racist system or to reap its privileges. ~ David Horowitz,
316:The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is. ~ Tom Regan,
317:The end toward which mankind is inexorably developing by the constant overcoming of internal antagonisms is not the enjoyment, ownership, or use of goods, but self-realization, creativity based upon the incorporation into the individual personality of the whole previous development of humanity. Freedom is creative universality, not utility. ~ C L R James,
318:Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair. ~ Terry Eagleton,
319:I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals. ~ John Lewis Gaddis,
320:The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: “All life is Yoga.” (Aurobindo 1976, 4) ~ Georg Feuerstein,
321:We tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, then it must be “according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else”. ~ Shashi Tharoor,
322:As it often happens that the best men are but little known, and consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way, the biographer is of great utility, as, by communicating such valuable patterns to the world, he may perhaps do a more extensive service to mankind than the person whose life originally afforded the pattern. ~ Henry Fielding,
323:The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset,
324:The word itself—“cliché”—derives from the sound that printing plates made when they were cast from movable type. Some phrases were used often enough that it made sense to cast the whole phrase in metal, rather than having to create an arrangement of individual letters. It was about utility. You didn’t have to remake the entire plate each time. ~ Leslie Jamison,
325:All this would have been fine, his many offenses, but for the fact that he actually believed that Mae cared. He believed that Mae, graduate of Carleton, dreamer of rare and golden dreams, cared about this job at the gas and electric utility. That she would be worried if Kevin considered her performance on any given day subpar. It drove her mad. The ~ Dave Eggers,
326:I'm more interested in becoming a commercial writer, and unfortunately, commentary on my writing from a bunch of other unpublished writers is of little utility in that regard. Being a better writer is something of a moot point, since if you're not a commercial writer to some extent, very few people will know whether your writing is any good or not. ~ John Scalzi,
327:Modern creditors avert public cancellation of debts (and making banks a public utility) by pretending that lending provides mutual benefit in which the borrower gains – consumer goods now rather than later, or money to run a business or buy an asset that earns enough to pay back the creditor with interest and still leave a profit for the debtor. ~ Michael Hudson,
328:The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. ~ John Stuart Mill,
329:We might even invent laws for series or formula in an arbitrary manner, and set the engine to work upon them, and thus deduce numerical results which we might not otherwise have thought of obtaining; but this would hardly perhaps in any instance be productive of any great practical utility, or calculated to rank higher than as a philosophical amusement. ~ Ada Lovelace,
330:That the foundation of our national policy should be laid in private morality. If individuals be not influenced by moral principles, it is in vain to look for public virtue; it is, therefore, the duty of legislators to enforce, both by precept and example, the utility, as well as the necessity, of a strict adherence to the rules of distributive justice. ~ James Madison,
331:Though thirty spokes may form the wheel, it is the hole within the hub which gives the wheel utility. It is not the clay the potter throws, which gives the pot its usefulness, but the space within the shape, from which the pot is made. Without a door, the room cannot be entered, and without its windows it is dark Such is the utility of non-existence.212 ~ Jordan Peterson,
332:Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race. ~ Thomas Jefferson,
333:Though thirty spokes may form the wheel, it is the hole within the hub which gives the wheel utility. It is not the clay the potter throws, which gives the pot its usefulness, but the space within the shape, from which the pot is made. Without a door, the room cannot be entered, and without its windows it is dark Such is the utility of non-existence.212 ~ Jordan B Peterson,
334:He was impotent, here as in the outside world, his utility confined to punching commands into computers. Beyond the bedroom where he sat day after day like an idle spider in the midst of a digital Web he was boneless, protected only by a black carapace of T-shirts and jeans, unprepared for physical danger. His mind struggled against the limits of his body. ~ G Willow Wilson,
335:I loved the idea that people dressed up to go to the gardens. Our work always has a utility point of view at its heartbeat and then other things come around it, so it really allowed us to use denims and suedes and gauzes, and those sorts of hard-working fabrics - workwear fabrics - and then contrast them with crepe de chine, beautiful florals and big jewelry. ~ Karen Walker,
336:Or maybe it’s a ploy to get more sex.” She gave him a look that curled his chopsticks. “Maybe it’s working,” she said. “Maybe I’ll slip into something more comfortable,” he said. “Not that Batman mask again.” “Aw, c’mon, you can wear the utility belt.” She thought about it. “Okay, but no stopping in the middle and shouting, ‘Same Bat Time, same Bat Channel.’  ~ Harlan Coben,
337:Vitruvius, the great writer, architect and engineer, identified in his famous treatise on Architecture that the three values essential to any work of Architecture were: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas; or firmness, utility, and delight. Firmness meaning well built, solid and resistant; utility meaning useful and functional, and delight meaning beautiful. ~ Santiago Calatrava,
338:a name, like javax.swing (a package that holds some of the Swing GUI classes you’ll learn about soon). ArrayList is in the package called java.util, which surprise surprise, holds a pile of utility classes. You’ll learn a lot more about packages in Chapter 17, including how to put your own classes into your own packages. For now though, we’re just looking to use ~ Kathy Sierra,
339:Play: It is an an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play-mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exaltation and tension accompanies the action. ~ Johan Huizinga,
340:To treat programming scientifically, it must be possible to specify the required properties of programs precisely. Formality is certainly not an end in itself. The importance of formal specifications must ultimately rest in their utility -in whether or not they are used to improve the quality of software or to reduce the cost of producing and maintaining software. ~ Jim Horning,
341:And so there we were, balanced on a knife edge that was unfortunately only metaphorical. Sooner or later, I had to be me. But until then I would see an awful lot of Rita. She couldn't hold a candle to my old flame, the Dark Passenger, but I did need my secret identity. And until I escaped Doakes, Rita was my cape, red tights, and utility belt—almost the entire costume. ~ Jeff Lindsay,
342:The weathered dairy barn, the wilted chicken coop, the leaning corn crib, the corroded silos-- all were revealed as structures of utility and grace. Someone must have rigged Ry's perception so that he had spent his whole life seeing only the ultimate futility of these structures while concealing what made them worthy, the struggle itself, the striving for a better day. ~ Daniel Kraus,
343:One can like one's job, enjoy these material gestures and the things that permit the accomplishing of them. One can transform the curse of labor into sport. Activity does not derive its value and meaning from an ultimate and unique goal [...] To enjoy without utility, in pure loss, gratuitously, without referring to anything else, in pure expenditure---this is human. ~ Emmanuel Levinas,
344:Yes, the success of open source does call into some question the utility of command-and-control systems, of secrecy, of centralization, and of certain kinds of intellectual property. It would be almost disingenuous not to admit that it suggests (or at least harmonizes well with) a broadly libertarian view of the proper relationship between individuals and institutions. ~ Eric S Raymond,
345:But concerning vision alone is a separate science formed among philosophers, namely, optics, and not concerning any other sense ... It is possible that some other science may be more useful, but no other science has so much sweetness and beauty of utility. Therefore it is the flower of the whole of philosophy and through it, and not without it, can the other sciences be known. ~ Roger Bacon,
346:Buddhist teachings discourage us from clinging and grasping to those we hold dear, and from trying to control the people or the relationship. What’s more, we’re encouraged to accept the impermanence of all things: the flower that blooms today will be gone tomorrow, the objects we possess will break or fade or lose their utility, our relationships will change, life will end. ~ Sharon Salzberg,
347:Man is created for a purpose; the object of his existence is to perfect himself. Man is imperfect by nature, because if nature had made him perfect he would have had no wants; and it is only by supplying his wants that utility can be developed. The development of utility is therefore the object of our being, and the attainment of this great end the cause of our existence. ~ Benjamin Disraeli,
348:Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own. ~ Marcel Proust,
349:Air is one we hold in common; it has a limited carrying capacity for pollutants and that's being used up by those who pollute the atmosphere. So we have to stop that externality. We would never allow a utility to put their coal slag in a dump truck and back it up to the city park and dump it in unlimited amounts for free. But that is exactly what we do with carbon dioxide and methane. ~ Jay Inslee,
350:The new science takes us from a colonial vision of nature as an enemy to pillage and enslave, to a new vision of nature as a community to nurture. The right to exploit, harness, and own nature in the form of property is tempered by the obligation to steward nature and treat it with dignity and respect. The utility value of nature is slowly giving way to the intrinsic value of nature. ~ Jeremy Rifkin,
351:The data on the economic utility of artists is really, really strong. Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people...and of course entrepreneurs are the people who provide all of the vision for the entire capitalist system. They're absolutely necessary.
But conservatives tend to be so blind to art that they can't even see that the artists are the ones who drive the economy forward! ~ Jordan Peterson,
352:The data on the economic utility of artists is really, really strong. Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people...and of course entrepreneurs are the people who provide all of the vision for the entire capitalist system. They're absolutely necessary.
But conservatives tend to be so blind to art that they can't even see that the artists are the ones who drive the economy forward! ~ Jordan B Peterson,
353:As for clothing, [...] perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. [...] No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. ~ Henry David Thoreau,
354:Bernoulli’s model lacks the idea of a reference point, expected utility theory does not represent the obvious fact that the outcome that is good for Anthony is bad for Betty. His model could explain Anthony’s risk aversion, but it cannot explain Betty’s risk-seeking preference for the gamble, a behavior that is often observed in entrepreneurs and in generals when all their options are bad. ~ Daniel Kahneman,
355:When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage ~ Daniel Gilbert,
356:When we have an experience—hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room—on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert,
357:Philosophers should resist the temptation to be publicly virtuous. Given an unjust society, from the vantage of what counts as the public good, they are corrupters, not edifiers. The desire to be seen to be virtuous, to make a positive contribution, is a deleterious symptom of professionalization. Philosophy's social utility is an ersatz for its duty to mount challenges to the entire social order. ~ Ray Brassier,
358:An icon means nothing to me. I don't understand what it means to anybody actually. It seems like a word of convenience. It seems to attend to the huge success of certain kinds of movies that I did, but there's no personal utility in being an icon. I don't know what an icon does, except stand in a corner quietly accepting everyone's attention. I like to work, so there's no utility in being an icon. ~ Harrison Ford,
359:But this narrative of prophecy would eventually be subverted by the enemies of Elohim, who transformed it into an entire substitute system of astral worship where stars were considered as controlling powers over the lives of men. Though there was no actual power in the stars, it served the purpose of the gods to divert mankind’s attention from the true God of history into a god of one’s own utility. ~ Brian Godawa,
360:The Utah Power & Light Company, meanwhile, cut right to the chase in a full-page ad with the alarmist headline “How many ‘Independence Days’ have we left?” The utility company implored readers to “pray for help in maintaining man’s closeness to God, in preserving man’s God-given rights and responsibilities against those who would make you dependent upon a socialistic, all-powerful government.” 53 ~ Kevin M Kruse,
361:You know what? This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,
362:False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. ~ Cesare Beccaria,
363:Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response. ~ Clay Shirky,
364:Soul" is a barrier against reduction, against human life reduced to biology and genitals, culture and utility, race and ethnicity. It signals an interiority that permeates all exteriority, an invisibility that everywhere inhabits visibility. "Soul" carries with it resonances of God-created, God-sustained, and God-blessed. It is our most comprehensive term for designating the core being of men and women. ~ Eugene H Peterson,
365:The Plagiarism of orators is the art, or an ingenious and easy mode, which some adroitly employ to change, or disguise, all sorts of speeches of their own composition, or that of other authors, for their pleasure, or their utility; in such a manner that it becomes impossible even for the author himself to recognise his own work, his own genius, and his own style, so skilfully shall the whole be disguised. ~ Isaac D Israeli,
366:But the coercive power of competition forces capitalists, as individual economic agents, to abuse that system and so undermine the social power of money itself: the currency may be debased, chronic inflation occurs, monetary crises are created, etc. It turns out that their use of money as a medium of circulation through the agency of the credit system undermines the utility of money as a measure and store of value. ~ Anonymous,
367:A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean. ~ Ken Wilber,
368:Modern man has a need for simplification that tends to find its expression one way or another. And this artificial monotony which he takes pains to create, this monotony which is slowly taking over the world, this monotony is the sign of our greatness. It bears the mark of a certain will-power, the will to utility; it is the expression of utility, a law that governs all our modern activity: the Law of Utility. ~ Blaise Cendrars,
369:the world, as perceived, is maya—appearance or illusion. This means, in part, that people are blinded by their desires (as well as merely incapable of seeing things as they truly are). This is true, in a sense that transcends the metaphorical. Your eyes are tools. They are there to help you get what you want. The price you pay for that utility, that specific, focused direction, is blindness to everything else. ~ Jordan Peterson,
370:Things in which we do not take joy are either a burden upon our minds to be got rid of at any cost; or they are useful, and therefore in temporary and partial relation to us, becoming burdensome when their utility is lost; or they are like wandering vagabonds, loitering for a moment on the outskirts of our recognition, and then passing on. A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us. ~ Rabindranath Tagore,
371:Ancient forests that took millennia to evolve are called "decadent" or "overmature," so clearing them is justified by the notion that they are finished or at an end. Sometimes the forest industry labels such forests "wild," and what is planted and grown after it has been clear-cut is called a "normal" forest. We define things in terms of human utility, not in any way that makes ecological or even biological sense. ~ David Suzuki,
372:Peace builds, war destroys. Nations are fundamentally peaceful because they recognize the predominant utility of peace. They accept war only in self-defence; wars of aggression they do not desire. It is the princes who want war, because thus they hope to get money, goods, and power. It is the business of the nations to prevent them from achieving their desire by denying them the means necessary for making war. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
373:the world, as perceived, is maya—appearance or illusion. This means, in part, that people are blinded by their desires (as well as merely incapable of seeing things as they truly are). This is true, in a sense that transcends the metaphorical. Your eyes are tools. They are there to help you get what you want. The price you pay for that utility, that specific, focused direction, is blindness to everything else. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
374:By the principle of asceticism I mean that principle, which, like the principle of utility, approves or disapproves of any action, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question; but in an inverse manner: approving of actions in as far as they tend to diminish his happiness; disapproving of them in as far as they tend to augment it. ~ Jeremy Bentham,
375:Ever since Aristotle described three different kinds of friends—friends of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue—we have known that a set of friends can be a diverse lot. We can have friends we only see at basketball games or book club, friends we see nearly every day at work, and friends who are our confidants. Specialization is fine—we do not expect to like all of our friends in the same way or for the same reasons. At ~ Bella DePaulo,
376:I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left. ~ Jeanette Winterson,
377:I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life or the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left. ~ Jeanette Winterson,
378:The most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of SPEECH, consisting of Names or Appellations, and their Connexion; whereby men register their Thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutuall utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither Commonwealth, nor Society, nor Contract, nor Peace, no more than amongst Lyons, Bears, and Wolves. ~ Thomas Hobbes,
379:The political reputation of Servius rests upon his organization of society according to a fixed scale of rank and fortune. He originated the census, a measure of the highest utility to a state destined, as Rome was, to future preeminence; for by means of its public service, in peace as well as in war, could thence forward be regularly organized on the basis of property; every man's contribution could be in proportion to his means. ~ Livy,
380:principle of utility, which he defined as “the principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.”16 Each law should aim to maximize the utility of the community, which is defined as the simple arithmetic sum of the expected utilities of each member. Bentham then systematized ~ Jonathan Haidt,
381:In the United States the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America; and there can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
382:Is it life?" he answered, "I would rather be without it," he said, "for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon. ~ Flann O Brien,
383:The utility of a thing makes it a use value.[14] But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. ~ Karl Marx,
384:Facebook's a wonderful, incredible way to bring humanity together. They've brought together 2 billion people in the largest fictional family in history. So young people are starting to empathize with each other through Facebook across the globe. This is wonderful. However, when everyone needs Facebook because it's so successful that everyone's on it, then it starts to look like a global public utility, a public good. Same with Amazon. ~ Jeremy Rifkin,
385:The mind is a mechanism. It has no intelligence. The mind is a bio-computer. How can it have any intelligence? It has skill, but it has no intelligence; it has a functional utility, but it has no awareness. It is a robot; it works well but don`t listen to it too much because then you will lose your inner intelligence. Then it is as if you are asking a machine to guide you, lead you. You are asking a machine which has nothing original in it. ~ Rajneesh,
386:subtle case for the role of error in innovation, because error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore. ~ Steven Johnson,
387:Three principles - the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the utility of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality - are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics. ~ Murray Gell Mann,
388:The determination of the value of an item must not be based on its price, but rather on the utility it yields. The price of the item is dependent only on the thing itself and is equal for everyone; the utility, however, is dependent on the particular circumstances of the person making the estimate. Thus there is no doubt that a gain of one thousand ducats is more significant to a pauper than to a rich man though both gain the same amount. ~ Daniel Bernoulli,
389:I was starting to wonder if the sort of memorization practiced by mental athletes was not something like the peacock’s tail: impressive not for its utility, but for its profound lack of utility. Were these ancient techniques anything more than “intellectual fossils,” as the historian Paulo Rossi once put it, fascinating for what they tell us about the minds of a bygone era, but as out of place in our modern world as quill pens and papyrus scrolls? ~ Joshua Foer,
390:No profession or occupation is more pleasing than the military; a profession or exercise both noble in execution (for the strongest, most generous and proudest of all virtues is true valor) and noble in its cause. No utility either more just or universal than the protection of the repose or defense of the greatness of one's country. The company and daily conversation of so many noble, young and active men cannot but be well-pleasing to you. ~ Michel de Montaigne,
391:Necessary policemen, firemen, street cleaners, health officers, judges, legislators and executives perform productive services as important as those of anyone in private industry. They make it possible for private industry to function in an atmosphere of law, order, freedom and peace. But their justification consists in the utility of their services. It does not consist in the "purchasing power" they possess by virtue of being on the public payroll. ~ Henry Hazlitt,
392:The price of money, like other prices, is determined in the last resort by the subjective valuations of buyers and sellers. But, as has been said already, the subjective use-value of money, which coincides with its subjective exchange-value, is nothing but the anticipated use-value of the things that are to be bought with it. The subjective value of money must be measured by the marginal utility of the goods for which the money can be exchanged.1 ~ Ludwig von Mises,
393:that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit. ~ Arthur Koestler,
394:There are respectable individuals, who from a just aversion to an accumulation of Public debt, are unwilling to concede to it any kind of utility, who can discern no good to alleviate the ill with which they suppose it pregnant; who cannot be persuaded that it ought in any sense to be viewed as an increase of capital lest it should be inferred, that the more debt the more capital, the greater the burthens the greater the blessings of the community. ~ Alexander Hamilton,
395:Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this—that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. ~ John Stuart Mill,
396:We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension. ~ David Hume,
397:The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises. ~ Mario Savio,
398:English to Italian translation
Il fascismo, più che ritiene e osserva il futuro e lo sviluppo dell'umanità, a prescindere da considerazioni politiche del momento, non crede né alla possibilità né all'utilità della pace perpetua. which means Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. ~ Benito Mussolini,
399:In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century. ~ Warren Buffett,
400:By utility is meant that property is any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness(all this in the present case come to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party who whose is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community; if a particular individual; then the happiness of that individual ~ Jeremy Bentham,
401:To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn’t need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough. ~ Mark Forsyth,
402:But it implied, as utility theory never had, that it was as easy to get people to take risks as it was to get them to avoid them. All you had to do was present them with a choice that involved a loss. In the more than two hundred years since Bernoulli started the discussion, intellectuals had regarded risk-seeking behavior as a curiosity. If risk seeking was woven into human nature, as Danny and Amos’s theory implied that it was, why hadn’t people noticed it before? ~ Michael Lewis,
403:Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods. ~ Ron Chernow,
404:Switching to LEDs could mean a 1.5 percent decline per year in electricity consumption, eliminating the need for 30 power plants annually and cutting annual spending on electricity by $25 billion by the end of the decade. Yet regulatory models for electricity consumption assume a steady increase in demand. When customers can increase their use of lighting services without increasing their demand for electricity, the traditional utility model could face difficult times. ~ Stefan Heck,
405:Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure ... There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency. ~ Jeremy Bentham,
406:Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race. ~ Thomas Jefferson,
407:They were just snapshots, nothing special, nothing particularly artistic. They were used for utility purposes. (On photographs of mundane streetscapes he had Stanley Something-or-other take in Sacramento in 1988 to serve as backgrounds to his cartoons. People don't draw it, all this crap, people don't focus attention on it because it's ugly, it's bleak, it's depressing... But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life. ) ~ Robert Crumb,
408:Suppose that government is founded on contract, and that these powers are entrusted to persons who grossly abuse them, it is evident that resistance is lawful, because the original contract is now broken. But we showed before that government was founded on the principles of utility and authority. We also showed that the principle of authority is more prevalent in a monarchy, and that of utility in a democracy, from their frequent attendance on public meetings and courts of justice. ~ Adam Smith,
409:What meaning has such meditation? There is no meaning; there is no utility. But in that meditation there is a movement of great ecstasy which is not to be confounded with pleasure. It is this ecstasy which gives to the eye, to the brain and to the heart, the quality of innocency. Without seeing life as something totally new, it is a routine, a boredom, a meaningless affair. So meditation is of the greatest importance. It opens the door to the incalculable, to the measureless. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,
410:Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy, and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. ... Clothes and language can be things of beauty, I would no more write without art because I didn't need to than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough. ~ Mark Forsyth,
411:At first he who invented any art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of the latter were always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. ~ Aristotle,
412:In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch ~ Bertrand Russell,
413:A little attention however to the nature of the human mind evinces that the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant. That they are pleasant when well written, every person feels who reads. But wherein is its utility, asks the reverend sage, big with the notion that nothing can be useful but the learned lumber of Greek and Roman reading with which his head is stored? I answer, every thing is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue. ~ Thomas Jefferson,
414:Darwin and his successors have railed against the fallacy of confusing the current utility of a trait with the reason the trait evolved. For example, Darwin argued that skull sutures in mammals did not evolve because they facilitate live birth; the sutures were in place well before live birth evolved. Checking the chronological order in which different traits evolved in a lineage is one way to test an adaptive hypothesis; the fact of common ancestry is what makes that checking possible. ~ Elliott Sober,
415:Fascism, in so far as it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism - born of a renunciation of struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it. ~ Benito Mussolini,
416:Money and electricity are much alike. Both are stored energy. Living amidst electricity, using it constantly, you take its presence and its utility for granted. Treated with respect, it is constructive, tireless. Treated with disrespect, it is destructive, vicious. It will light your way, pull a twelve-car train from Washington to New York in a bit more than four hours, kill you or burn your house alike. Electricity is insulated, though, and children are not permitted to play with it. ~ Evalyn Walsh McLean,
417:In 2013, 1 percent of poor renters lived in rent-controlled units; 15 percent lived in public housing; and 17 percent received a government subsidy, mainly in the form of a rent-reducing voucher. The remaining 67 percent—2 of every 3 poor renting families—received no federal assistance. 32 This drastic shortfall in government support, coupled with rising rent and utility costs alongside stagnant incomes, is the reason why most poor renting families today spend most of their income on housing. ~ Matthew Desmond,
418:Just as it is too simple to say that people seek utility, it is too simple to say that people seek fitness. Instead, as we discuss next, human decision making is designed to achieve a set of very different evolutionary goals. In investigating how people meet these evolutionary goals, scientists have discovered something important: solutions to these different problems often require us to make decisions in different—and sometimes completely incompatible—ways. We are, in fact, inconsistent by design. ~ Anonymous,
419:What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief. ~ Benjamin Franklin,
420:You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love. ~ Anthony de Mello,
421:Physical science, through the medium of inventions, is useful to innumerable people who are wholly ignorant of it; thus the study of physical science is to be recommended, not only, or primarily, because of the effect on the student, but rather because of the effect on mankind in general. Thus utility does not belong to philosophy. If the study of philosophy has any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must be only indirectly, through its effects upon the lives of those who study it. ~ Bertrand Russell,
422:It is the censor's business to make a judgment about the propriety of the content or message of the proposed expressive activity. The regulation here does not authorize any judgment about the content of any speeches. ... A park is a limited space, and to allow unregulated access to all comers could easily reduce rather than enlarge the park's utility as a forum for speech. Just imagine two rallies held at the same time in the same park area using public-address systems that drowned out each other's speakers. ~ Richard Posner,
423:a noble and active mind blunts itself against nothing so quickly as the sharp and bitter irritant of knowledge. And certain it is that the youth's constancy of purpose, no matter how painfully conscientious, was shallow beside the mature resolution of the master of his craft, who made a right-about-face, turned his back on the realm of knowledge, and passed it by with averted face, lest it lame his will or power of action, paralyse his feelings or his passions, deprive any of these of their conviction or utility. ~ Thomas Mann,
424:It must be pointed out that the level of the total stock of money and of the value of the money unit are matters of complete indifference as far as the utility obtained from the use of the money is concerned. Society is always in enjoyment of the maximum utility obtainable from the use of money. Half of the money at the disposal of the community would yield the same utility as the whole stock, even if the variation in the value of the monetary unit was not proportioned to the variation in the stock of money. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
425:studies are beginning to show that our ability to appreciate the intrinsic value of generosity, sharing and selflessness is central to maximizing our well-being. MAKING HOMO ECONOMICUS HAPPY When this theory is applied to people, Becker argues that we become Homo economicus in a very specific way: Everyone is a producer of his or her own happiness. We obtain our own utility, to use his language, “through the productive activity of combining purchased market goods and services with some of the house hold’s own time. ~ Raj Patel,
426: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,
427:To be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed and robbed; then, upon the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon,
428:Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness. ~ Thomas Merton,
429:The particular content of the idea was decidedly secondary. The ultimate utility of ideas is not their intrinsic truth but the extent to which they make a desired action possible—in Hitler’s case the destruction of your enemies, the attainment of glory, and the triumph of your race. This is important to keep in mind because Hitler’s ideological coherence left a great deal to be desired. His opportunism, pragmatism, and megalomania often overpowered any desire on his part to formulate a fixed ideological approach. ~ Jonah Goldberg,
430:for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities. A supreme difficulty is Nature's indication to us of a supreme conquest to be won and an ultimate problem to be solved; it is not a warning of an inextricable snare to be shunned or of an enemy too strong for us from whom we must flee. Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there for a great utility; they too demand the divine realisation of their possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
431:physical evolution, so reason cannot be explained as a mere extension or complication of consciousness. To explain our rationality will require something in addition to what is needed to explain our consciousness and its evidently adaptive forms, something at a different level. Reason can take us beyond the appearances because it has completely general validity, rather than merely local utility. If we have it, we recognize that it can be neither confirmed nor undermined by a theory of its evolutionary origins, nor by ~ Thomas Nagel,
432:[T]he strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life. ~ Leon Wieseltier,
433:We were doing the same thing. We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us. Nuevo-mexicanos have done it very well for hundreds of years, inventing words where they don't have them. I think the future of our language is where we claim our bilingualism for its utility. ~ Ana Castillo,
434:The utility of information is admitted practically as well as theoretically; without a literate population a modern State is impossible. But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative difficulties. Only the guardians, in Plato’s language, are to think; the rest are to obey, or to follow leaders like a herd of sheep. ~ Bertrand Russell,
435:How well you do know your own mind? This is, no doubt, a sobering question. Yet it must be answered before proceeding. The utility of any tool is defined, in part, by consistency in deployment and predictability of outcome—the absence of unforeseen surprises once it is in use. A pencil sharpener whose blade engages erratically is no asset and should be culled from your tool kit. So, too, is a mind whose unseen contours hide jarring or potentially compromising impulses, memories, panics, prejudices, weaknesses, and the like. ~ David Rees,
436:The science of government being, therefore, so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes. ~ Edmund Burke,
437:The ‘real’ mathematics of the ‘real’ mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholely ‘useless’ (and this is true of ‘applied’ as of ‘pure’ mathematics). It is not possible to justify the life of any genuine professional mathematician on the ground of the ‘utility’ of his work.… The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are, at present at any rate, almost as ‘useless’ as the theory of numbers. It ~ Andrew Hodges,
438:A company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency (how often the behavior occurs) and perceived utility (how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions). Googling occurs multiple times per day, but any particular search is negligibly better than rival services like Bing. Conversely, using Amazon may be a less frequent occurrence, but users receive great value knowing they’ll find whatever they need at the one and only “everything store. ~ Nir Eyal,
439:The marginal utility of money to any individual, i.e., the marginal utility derivable from the goods that can be obtained with the given quantity of money or that must be surrendered for the required money, presupposes a certain exchange-value of the money; so the latter cannot be derived from the former. 1 Those who have realized the significance of historically-transmitted values in the determination of the objective exchange-value of money will not find great difficulty in escaping from this apparently circular argument. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
440:Max Weber defended the social utility of the politician’s calling and identified three qualities required for success: devotion to a cause; a sense of responsibility; and judgment, or being attuned to the consequences of one’s actions. These usefully define Lincoln’s own qualities as a politician. Yet Weber concluded by noting the symbiotic relationship between political action and moral agitation. “What is possible,” he wrote, “would not have been achieved, if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.”8 ~ Eric Foner,
441:Deep down inside, don’t we at least suspect we are really made for shared relationship and not competitive acquisition? I think we do know this. But we’re thrown into a modern world where identity and purpose are almost entirely based in a ruthless contest for status and stuff. Without a primary orientation of the soul toward God, life gets reduced to the pursuit of power and the acquisition of things. Attempting to yoke God to that kind of agenda is what the Bible calls idolatry—God harnessed as means, the holy reduced to utility. ~ Brian Zahnd,
442:The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end. ~ Warren Buffett,
443:Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments. ~ David Brooks,
444:Jethro, however, rarely listened to people. Or noticed them at all. Even if he looked a person directly in the eye, he often failed to recognize anything of utility. Jethro perceived their presence, the space they took up, the resources they used on his planet. His brain interpreted the matter and energy they possessed, but unless there was potential for something useful to him, he may as well have been looking at a rock, or a weed, or a broken, outmoded piece of furniture in a junkyard. Jethro only took notice of values, not people. ~ Zoltan Istvan,
445:Economic activity is no longer an adversarial contest between embattled sellers and buyers "In the distributed economy, where collaboration trumps competition, inclusivity replaces exclusivity and transparency and openness to others becomes essential to the new way of conducting business, empathic sensibility has room to breathe and thrive. It is no longer so constrained by hierarchies, boundaries of exclusion, and a concept of human nature that places acquisitiveness, self-interest, and utility at the center of the human experience." ~ Jeremy Rifkin,
446:The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought... Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility. ~ Winston Churchill,
447:Utilities used deregulation to effect a series of mergers limiting competition. In order to accelerate profits, cost cutting ensued, involving the layoff of thousands of utility company employees, including some who were responsible for maintenance of generation, transmission, and distribution systems. A number of investor-owned utilities stopped investing in the maintenance and repair of their own equipment, and, instead, cut costs to enhance the value of their stock rather than spending money to enhance the value of their service. ~ Dennis Kucinich,
448:The other cop is writing things down in his pad. The pad is so small. His pen is really small, too. They seem too small, the pen and pad. Personally, I would want a bigger pad. Then again, with a bigger pad, where would I put it? You’d need a pad-holster, which might look cool but would make it even harder to run, especially if you have the flashlight attachment . . . I guess you need a small pad so it’ll fit on your utility belt— Oh, it would be so great if they called it a utility belt. Maybe I could ask. Not now, of course, but later. ~ Dave Eggers,
449:Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries. ~ Vannevar Bush,
450:Which kinds of decisions are premature? Decisions that have nothing to do with the business requirements—the use cases—of the system. These include decisions about frameworks, databases, web servers, utility libraries, dependency injection, and the like. A good system architecture is one in which decisions like these are rendered ancillary and deferrable. A good system architecture does not depend on those decisions. A good system architecture allows those decisions to be made at the latest possible moment, without significant impact. ~ Robert C Martin,
451:What are you gonna do with a giant crossword poster? 'Oh, I'm sorry, Anna. I can't go to the movies tonight. I'm working on two thousand across, Norwegian Birdcall.'"

"At least I'm not buying a Large Plastic Rock for hiding 'unsightly utility posts.' You realize you have no lawn?"

"I could hide other stuff. Like...failed French tests. Or illegal moonshining equipment." He couples over with that wonderful boyish laugher, and I grin. "But what will you do with a motorized swimming-pool snack float?"

"Use it in the bathtub. ~ Stephanie Perkins,
452:Feeling prosperous means paying your utility bills on time and with a smile on your face. Prosperity means not only giving to the homeless person, but having a smile on your face when you do it. Prosperity also means buying fresh produce with a smile on your face instead of buying day-old bread or bargain overripe fruit with a scowl on your face. Still more, being prosperous means tipping generously with a smile on your face when the waiter has given you great service instead of trying to stiff him with a mere percent, or worse, no tip at all. ~ Ernie J Zelinski,
453:It is a hundred meters wide, with a narrow monorail track running down the middle. The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly. A lot of people just ride back and forth on it, looking at the sights. When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night. ~ Neal Stephenson,
454:We tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, argued Vivekananda, then it must be `according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else'. It was important, therefore, to learn to look at the duty of others through their own eyes and never judge the customs and observances of others through the prism of our own standards. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
455:One had to speak of sex; one had to speak publicly and in a manner that was not determined by the division between licit and illicit, even if the speaker maintained the distinction for himself (which is what these solemn and preliminary declarations were intended to show): one had to speak of it as of a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered. ~ Michel Foucault,
456:As Thorstein Veblen correctly surmised over a century ago, the failure of economics to become an evolutionary science is the product of the optimizing framework of the underlying paradigm, which is inherently antithetical to the process of evolutionary change. This is the primary reason why the neoclassical mantra that the economy must be perceived as the outcome of the decisions of utility-maximizing individuals must be squarely rejected. ~ Steve Keen,
457:As Thorstein Veblen correctly surmised over a century ago, the failure of economics to become an evolutionary science is the product of the optimizing framework of the underlying paradigm, which is inherently antithetical to the process of evolutionary change. This is the primary reason why the neoclassical mantra that the economy must be perceived as the outcome of the decisions of utility-maximizing individuals must be squarely rejected. ~ Steve Keen,
458:Similarly, “Rational agents make decisions that maximize the probabilistic expectation of a coherent utility function” is the kind of thought that depends on a concept of (instrumental) rationality, whereas “It’s rational to eat vegetables” can probably be replaced with “It’s useful to eat vegetables” or “It’s in your interest to eat vegetables.” We need a concept like “rational” in order to note general facts about those ways of thinking that systematically produce truth or value—and the systematic ways in which we fall short of those standards. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,
459:Elijah Forrester, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, opposed the Eisenhower administration’s 1956 civil rights bill on the grounds that “where segregation has been abolished,” black villainy soon prospered.*16 “In the District of Columbia, the public parks have become of no utility whatever to the white race,” Forrester claimed, “for they enter at the risk of assaults upon their person or the robbery of their personal effects.” Unless segregation was immediately restored, “in ten years, the nation’s capital will be unsafe for them in the daytime ~ Ta Nehisi Coates,
460:...Pat wondered what inspiration an artist might find in the attempts of twenty-first-century architects to impose their phallic triumphs on the cityscape. Had any artist ever painted a contemporary glass block, for instance, or any other product of architectural brutalism that had laid its crude hands here and there upon the city?...If a building did not lend itself to being painted, then surely that must be because it was inherently ugly, whatever its claims to utility. And if it was ugly, then what was it doing in this delicately beautiful city? ~ Alexander McCall Smith,
461:Those two pairs of sneakers: one hurt my heel. It was the nicer-looking one but it hurt my heel. The confrontation between beauty and utility can sometimes be uncomfortable, and the utility of an uncomfortable pair of sneakers somewhat obscure and uncertain. Besides, there would always be someone in the world with feet a little different to mine – more delicate, without such a prominent bone in the corner. That person would be Cinderella to my nicer-looking pair of sneakers, and it was up to me to bid them farewell and hope that they lived happily ever after. ~ Adriana Lisboa,
462:How had she forgotten how fascinated she had been with the intersection of people and plants? Each culture across the world, no matter the habitat, had discovered the utility of plants not only for food but also for medicine and in religious practices. Often all these uses were linked: sustenance, wellness, and spirituality were bound together, the way a plant is rooted in the earth while reaching for the sun. And despite the advances in modern medicine—and they were considerable—powerful natural sources of healing were being discovered, or rediscovered, all the time. ~ Sonja Yoerg,
463:The distributed nature of solar energy is a problem only if you are thinking like a utility, trying to produce all of your power in one place. But it can be a good thing if you think about making every building into its own energy source, about making whole cities into their own grid, about bringing power to the billions who are not hooked up to the grid at all. Just thinking about a space-based solar power system highlights (pun intended) that solar power’s weaknesses from an old-style industrial perspective may be its strength in the Next Great Generation’s point of view. ~ Bill Nye,
464:Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world. What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a similar transformation: people begin as comrades and fellow citizens, then become labor resources and assets, and then, as their utility shifts or degrades, transmute into liabilities, and thus must be appropriately managed. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett,
465:If you wanted to create jobs in a way that has minimal effect on the deficit but has government action, the two best things you could do are the infrastructure bank and a simple SBA-like loan guarantee for all building retrofits, where the contractor or the energy-service company guarantees the savings. So that allows the bank to loan money to let a school or a college or a hospital or a museum or a commercial building unencumbered by debt to loan it on terms that are longer, so you can pay it back only from your utility savings. You could create a million jobs doing that. ~ William J Clinton,
466:As furniture makers, Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance, and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up—irremediably extinct—within just fifty years of its discovery. ~ Bill Bryson,
467:If one believes philosophers, then what we call religion is only a deliberately popularized or an instinctively artless philosophy. Poets seem to consider religion rather as a variation of poetry which by misjudging its proper beautiful game takes itself too seriously and one-sidedly. Philosophy, however, admits and recognizes that it can begin and complete itself only with religion. Poetry seeks only to strive for the infinite and despises worldly utility and culture, which are the true antitheses of religion. Eternal peace among artists is thus not far away. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel,
468:I regard the state of which I am a citizen as a public utility, like the organization that supplies me with water, gas, and electricity. I feel that it is my civic duty to pay my taxes as well as my other bills, and that it is my moral duty to make an honest declaration of my income to the income tax authorities. But I do not feel that I and my fellow citizens have a religious duty to sacrifice our lives in war on behalf of our own state, and, a fortiori, I do not feel that we have an obligation or a right to kill and maim citizens of other states or to devastate their land. ~ Arnold J Toynbee,
469:Where the world comes in my way—and it comes in my way everywhere—I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it. ~ Max Stirner,
470:The law, I said, which is the sequel of this and of all that has preceded, is to the following effect,—'that the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent.' Yes, he said, that is a much greater wave than the other; and the possibility as well as the utility of such a law are far more questionable. I do not think, I said, that there can be any dispute about the very great utility of having wives and children in common; the possibility is quite another matter, and will be very much disputed. I ~ Plato,
471:The traditional boundaries between various fields of science are rapidly disappearing and what is more important science does not know any national borders. The scientists of the world are forming an invisible network with a very free flow of scientific information - a freedom accepted by the countries of the world irrespective of political systems or religions. ... Great care must be taken that the scientific network is utilized only for scientific purposes - if it gets involved in political questions it loses its special status and utility as a nonpolitical force for development. ~ Sune Bergstrom,
472:In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the questions cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty, than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail; as soon as farther experience and sounder reasoning have given us juster notions of human affairs, we retract our first sentiment, and adjust anew the boundaries of moral good and evil. ~ David Hume,
473:My belief is firm in a law of compensation. The true rewards are ever in proportion to the labor and sacrifices made. This is one of the reasons why I feel certain that of all my inventions, the Magnifying Transmitter will prove most important and valuable to future generations. I am prompted to this prediction not so much by thoughts of the commercial and industrial revolution which it will surely bring about, but of the humanitarian consequences of the many achievements it makes possible. Considerations of mere utility weigh little in the balance against the higher benefits of civilization. ~ Nikola Tesla,
474:In fact, the nature of Western systems of indoctrination is typically not understood by dictators, they don’t understand the utility for propaganda purposes of having “critical debate” that incorporates the basic assumptions of the official doctrines, and thereby marginalizes and eliminates authentic and rational critical discussion. Under what’s sometimes been called “brainwashing under freedom,” the critics, or at least, the “responsible critics” make a major contribution to the cause by bounding the debate within certain acceptable limits―that’s why they’re tolerated, and in fact even honored. ~ Noam Chomsky,
475:supposed to typify public lavatories: the lavatorial utility that was a feature of subway design. lav·a·to·ry n. (pl. -ries) a room or compartment with a toilet and washbasin; a bathroom. - a sink or washbasin in a bathroom. - BRIT. a flush toilet. late Middle English: from late Latin lavatorium 'place for washing', from Latin lavare 'to wash'. The word originally denoted something in which to wash, such as a bath or piscina, later (mid 17th cent.) a room with washing facilities; the current sense dates from the 19th cent. la·va tube n. a natural tunnel within a solidified lava flow, formerly occupied by ~ Erin McKean,
476:Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices, straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows them to us in order to induce us to reflect. Only since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the full sense of the word; what is the use? On the contrary, our souls being realities and having a goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on them intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of whatever sort it may be, the utility which it contains. This, ~ Victor Hugo,
477:It is improbable that in fifty—perhaps twenty—years from now the deposit channel will have the central role in the financial system that it has occupied for centuries by virtue of its link to payments. The payment system is ripe for disruptive innovation, but to date entrants—such as PayPal, Square and most recently Apple Pay—have preferred to shelter under the umbrella of the high charging structure established by inefficient incumbent banks. This cautious sharing of oligopoly profits will not persist indefinitely, and in time the payment system will become an inexpensive utility distinct from the deposit channel. The ~ John Kay,
478:If you wish to see firsthand the unpredictable power of an emergent platform, you need only look at what has happened to GPS over the past five years. The engineers that built the system—starting with Guier and Weiffenbach—created an entire ecosystem of unexpected utility. Frank McClure recognized that you could harness Guier and Weiffenbach’s original insight to track nuclear submarines, but he had no inkling that fifty years later the same system would help teenagers to play elaborate games in urban centers, or climbers to explore treacherous mountain ranges, or photographers to upload their photos to Flickr maps. ~ Steven Johnson,
479:I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility. ~ Marilynne Robinson,
480:The meal was breakfast: the subject, utility clothing. 'As for the stuff they're turning out for men nowadays,' said Mr Thwaites bitterly, 'I wouldn't give it to my Valet.'

Mr Thwaites' valet was quite an old friend. An unearthly, flitting presence, whose shape, character, age, and appearance could only be dimly conceived, he had been turning up every now and again ever since Miss Roach had known Mr Thwaites. Mostly he was summoned into being as one from whom all second-rate, shoddy, or inferior articles were withheld. But sometimes things were good enough for Mr Thwaites' valet, but would not do for Mr Thwaites. ~ Patrick Hamilton,
481:The meal was breakfast: the subject, utility clothing. 'As for the stuff they're turning out for men nowadays,' said Mr Thwaites bitterly, 'I wouldn't give it to my Valet.'

Mr Thwaites' valet was quite an old friend. An unearthly, flitting presence, whose shape, character, age, and appearance could only be dimly conceived, he had been turning up every now and again ever since Miss Roach had known Mr Thwaites. Mostly he was summoned into being as one from whom all second-rate, shoddy, or inferior articles were withheld. But sometimes things were good enough for Mr Thwaites' valet, but would not do for Mr Thwaites. ~ Patrick Hamilton,
482:When we finally left the storms of the Midwest behind us, I turned to the man beside me, a Boeing engineer, and asked him if he had been afraid. “No. I’ve already been there.” It was a strange answer. He explained that he had been clinically dead as a youth, crushed beneath a car after he and several friends had hit a utility pole. “I watched from somewhere up above and saw the troopers lift the car off someone. Then I saw that it was me lying there. I wasn’t afraid, and I didn’t feel any pain—not until I woke up in the hospital three days later. Since then, I’ve known that the soul doesn’t die, only the body, and I’ve never been afraid.” I ~ Ann Rule,
483:A family which stays together for selfish reasons and not out of love does not stay together for long. When the family is humoured for convenience and necessity, its utility gets over soon. In such cases, children don’t need their parents when they grow up. A wife does not need her husband if she earns her livelihood. A husband may be attracted to a younger and more beautiful woman to fill his life. Parents do not want to waste time and money in bringing up their children who may leave them on growing up and won’t be available in time of need. An investment in a bank would perhaps be more reliable for old age than investment on children. ~ Awdhesh Singh,
484:Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and
our vices, straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our
souls. God shows them to us in order to induce us to reflect.
Only since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them
capable of education in the full sense of the word; what is the
use? On the contrary, our souls being realities and having a
210
goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on them
intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social
education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of
whatever sort it may be, the utility which it contains. ~ Victor Hugo,
485:He turned the entire living room into an airport, complete with a four-foot-high LEGO traffic control tower and a fleet of paper planes, plastic army pilots taped safely into their cockpits. From deep beneath the couch, a large utility flashlight illuminates some sort of...landing strip? I crouch down for a better look.
Oh. My. God.
Stuck to the carpet in parallel, unbroken paths from one wall to the other are two lanes of brand-new maxi pads. Plastic dinosaurs stand guard at every fourth pad–triceratops and T rexes on one side, brontosauruses and pterodactyls on the other–protecting the airport from enemy aircraft and/or heavy flow. ~ Sarah Ockler,
486:If you want to understand how America appears to the world today, consider the sport-utility vehicle. Oversized and overweight, the SUV disdains negotiated agreements to restrict atmospheric pollution. It consumes inordinate quantities of scarce resources to furnish its privileged inhabitants with supererogatory services. It exposes outsiders to deadly risk in order to provide for the illusory security of its occupants. In a crowded world, the SUV appears as a dangerous anachronism. Like US foreign policy, the sport-utility vehicle comes packaged in sonorous mission statements; but underneath it is just an oversized pickup truck with too much power. ~ Tony Judt,
487:And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. ~ Will Durant,
488:And yet, because I am without a doubt mortal, I have the troubling desire to do good, to please, to communicate my warmth, to still be very beautiful sometimes to inspire a taste for beauty. I know that these times are not fertile in grace...I am afraid tomorrow the grace of woman...may be recognized as a public utility & be socialized to the point of becoming a banal article, a bazaar object like in '93 & that one will find types of tender or amusing women with millions of copies like the creations of the big...fashion stores where it is always the same thing. I want to affirm the superiority of the god over that of the organizer of concerts for the poor. ~ Rachilde,
489:This war ends, then so do the taxpayer-funded contracts, the drumbeats in the media, the nice Combatant faces, and the patriotic cause to lull the civilians and shame the dissenters. The other thing that comes to an end is all the justification for why this country's run the way it is. People will wonder why their paychecks are still getting halved to pay off the men who own their utility companies, their roads, their national parks. They'll wonder why they've got to work eighty-hour weeks to support the folks who took their houses and destroyed the middle-class jobs. There's not going to be an enemy to point a finger at anymore. People will see the real problem. ~ S J Kincaid,
490:I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job. It's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression in the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it. ~ Deborah Levy,
491:I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression is the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation that is keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it. ~ Deborah Levy,
492:A few congregations had food pantries and clothes closets—bandage ministries—but none of them knew any better than we did how to tackle the larger systemic problems that made those ministries necessary. Plus, while no one disagreed about the goodness of handing out free food and clothes, quite a lot of people disagreed about the rightness of petitioning the county commission for more federal housing money or talking with local utility companies about lowering their deposits for low income families. Handing out free food and clothes was a charitable act. Approaching the powers was a political act. We could give people fish, but we could not ask why they had no fish. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor,
493:Jason turned to Leo. “Do you think you can fly this thing?”
“Um…” Leo put his hand on the side of the helicopter, concentrating hard, as if listening to the machine.
“Bell 412HP utility helicopter,” Leo said. “Composite four-blade main rotor, cruising speed twenty-two knots, service ceiling twenty-thousand feet. The tank is near full. Sure, I can fly it.”
Piper smiled at the ranger again. “You din’t have a problem with an under-aged unlicensed kid borrowing your copter, do you? We’ll return it.”
“I-“ The pilot nearly choked on the words, but she got them out: “I don’t have a problem with that.”
Leo grinned. “Hop in kids, Uncle Leo’s gonna take you for a ride. ~ Rick Riordan,
494:How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden. ~ Adam Smith,
495:Gen. George S. Patton Jr. fears no one. But now he sleeps flat on his back in a hospital bed. His upper body is encased in plaster, the result of a car accident twelve days ago. Room 110 is a former utility closet, just fourteen feet by sixteen feet. There are no decorations, pictures on the walls, or elaborate furnishings—just the narrow bed, white walls, and a single high window. A chair has been brought in for Patton’s wife, Beatrice, who endured a long, white-knuckle flight over the North Atlantic from the family home in Boston to be at his bedside. She sits there now, crochet hook moving silently back and forth, raising her eyes every few moments to see if her husband has awakened. ~ Bill O Reilly,
496:The potential utility of therapeutic gene editing goes far beyond simply reverting mutated genes back to their healthy states. Some scientists are employing CRISPR in human cells to block viral infections, just like this molecular defense system naturally evolved to do in bacteria. In fact, the first clinical trials to use gene editing are aimed at curing HIV/AIDS by editing a patient’s own immune cells so the virus can’t penetrate them. And in another landmark effort, the first human life was saved by gene editing in combination with another emerging breakthrough in medicine: cancer immunotherapy, in which the body’s own immune system is trained to hunt down and kill cancerous cells. ~ Jennifer A Doudna,
497:I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GDP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die. ~ Warren Buffett,
498:All index-number systems, so far as they are intended to have a greater significance for monetary theory than that of mere playing with figures, are based upon the idea of measuring the utility of a certain quantity of money. The object is to determine whether a gramme of gold is more or less useful to-day than it was at a certain time in the past. As far as objective use-value is concerned, such an investigation may perhaps yield results. We may assume the fiction, if we like, that, say, a loaf of bread is always of the same utility in the objective sense, always comprises the same food value. It is not necessary for us to enter at all into the question of whether this is permissible or not. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
499:Yes Yes

when God created love he didn't help most
when God created dogs He didn't help dogs
when God created plants that was average
when God created hate we had a standard utility
when God created me He created me
when God created the monkey He was asleep
when He created the giraffe He was drunk
when He created narcotics He was high
and when He created suicide He was low

when He created you lying in bed
He knew what He was doing
He was drunk and He was high
and He created the mountains and the sea and fire at the same time

He made some mistakes
but when He created you lying in bed
He came all over His Blessed Universe. ~ Charles Bukowski,
500:McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms, without energy-hogging big-box stores, without electronic billboards, without endless piles of throwaway junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods no one really needs is not an impoverished world. I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life. ~ Charles Eisenstein,
501:Called the Golden Rock for the flood of commerce that flowed through its free port, stuffing its warehouses with goods for trade and the coffers of its merchants with the proceeds, it “was different from all others,” said Edmund Burke in a speech of 1781 when Eustatius in sudden fame leapt into public notice. “It had no produce. no fortifications for its defense, nor martial spirit nor military regulations.… Its utility was its defense. The universality of its use, the neutrality of its nature was its security and its safeguard. Its proprietors had, in the spirit of commerce, made it an emporium for all the world … Its wealth was prodigious, arising from its industry and the nature of its commerce.” Two ~ Barbara W Tuchman,
502:The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called 'value in use;' the other, 'value in exchange.' The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and, on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water; but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods ~ Adam Smith,
503:I belong to a generation that came of age listening to news of the collapse of the Communist dicatorships and never felt the slightest affection or nostalgia for those regimes or for the Soviet Union. I was vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism, some of which simply ignored the historic failure of Communism and much of which turned its back on the intellectual means necessary to push beyond it. I have no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se—especially since social inequalities are not in themselves a problem as long as they are justified, that is, “founded only upon common utility,” as article 1 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen proclaims. ~ Thomas Piketty,
504:Police: NY bus driver drove drunk with 35 students on board CORTLANDT, N.Y. (AP) — Police say a school bus driver was driving drunk with 35 students on board when she sideswiped a utility pole in suburban New York. It happened Monday as 56-year-old Mary Coletti was taking students to Walter Panas High School in Cortdandt. Authorities say she sideswiped the pole around 7 a.m. They say her blood-alcohol level was above the legal limit of .08 percent. A few students suffered minor injuries. Lakeland School District Superintendent George Stone tells The Journal News Coletti's bus driver's license has been revoked. Coletti was arraigned Monday and sent to jail on $1,000 bail. She's due back in court May 18. It's unclear if she has an attorney. Posted: ~ Anonymous,
505:Humans pursuing deep, complete connections respond to quite different incentives from those that influence self-interested utility maximizers. Rewards, monitoring, and punishments are less likely to be effective than engagement, communication, norms, socialization, identity, and common purpose. They share not out of a calculation of reciprocity but from a psychological pleasure in sharing. Those seeking connections make decisions from their hearts as well as their heads, influenced by emotion, fairness, empathy, and intuition. Their behavior, thoughts, feelings, and even personal attributes are highly socially contingent.
The range of humanity includes individuals who display every possible combination of selfishness and sociability. ~ Anne Marie Slaughter,
506:The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called 'value in use;' the other, 'value in exchange.' The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and, on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water; but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it. ~ Anonymous,
507:Before it was usual to acquire goods in the market, not for personal consumption, but simply in order to exchange them again for the goods that were really wanted, each individual commodity was only accredited with that value given by the subjective valuations based on its direct utility. It was not until it became customary to acquire certain goods merely in order to use them as media of exchange that people began to esteem them more highly than before, on account of this possibility of using them in indirect exchange. The individual valued them in the first place because they were useful in the ordinary sense, and then additionally because they could be used as media of exchange. Both sorts of valuation are subject to the law of marginal utility. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
508:The criers of the Mysteries speak again, bidding all men welcome to the House of Light. The great institution of materiality has failed. The false civilization built by man has turned, and like the monster of Frankenstein, is destroying its creator. Religion wanders aimlessly in the maze of theological speculation. Science batters itself impotently against the barriers of the unknown. Only transcendental philosophy knows the path. Only the illumined reason can carry the understanding part of man upward to the light. Only philosophy can teach man to be born well, to live well, to die well, and in perfect measure be born again. Into this band of the elect--those who have chosen the life of knowledge, of virtue, and of utility--the philosophers of the ages invite YOU. ~ Manly P Hall,
509:Who owns those scrawny little feet? Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.
Who owns these questionable brains? Death.
All this messy blood? Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.
This wicked little tongue? Death.
This occasional wakefulness? Death.

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
Who owns all of space? Death.

Who is stronger than hope? Death.
Who is stronger than the will? Death.
Stronger than love? Death.
Stronger than life? Death.

But who is stronger than Death?
Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow. ~ Ted Hughes,
510:But where is my other friend?”
“Oh him?” said Pug. “Oh take him and welcome. Glad to have him off my hands. I’ve never seen such a drug in the market in all my born days. Priced him at five crescents in the end and even so nobody’d have him. Threw him in free with other lots and still no one would have him. Wouldn’t touch him. Wouldn’t look at him. Tacks, bring out Sulky.”
Thus Eustace was produced, and sulky he certainly looked; for though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy. He walked up to Caspian and said, “I see. As usual. Been enjoying yourself somewhere while the rest of us were prisoners. I suppose you haven’t even found out about the British Consul. Of course not. ~ C S Lewis,
511:To a naive observer, money made out of precious metal was 'sound money' because the piece of precious metal was an 'intrinsically' valuable object, while paper money was 'bad money' because its value was only 'artificial'. But even the layman who holds this opinion accepts the money in the course of business transactions, not for the sake of its industrial use-value, but for the sake of its objective exchange-value, which depends largely upon its monetary employment. He values a gold coin not merely for the sake of its industrial use-value, say because of the possibility of using it as jewellery, but chiefly on account of its monetary utility. But, of course, to do something, and to render an account to oneself of what one does and why one does it, are quite different things. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
512:Then, one night, while daughter Margaret played the piano upstairs, the floor indeed gave way and the piano crashed through, sending plaster and rotted wood onto the executive mansion’s first floor below. The subsequent extensive and high-profile restoration provided the perfect cover to install a secret bomb shelter. On August 1, 1950, Truman’s naval aide, Robert Dennison, wrote a memo to the renovation team, explaining, “The President has authorized certain protective measures which include alterations at basement level in and adjacent to the wings of the White House.” The renovation had originally called for two basement levels of various utility and storage rooms. Instead, Dennison, aide David Stowe, and the project architect sketched out a large, heavily fortified facility ~ Garrett M Graff,
513:Innumerable patriotic societies had sprung up each with its executive secretary, and executive secretaries must live, and therefore must conjure up new and ever greater menaces,” wrote the journalist and historian Frederick Lewis Allen. “Innumerable other gentlemen now discovered that they could defeat whatever they wanted to defeat by tarring it conspicuously with the Bolshevist brush. Big-navy men, believers in compulsory military service, drys, anti-cigarette campaigners, anti-evolution Fundamentalists, defenders of the moral order, book censors, Jew-haters, Negro-haters, landlords, manufacturers, utility executives, upholders of every sort of cause, good, bad, and indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin. ~ Jon Meacham,
514:Ten years ago, researchers in the relatively new field of behavioral economics began running a series of experiments on a group of capuchin monkeys, and in no time had turned them into . . . us. One report on the results, which found that monkeys not only quickly grasped the concept of currency but knew exactly what it was good for, ran under the headline “Gambling, Prostitution, and Theft Rampant Among Yale Monkeys.” Indeed, the capuchins were observed horse trading, bargain hunting, practicing “utility maximization,” responding to shifts in the value of their coin, occasionally lifting an unwatched token, assessing risk in potential exchanges, and finally, in what was called the first observed example of paid sex among primates other than us, achieving parity with human society.‡ ~ Melissa Holbrook Pierson,
515:This is McDonough and Braungart’s argument that “Waste = Food,” that is, that we must consider waste as an integral part of any natural system and that “effectiveness” is more critical to the success of an ecosystem than “efficiency.” Like Bataille, the authors privilege useless abundance and profligacy over means­to­an­end instrumentalism. And in this way, their argument is closer to Bataille’s in that they recognize that there is a human need for things that surpass utility or efficiency, such as beauty, creativity, fantasy, and enjoyment. They write, Imagine a fully efficient world…Mozart would hit the piano with a two­by­four. Van Gogh would use one color…And what about efficient sex? An efficient world is not one we envision as delightful. In contrast to nature, it is downright parsimonious (65) ~ Anonymous,
516:Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy. ~ Voltaire,
517:In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether’s Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? ~ Michael Lewis,
518:I. Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility.

II. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.

III. The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; nor can any Individual, or Any Body of Men, be entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it.

In these principles, there is nothing to throw a Nation into confusion by inflaming ambition. They are calculated to call forth wisdom and abilities, and to exercise them for the public good, and for the emolument or aggrandizement of particular descriptions of men or families. ~ Thomas Paine,
519:To be sure, social scientists, going back at least to the turn-of-the-century anthropologist Edward Westermarck, have recognized that reciprocal altruism is fundamental to life in all cultures. There is a whole literature on “social exchange theory,” in which the everyday swapping of sometimes intangible resources— information, social support—is gauged with care.19 But because so many social scientists have resisted the very idea of an inherent human nature, reciprocation has often been seen as a cultural “norm” that just happens to be universal (presumably because distinct peoples independently discovered its utility). Few have noted that the daily life of every human society rests not just on reciprocity, but on a common foundation of feelings—sympathy, gratitude, affection, obligation, guilt, dislike, and so on. ~ Robert Wright,
520:You're not paying attention to me, are you?"
"Eh? What's that? Sorry, love, I didn't hear you. Wasn't paying attention. I had my eyes on your perfectly formed arse."
Catherine fixed him with a glare worthy of a Scottish schoolmaster. "This is serious business Jamie. If you've to pass for a Highlander, you've got to get the kilt just so,"
"Bah! You're a hoydenish vixen. You just want to ogle my knees."
"Nonsense. I'm sure you'll find the ah... freedom and... utility very appealing once you try it on."
"You mean you think I'll like the feel of the family jewels waving free?" Blushing, she spread both great kilts on the ground. "One lays down on it like so. Oh stop grinning, Jamie, and do try."
She was so earnest and eager in her lesson that he hadn't the heart to tell her he'd worn a kilt a time or two before. ~ Judith James,
521:Alice haunted the mossy edge of the woods, lingering in patches of shade. She was waiting to hear his Austin-Healey throttle back when he careened down the utility road separating the state park from the cabins rimming the lake, but only the whistled conversation of buntings echoed in the branches above. The vibrant blue males darted deeper into the trees when she blew her own 'sweet-sweet chew-chew sweet-sweet' up to theirs. Pine seedlings brushed against her pants as she pushed through the understory, their green heads vivid beneath the canopy. She had dressed to fade into the forest; her hair was bundled up under a long-billed cap, her clothes drab and inconspicuous. When at last she heard his car, she crouched behind a clump of birch and made herself as small as possible, settling into a shallow depression of ferns and leaf litter. ~ Tracy Guzeman,
522:It is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive public good from private interest and who, for the sake of private good, conceived and outlined a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is the accumulation of power. Hobbes, indeed, is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim....
.... The consistency of this conclusion is in no way altered by the remarkable fact that for some three hundred years there was neither a sovereign who would "convert this Truth of Speculation into the Utility of Practice," nor a bourgeoisie politically conscious and economically mature enough openly to adopt Hobbes's philosophy of power. ~ Hannah Arendt,
523:The figure, made by the woman standing in front of him, had not been manufactured by modifying—carving or shaping or polishing—a material that occurred naturally. It was made of ceramic, fired clay, and it was the first material ever created by human hand and human intelligence. The heating chamber was not a cooking oven, it was a kiln. And the first kiln ever devised was not invented for the purpose of making useful waterproof containers. Long before pottery, small ceramic sculptures were fired into impermeable hardness. The figures they had seen on the shelves resembled animals and humans, but the images of women—no men were made, only women—and other living creatures were not considered actual portrayals. They were symbols, metaphors, meant to represent more than they showed, to suggest an analogy, a spiritual similarity. They were art; art came before utility. ~ Jean M Auel,
524:Because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ. But being in a civilization which does believe in this dogma of fact for facts' sake, we do not see the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole. I am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility which is true both of the Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see the superficial and aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where a man died. But we do not see the aesthetic singularity and startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can live — a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist. ~ G K Chesterton,
525:We should finally note a more radical challenge to the concept of Platonic utility that arises from nascent work in the reinforcement learning field under the rubric of intrinsic motivation. One idea is that the "true" evolutionarily appropriate metric for behavior is the extremely sparse one of propagating ones genes. What we think of as a Platonic utility over immediate rewards such as food or water, would merely be a surrogate that helps overcome the otherwise insurmountable credit assignment path associated with procreation. In these terms, even the Platonic utility is the same sort of heuristic expedient as the Pavlovian controller itself, with evolutionary optimality molding approximate economic rationality to its own ends. It as a sober thought that understanding values may be less important as a way of unearthing the foundations of choice that we might have expected. ~ Tali Sharot,
526:Anne was now at hand to take up her own cause, and the sincerity of her manner being soon sufficient to convince him, where conviction was at least very agreeable, he had no farther scruples as to her being left to dine alone, though he still wanted her to join them in the evening, when the child might be at rest for the night, and kindly urged her to let him come and fetch her; but she was quite unpersuadable and this being the case, she had ere long the pleasure of seeing them set off together in high spirits. They were gone, she hoped, to be happy, however oddly constructed such happiness might seem; as for herself, she was left with as many sensations of comfort, as were, perhaps ever likely to be hers. She knew herself to be of the first utility to the child; and what was it to her, if Frederick Wentworth were only half a mile distant, making himself agreeable to others! ~ Jane Austen,
527:Let him then, who would be indeed a Christian, watch over his ways and over his heart with unceasing circumspection. Let him endeavour to learn, both from men and books, particularly from the lives of eminent Christians, what methods have been actually found most effectual for the conquest of every particular vice, and for improvement in every branch of holiness. Thus studying his own character, and observing the most secret workings of his own mind, and of our common nature; the knowledge which he will acquire of the human heart in general, and especially of his own, will be of the highest utility, in enabling him to avoid or to guard against the occasions of evil: and it will also tend, above all things, to the growth of humility, and to the maintenance of that sobriety of spirit and tenderness of conscience, which are eminently characteristic of the true Christian. ~ William Wilberforce,
528:Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one's daily life three lipstick cases with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven pence three farthings in loose change and the mandatory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phyrne's bag the last time Dot had turned it out. ~ Kerry Greenwood,
529:An almost equally important payoff of open source is its utility as a way to propagate open standards and build markets around them. The dramatic growth of the Internet owes much to the fact that nobody owns TCP/IP; nobody has a proprietary lock on the core Internet protocols. The network effects behind TCP/IP’s and Linux’s success are fairly clear and reduce ultimately to issues of trust and symmetry — potential parties to a shared infrastructure can rationally trust it more if they can see how it works all the way down, and will prefer an infrastructure in which all parties have symmetrical rights to one in which a single party is in a privileged position to extract rents or exert control. It is not, however, actually necessary to assume network effects in order for symmetry issues to be important to software consumers. No software consumer will rationally choose to lock itself ~ Eric S Raymond,
530:In reality there are two, and only two, foundations of law; and they are both of them conditions without which nothing can give it any force: I mean equity and utility. With respect to the former, it grows out of the great rule of equality, which is grounded upon our common nature, and which Philo, with propriety and beauty, calls the mother of justice. All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they may alter the mode and application, but have no power over the substance, of original justice. The other foundation of law, which is utility, must be understood, not of partial or limited, but of general and public, utility, connected in the same manner with, and derived directly from, our rational nature: for any other utility may be the utility of a robber, but cannot be that of a citizen,—the interest of the domestic enemy, and not that of a member of the commonwealth. ~ Edmund Burke,
531:Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one’s daily life three lipstick cases each with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven`pence three farthings in loose change and the manda-tory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phryne’s bag the last time Dot had turned it out. The ~ Kerry Greenwood,
532:From this failure to expunge the microeconomic foundations of neoclassical economics from post-Great Depression theory arose the "microfoundations of macroeconomics" debate, which ultimately led to a model in which the economy is viewed as a single utility-maximizing individual blessed with perfect knowledge of the future.

Fortunately, behavioral economics provides the beginnings of an alternative vision of how individuals operate in a market environment, while multi-agent modelling and network theory give us foundations for understanding group dynamics in a complex society. These approaches explicitly emphasize what neoclassical economics has evaded: that aggregation of heterogeneous individuals results in emergent properties of the group, which cannot be reduced to the behavior of any "representative individual." These approaches should replace neoclassical microeconomics completely. ~ Steve Keen,
533:We chose to focus on creative problem solving for several reasons. One was its obvious utility, an important consideration at that juncture because of those who doubted that psychedelics were good for anything at all. Besides, many of the spontaneous occurrences we had observed were of this problem-solving kind. Finally, extensive research activity in the field of creativity had yielded a number of objective measures to use. The study attempted to shed light on three questions: Can the psychedelic experience enhance creative problem-solving ability, and if so, what is the concrete evidence of enhancement? Can this enhancement lead to concrete, valid, and feasible solutions assessable by the pragmatic criteria of modern industry and mainstream science? In working with creative individuals, would there be changes indicative of increased creativity continuing after the psychedelic intervention? ~ James Fadiman,
534:Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light. ~ Jeremy Bentham,
535:If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man's only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation.
(pg.89, "Think Little") ~ Wendell Berry,
536:The capitalist who does no useful work has the economic power to take from a thousand or ten thousand workingmen all they produce, over and above what is required to keep them in working and producing order, and he becomes a millionaire, perhaps a multi-millionaire. He lives in a palace in which there is music and singing and dancing and the luxuries of all climes. He sails the high seas in his private yacht. He is the reputed “captain of industry” who privately owns a social utility, has great economic power, and commands the political power of the nation to protect his economic interests. He is the gentleman who furnishes the “political boss” and his swarm of mercenaries with the funds with which the politics of the nation are corrupted and debauched. He is the economic master and the political ruler and you workingmen are almost as completely at his mercy as if you were his property under the law. ~ Chris Hedges,
537:SO, WHERE DOES this leave us? If we can’t rely on the market forces of supply and demand to set optimal market prices, and we can’t count on free-market mechanisms to help us maximize our utility, then we may need to look elsewhere. This is especially the case with society’s essentials, such as health care, medicine, water, electricity, education, and other critical resources. If you accept the premise that market forces and free markets will not always regulate the market for the best, then you may find yourself among those who believe that the government (we hope a reasonable and thoughtful government) must play a larger role in regulating some market activities, even if this limits free enterprise. Yes, a free market based on supply, demand, and no friction would be the ideal if we were truly rational. Yet when we are not rational but irrational, policies should take this important factor into account. ~ Dan Ariely,
538:Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world. What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a similar transformation: people begin as comrades and fellow citizens, then become labor resources and assets, and then, as their utility shifts or degrades, transmute into liabilities, and thus must be appropriately managed. This is a fact of nature just as much as the currents of the winds and the seas. The flow of force and matter is a system, with laws and maturation patterns. We should harbor no guilt for complying with those laws—even if they sometimes require a little inhumanity. —TRIBUNO CANDIANO, LETTER TO THE COMPANY CANDIANO CHIEF OFFICER’S ASSEMBLY ~ Robert Jackson Bennett,
539:I had come to expect that Chinese friends would make financial decisions that I found uncomfortably risky: launching businesses with their savings, moving across the country without the assurance of a job. One explanation, which Weber and Hsee call “the cushion hypothesis,” is that traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence that they can turn to others for help if their risk-taking does not succeed. Another theory is more specific to the boom years. “The economic reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping were a gamble in themselves,” Ricardo Siu, a business professor at the University of Macau, told me. “So people got the idea that taking a risk is not just okay; it has utility.” For those who have come from poverty to the middle class, he added, “the thinking may be, If I lose half my money, well, I’ve lived through that. I won’t be poor again. And in several years I can earn it back. But if I win? I’m a millionaire! ~ Evan Osnos,
540:Remember and Share - For some businesses, forming habits is a critical component to success, but not every business requires habitual user engagement. - When successful, forming strong user habits can have several business benefits including: higher customer lifetime value, greater pricing flexibility, supercharged growth, and a sharper competitive edge. - Habits can not form outside the “Habit Zone,” where the behavior occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility. - Habit-forming products often start as nice-to-haves (vitamins) but once the habit is formed, they become must-haves (painkillers). - Habit-forming products alleviate users’ pain by relieving a pronounced itch. - Designing habit-forming products is a form of manipulation. Product builders would benefit from a bit of introspection before attempting to hook users to make sure they are building healthy habits, not unhealthy addictions (more to come on this topic in chapter eight). ~ Nir Eyal,
541:The tongue of a woodpecker can extend more than three times the length of its bill. When not in use, it retracts into the skull and its cartilage-like structure continues past the jaw to wrap around the bird’s head and then curve down to its nostril. In addition to digging out grubs from a tree, the long tongue protects the woodpecker’s brain. When the bird smashes its beak repeatedly into tree bark, the force exerted on its head is ten times what would kill a human. But its bizarre tongue and supporting structure act as a cushion, shielding the brain from shock.1 There is no reason you actually need to know any of this. It is information that has no real utility for your life, just as it had none for Leonardo. But I thought maybe, after reading this book, that you, like Leonardo, who one day put “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker” on one of his eclectic and oddly inspiring to-do lists, would want to know. Just out of curiosity. Pure curiosity. ~ Walter Isaacson,
542:Heavy Equipment Recovery Combat Utility Lift and Evacuation System (HERCULES) (M88A2) Mission Provide towing, winching, and hoisting to support battlefield recovery operations and evacuation of heavy tanks and other tracked combat vehicles. Entered Army Service 1997 Description and Specifications The M88A2 HERCULES is a full-tracked, armoured vehicle that uses the existing M88A1 chassis but significantly improves towing, winching, lifting, and braking characteristics. The HERCULES is the primary recovery support vehicle for the Abrams tank fleet, the heavy Assault Bridge, and heavy self-propelled artillery. Length: 338 in Height: 123 in Width: 144 in Weight: 70 tons Speed: 25 mph w/o load; 17 mph w/load Cruising Range: 200 miles Boom Capacity: 35 tons Winch Capacity: 70 tons/670 ft Draw Bar Pull: 70 tons Armament: One .50-calibre machine gun Power train: 12 cylinder, 1050 HP air-cooled diesel engine with 3-speed automatic transmission Crew: 3 Manufacturer ~ Russell Phillips,
543:You must not enquire too far, Marianne—remember I have no knowledge in the picturesque, and I shall offend you by my ignorance and want of taste if we come to particulars. I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged; and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere. You must be satisfied with such admiration as I can honestly give. I call it a very fine country—the hills are steep, the woods seem full of fine timber, and the valley looks comfortable and snug—with rich meadows and several neat farm houses scattered here and there. It exactly answers my idea of a fine country, because it unites beauty with utility—and I dare say it is a picturesque one too, because you admire it; I can easily believe it to be full of rocks and promontories, grey moss and brush wood, but these are all lost on me. I know nothing of the picturesque. ~ Jane Austen,
544:even souvenir seekers. One of the worst contaminants was fellow officers, especially brass grandstanding if reporters were present and eager to grab a video bite to slap on the twenty-four-hour news cycle. One more glance at the circular coffin. Okay, Amelia Sachs thought: Knuckle time… A phrase of her father’s. The man had also been cop, a beat patrolman working the Deuce—Midtown South; back then Times Square was like Deadwood in the 1800s. “Knuckle time” referred to those moments when you have to go up against your worst fears. Breadbasket… Sachs returned to the access door and climbed through it and down into the utility room below the cellar. Then she took the evidence collection gear bag from the other officer. Sachs said, “You search the basement, Jean?” “I’ll do it now,” Eagleston said. “And then get everything into the RRV.” They’d done a fast examination of the cellar. But it was apparent that the perp had spent minimal time there. He’d grabbed Chloe, subdued ~ Jeffery Deaver,
545:The Average Occidental- be he a democrat or a Fascist, a Capitalist or a Bolshevik, a manual worker or an intellectual- knows only one positive "religion", and that is the worship of material progress, the belief that there is no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression goes, "independent of nature". The temples of this "religion" are the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dancing halls, hydro- electric works; and its priests are bankers, engineers,film stars, captains of industry, record-airmen. The unavoidable result of this craving after power and pleasure is the creation of hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever their respective interests come to clash. And on the cultural side the result is the creation of a human type whose morality is confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of good and evil is material progress. ~ Muhammad Asad,
546:Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly. ~ Theodore J Kaczynski,
547:We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts. ~ Francis Fukuyama,
548:We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity. A potentially minor genetic change […] entails a host of complex, nonadaptive consequences. The primary flexibility of evolution may arise from nonadaptive by-products that occasionally permit organisms to strike out in new and unpredictable directions. What “play” would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had not evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever, and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose? ~ Stephen Jay Gould,
549:All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic sceptic has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there. ~ Evelyn Underhill,
550:In other words, the fact that every person has the ability to reason and discover natural law, and the divine rights that flow from it, does not mean that all people will do so. In addition, Locke pointed out that natural law, not man-made law, is the origin and compass of human morality. “[W]ithout natural law there would be neither virtue nor vice, neither the reward of goodness nor the punishment of evil: there is no fault, no guilt, where there is no law. Everything would have to depend on human will, and, since there would be nothing to demand dutiful action, it seems that man would not be bound to do anything but what utility or pleasure might recommend, or what a blind and lawless impulse might happen perchance to fasten on. The terms ‘upright’ and ‘virtuous’ would disappear as meaningless or be nothing at all but empty names. . . . [F]or the nature of good and evil is eternal and certain, and their value cannot be determined either by the public ordinances of men or by any private opinion.”12 Even ~ Mark R Levin,
551:"The Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift in the structure of Being. That's the right way to think about it. That's given cosmic significance. You can dispense with that and say that nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance, that we're these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet, rotating out in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters. This is not a road that you can walk down and live well. For all intents and purposes, it's untrue. If fact, if you really walk down that road, and you take it really seriously, you end up not living at all. The kind of conclusions suicidal people draw about the utility of life prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough." ~ Jordan Peterson,
552:"The Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift in the structure of Being. That's the right way to think about it. That's given cosmic significance. You can dispense with that and say that nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance, that we're these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet, rotating out in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters. This is not a road that you can walk down and live well. For all intents and purposes, it's untrue. If fact, if you really walk down that road, and you take it really seriously, you end up not living at all. The kind of conclusions suicidal people draw about the utility of life prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough." ~ Jordan B Peterson,
553:To give you an idea of my state of mind I can not do better than compare it to one of those rooms we see nowadays in which are collected and mingled the furniture of all times and countries. Our age has no impress of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean-shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the gothic, the style of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own—a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, another for antiquity, still another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by debris, as if the end of the world were at hand. ~ Alfred de Musset,
554:And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening; if we did not vaguely know that in that later and longer life the balance will be redressed, and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundredfold? ~ Will Durant,
555:And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening; if we did not vaguely know that in that later and longer life the balance will be redressed, and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundredfold? Finally, ~ Will Durant,
556:In 1970, when Dr. Edgar Berman said women’s hormones during menstruation and menopause could have a detrimental influence on women’s decision making, feminists were outraged. He was soon served up as the quintessential example of medical male chauvinism.12 But by the 1980s, some feminists were saying that PMS was the reason a woman who deliberately killed a man should go free. In England, the PMS defense freed Christine English after she confessed to killing her boyfriend by deliberately ramming him into a utility pole with her car; and, after killing a coworker, Sandie Smith was put on probation—with one condition: she must report monthly for injections of progesterone to control symptoms of PMS.13 By the 1990s, the PMS defense paved the way for other hormonal defenses. Sheryl Lynn Massip could place her 6-month-old son under a car, run over him repeatedly, and then, uncertain he was dead, do it again, then claim postpartum depression and be given outpatient medical help.14 No feminist protested. In the 1970s, then, feminists ~ Warren Farrell,
557: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,
558:The mystery is how a [theory] that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it. Many scholars have surely thought at one time or another of stories such as [the above examples], and casually noted that these stories did not jibe with utility theory. But they did not pursue the idea to the point of saying, “This theory is seriously wrong because it ignores the fact that utility depends on the history of one’s wealth, not only on present wealth.” As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert observed, disbelieving is hard work, and System 2 is easily tired. ~ Daniel Kahneman,
559:Because remembered experience is a distortion of actual experience, and because it's difficult to elicit real emotional experience in laboratory studies, some contemporary researchers emphasize the importance of obtaining immediate or on-line evaluations during real emotional episodes (measures of instant utility), especially in natural settings. Though such studies circumvent the errors of remembered utility and the artificiality of laboratory research, they are extremely hard to implement, as well as being time-consuming, and in the end are still subject to the biases and measurement problems inherent in any method that relies on one's introspective evaluation of his or her own mental states. The fallibility and subjectivity of introspection are, after all, what triggered the behaviorist revolution in psychology in the early twentieth century. And recall that the cognitive revolution only succeeded in bringing the mind back to psychology because it figured out how to study the mind without relying on introspection-by focusing on mental processes rather than mental content. ~ Joseph E LeDoux,
560:More laying hens are slaughtered in the United States than cattle or pigs. Commercial laying hens are not bred for their flesh, but when their economic utility is over the still-young birds are trucked to the slaughterhouse and turned into meat products. In the process they are treated even more brutally than meat-type chickens because of their low market value. Their bones are very fragile from lack of exercise and from calcium depletion for heavy egg production, causing fragments to stick to the flesh during processing. The starvation practice known as forced molting results in beaded ribs that break easily at the slaughterhouse. Removal of food for several days before the hens are loaded onto the truck weakens their bones even more.

Currently, the U.S. egg industry and the American Veterinary Medical Association oppose humane slaughter legislation for laying hens on the basis that their low economic value does not justify the cost of 'humane slaughter' technology. The industry created the inhumane conditions that are invoked to rationalize further unaccountability and cruelty. ~ Karen Davis,
561:More precisely, in its earlier, healthier form the herd morality implied already that the sole standard of goodness is a utility for the herd—that is to say, for the common good. Independence, superiority, inequality are esteemed and recognized to the extent to which they were thought to be subservient to the common good or indispensable for it and not for their own sake. The common good was understood of course as a good of a particular society or tribe, and it demanded therefore hostility to the tribe’s external and internal enemies and in particular to criminals. This was part of the original herd morality.

But this has completely changed in contemporary Europe. When the herd morality draws its ultimate consequences, as it does now, it takes the sides of the very criminals and becomes afraid of inflicting punishment. It is satisfied with making the criminal harmless, which is something very different from disarming the criminal [and] from inflicting punishment. By abolishing even the fear of the criminal, this is all justified by the identification of goodness with compassion. ~ Leo Strauss,
562:Against all odds, the first quadrant turns out to be the least populated on the grid. Willis Carrier is an outlier after all. In the private sector, the proprietary breakthrough achieved in a closed lab turns out to be a rarity. For every Alfred Nobel, inventing dynamite in secret in the suburbs of Stockholm, there are a half dozen collective inventions like the vacuum tube or the television, whose existence depended upon multiple firms driven by the profit motive who managed to create a significant new product via decentralized networking. Folklore calls Edison the inventor of the lightbulb, but in truth the lightbulb came into being through a complex network of interaction between Edison and his rivals, each contributing key pieces to the puzzle along the way. Collective invention is not some socialist fantasy; entrepreneurs like Edison and de Forest were very much motivated by the possibility of financial rewards, and they tried to patent as much as they could. But the utility of building on other people’s ideas often outweighed the exclusivity of building something entirely from scratch. ~ Steven Johnson,
563: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,
564:Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration. ~ G K Chesterton,
565:Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value."

This unconditional will to truth—what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too—if only the special case "I do not want to deceive myself" is subsumed under the generalization "I do not want to deceive." But why not deceive?

But why not allow oneself to be deceived?

Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in all fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
566:Ishwara-Shakti is not quite the same as Purusha-Prakriti; for Purusha and Prakriti are separate powers, but Ishwara and Shakti contain each other. Ishwara is Purusha who contains Prakriti and rules by the power of the Shakti within him. Shakti is Prakriti ensouled by Purusha and acts by the will of the Ishwara which is her own will and whose presence in her movement she carries always with her. The Purusha-Prakriti realisation is of the first utility to the seeker on the Way of Works; for it is the separation of the conscient being and the Energy and the subjection of the being to the mechanism of the Energy that are the efficient cause of our ignorance and imperfection; by this realisation the being can liberate himself from the mechanical action of the nature and become free and arrive at a first spiritual control over the nature. Ishwara-Shakti stands behind the relation of Purusha-Prakriti and its ignorant action and turns it to an evolutionary purpose. The Ishwara-Shakti realisation can bring participation in a higher dynamism and a divine working and a total unity and harmony of the being in a spiritual nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 216,
567:As an ideal of intellectual inquiry and a strategy for the advancement of knowledge, the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error. Most of us gravitate toward trying to verify our beliefs, to the extent that we bother investigating their validity at all. But scientists gravitate toward falsification; as a community if not as individuals, they seek to disprove their beliefs. Thus, the defining feature of a hypothesis is that it has the potential to be proven wrong (which is why it must be both testable and tested), and the defining feature of a theory is that it hasn’t been proven wrong yet. But the important part is that it can be—no matter how much evidence appears to confirm it, no matter how many experts endorse it, no matter how much popular support it enjoys. In fact, not only can any given theory be proven wrong; as we saw in the last chapter, sooner or later, it probably will be. And when it is, the occasion will mark the success of science, not its failure. This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. ~ Kathryn Schulz,
568:Consistently and uninterruptedly continued inflation must eventually lead to collapse. The purchasing power of money will fall lower and lower, until it eventually disappears altogether. It is true that an endless process of depredation can be imagined. We can imagine the purchasing power of money getting continually lower without ever disappearing altogether, and prices getting continually higher without it ever becoming impossible to obtain commodities in exchange for notes. Eventually this would lead to a situation in which even retail transactions were in terms of millions and billions and even higher figures; bu t the monetary system itself would remain. But such an imaginary state of affairs is hardly within the bounds of possibility. In the long run, a money which continually fell in value would have no commercial utility. It could not be used as a standard of deferred payments. For all transactions in which commodities or services were not exchanged for cash, another medium would have to be sought. In fact, a money that is continually depreciating becomes useless even for cash transactions. Everybody attempts to minimize his cash reserves, which are a source of continual loss. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
569:To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon,
570:They bowed most politely to Caspian and paid him long compliments, all about the fountains of prosperity irrigating the gardens of prudence and virtue--and things like that--but of course what they wanted was the money they had paid.
“That is only fair, sirs,” said Caspian. “Every man who has bought a slave today must have his money back. Pug, bring out your takings to the last minim.” (A minim is the fortieth part of a crescent.)
“Does your good Majesty mean to beggar me?” whined Pug.
“You have lived on broken hearts all your life,” said Caspian, “and if you are beggared, it is better to be a beggar than a slave. But where is my other friend?”
“Oh him?” said Pug. “Oh take him and welcome. Glad to have him off my hands. I’ve never seen such a drug in the market in all my born days. Priced him at five crescents in the end and even so nobody’d have him. Threw him in free with other lots and still no one would have him. Wouldn’t touch him. Wouldn’t look at him. Tacks, bring out Sulky.”
Thus Eustace was produced, and sulky he certainly looked; for though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy. ~ C S Lewis,
571:Campaign to destigmatize so-called "mental illness" often take a wrong turning here. They try to demonstrate how suffers of some condition have made amazing contributions to the science or the arts. Trying to destigmatize the diagnosis of autism, for example, we read how Einstein and Newton would have received that diagnosis today, and yet made fabulous discoveries in the field of physics. Even if they are acknowledged to have been "different", their worth is still reckoned in terms of how their work has impacted on the world of others. However well-intentioned, such perspectives are hardly judicious, as they make an implicit equation between value and social utility. Taking this step is dangerous, as the moment that human life is defined in terms of utility, the door to stigmatization and segregation is opened. If someone was found to be not useful, what value, then, would their life have? This was in fact exactly the argument of the early-twentieth-century eugenicists who complained for the extermination of the mentally ill. Although no one would admit such aspirations today, we cannot ignore the resurfacing in recent years of a remarkably similar discourse, with its emphasis on social utility, hereditary and genetic vulnerability. ~ Darian Leader,
572:EDITION FOR at least twenty years, a new translation of the works of St. John of the Cross has been an urgent necessity. The translations of the individual prose works now in general use go back in their original form to the eighteen-sixties, and, though the later editions of some of them have been submitted to a certain degree of revision, nothing but a complete retranslation of the works from their original Spanish could be satisfactory. For this there are two reasons. First, the existing translations were never very exact renderings of the original Spanish text even in the form which held the field when they were first published. Their great merit was extreme readableness: many a disciple of the Spanish mystics, who is unacquainted with the language in which they wrote, owes to these translations the comparative ease with which he has mastered the main lines of St. John of the Cross's teaching. Thus for the general reader they were of great utility; for the student, on the other hand, they have never been entirely adequate. They paraphrase difficult expressions, omit or add to parts of individual sentences in order (as it seems) to facilitate comprehension of the general drift of the passages in which these occur, and frequently retranslate from the Vulgate the Saint's Spanish ~ Juan de la Cruz,
573:Soloveitchik argued that we live in the contradiction between these two Adams. The outer, majestic Adam and the inner, humble Adam are not fully reconcilable. We are forever caught in self-confrontation. We are called to fulfill both personae, and must master the art of living forever within the tension between these two natures. The hard part of this confrontation, I’d add, is that Adams I and II live by different logics. Adam I—the creating, building, and discovering Adam—lives by a straightforward utilitarian logic. It’s the logic of economics. Input leads to output. Effort leads to reward. Practice makes perfect. Pursue self-interest. Maximize your utility. Impress the world. Adam II lives by an inverse logic. It’s a moral logic, not an economic one. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave. Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself. To nurture your Adam I career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam II moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses. ~ Anonymous,
574:Some writers, even some poets, become famous public figures, but writers as such have no social status, in the way that doctors and lawyers, whether famous or obscure, have.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the so-called fine arts have lost the social utility they once had. Since the invention of printing and the spread of literacy, verse no longer has a utility value as a mnemonic, a devise by which knowledge and culture were handed on from one generation to the next, and, since the invention of the camera, the draughtsman and painter are no longer needed to provide visual documentation; they have, consequently, become “pure” arts, that is to say, gratuitous activities. Secondly, in a society governed by the values appropriate to Labor (capitalist America may well be more completely governed by these than communist Russia) the gratuitous is no longer regarded – most earlier cultures thought differently – as sacred, because, to Man the Laborer, leisure is not sacred but a respite from laboring, a time for relaxation and the pleasures of consumption. In so far such a society thinks about the gratuitous at all, it is suspicious of it – artists do not labor, therefore, they are probably parasitic idlers – or, at best, regards it as trivial – to write poetry or paint pictures is a harmless private hobby. ~ W H Auden,
575:There are all degrees of proficiency in the use men make of this instructive world where we are boarded and schooled and apprenticed. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three degrees of progress.

One class lives to the utility of the symbol, as the majority of men do, regarding health and wealth as the chief good. Another class live about this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet and artist and the sensual school in philosophy. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified and these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third spiritual perception.

I see in society the neophytes of all these classes, the class especially of young men who in their best knowledge of the sign have a misgiving that there is yet an unattained substance and they grope and sigh and aspire long in dissatisfaction, the sand-blind adorers of the symbol meantime chirping and scoffing and trampling them down. I see moreover that the perfect man - one to a millennium - if so many, traverses the whole scale and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly; then also has a clear eye for its beauty; and lastly wears it lightly as a robe which he can easily throw off, for he sees the reality and divine splendor of the inmost nature bursting through each chink and cranny. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
576:Seer
When I take up my position
at the base of the westering wall
of Thebes, it is midday.
This time I’m blind; that time I see.
Ifs all a matter of convenience.
The first thing I feel is the heat
on my backside, now as flabby
as a worn out saddlebag.
My brace of genitals
are so disordered as to be almost self-sufficient.
My shape is uniquely eunuchoid.
My breasts. . . but everyone knows about them.
The sun is not terrible from this
aspect but the dusty ground
heats up and before you know it
your bottom is blistered.
One of my myriad acquaintances,
a youngish debater in mathematics,
has kindly lent me a cushion
embroidered with the symbols of his calling.
I feel (and see) their utility, their sterile charm
but I haven’t the temerity
to sit on them.
My face — do I have a face?
A mirror reverberating
with past and future tenses.
The present is here, at the foot of the wall;
oracular, prophetic, procurative.
Hardly in love with life, I am
its esteemed and lousy sojourner.
My blindness has gradually departed
but I find no point in advertising the fact.
The sun palpating their thicknesses,
I can see through the lids, see a thousand leagues
into the aspirations of women,
into the hearts and covered minds of men.
~ Bruce Beaver,
577:uniting life and Yoga :::
   No synthesis of Yoga can be satisfying which does not, in its aim, reunite God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life or, in its method, not only permit but favour the harmony of our inner and outer activities and experiences in the divine consummation of both. For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower. To avoid the life which is given him for the realisation of that possibility, can never be either the indispensable condition or the whole and ultimate object of his supreme endeavour or of his most powerful means of self-fulfilment. It can only be a temporary necessity under certain conditions or a specialised extreme effort imposed on the individual so as to prepare a greater general possibility for the race. The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes. like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous withlife itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: All life is Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, Life and Yoga,
578:We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts. Aristotle was more correct than these early modern liberal theorists when he said that human beings were political by nature. So while an individualistic understanding of human motivation may help to explain the activities of commodity traders and libertarian activists in present-day America, it is not the most helpful way to understand the early evolution of human politics. Everything ~ Francis Fukuyama,
579:Hypocrisy, Milton wrote, is “the only evil that walks Invisible, except to God alone.” To ensure that “neither Man nor Angel can discern” the evil is, nonetheless, a demanding vocation. Pascal had discussed it a few years earlier while recording “how the casuists reconcile the contrarieties between their opinions and the decisions of the popes, the councils, and the Scripture.” “One of the methods in which we reconcile these contradictions,” his casuist interlocutor explains, “is by the interpretation of some phrase.” Thus, if the Gospel says, “Give alms of your superfluity,” and the task is “to discharge the wealthiest from the obligation of alms-giving,” “the matter is easily put to rights by giving such an interpretation to the word superfluity that it will seldom or never happen that any one is troubled with such an article.” Learned scholars demonstrate that “what men of the world lay up to improve their circumstances, or those of their relatives, cannot be termed superfluity; and accordingly, such a thing as superfluity is seldom to be found among men of the world, not even excepting kings”—nowadays, we call it tax reform. We may, then, adhere faithfully to the preachings of the Gospel that “the rich are bound to give alms of their superfluity,… [though] it will seldom or never happen to be obligatory in practice.” “There you see the utility of interpretations,” he concludes. ~ Noam Chomsky,
580:Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman ~ John Kay,
581:In Milwaukee and across the nation, most renters were responsible for keeping the lights and heat on, but that had become increasingly difficult to do. Since 2000, the cost of fuels and utilities had risen by more than 50 percent, thanks to increasing global demand and the expiration of price caps. In a typical year, almost 1 in 5 poor renting families nationwide missed payments and received a disconnection notice from their utility company.4 Families who couldn’t both make rent and keep current with the utility company sometimes paid a cousin or neighbor to reroute the meter. As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more.5 Stealing gas was much more difficult and rare. It was also unnecessary in the wintertime, when the city put a moratorium on disconnections. On that April day when the moratorium lifted, gas operators returned to poor neighborhoods with their stacks of disconnection notices and toolboxes. We Energies disconnected roughly 50,000 households each year for nonpayment. Many tenants who in the winter stayed current on their rent at the expense of their heating bill tried in the summer to climb back in the black with the utility company by shorting their landlord. Come the following winter, they had to be connected to benefit from the moratorium on disconnection. So every year in Milwaukee evictions spiked in the summer and early fall and dipped again in November, when the moratorium began. ~ Matthew Desmond,
582:Knucks
In Abraham Lincoln's city,
Where they remember his lawyer's shingle,
The place where they brought him
Wrapped in battle flags,
Wrapped in the smoke of memories
From Tallahassee to the Yukon,
The place now where the shaft of his tomb
Points white against the blue prairie dome,
In Abraham Lincoln's city ... I saw knucks
In the window of Mister Fischman's second-hand store
On Second Street.
I went in and asked, 'How much?'
'Thirty cents apiece,' answered Mister Fischman.
And taking a box of new ones off a shelf
He filled anew the box in the showcase
And said incidentally, most casually
And incidentally:
'I sell a carload a month of these.'
I slipped my fingers into a set of knucks,
Cast-iron knucks molded in a foundry pattern,
And there came to me a set of thoughts like these:
Mister Fischman is for Abe and the 'malice to none' stuff,
And the street car strikers and the strike-breakers,
And the sluggers, gunmen, detectives, policemen,
Judges, utility heads, newspapers, priests, lawyers,
They are all for Abe and the 'malice to none' stuff.
I started for the door.
'Maybe you want a lighter pair,'
Came Mister Fischman's voice.
I opened the door ... and the voice again:
'You are a funny customer.'
Wrapped in battle flags,
Wrapped in the smoke of memories,
This is the place they brought him,
229
This is Abraham Lincoln's home town.
~ Carl Sandburg,
583:prevents them from deducting their rent, employee salaries, or utility bills, forcing them to pay taxes on a far larger amount of income than other businesses with the same earnings and costs. They also say the taxes, which apply to medical and recreational marijuana sellers alike, are stunting their hiring, or even threatening to drive them out of business. The issue reveals a growing chasm between the 23 states, plus the District of Columbia, that allow medical or recreational marijuana and the federal bureaucracy, from national forests in Colorado where possession is a federal crime to federally regulated banks that turn away marijuana businesses, and the halls of the IRS. The tax rule, an obscure provision known as 280E, catches many marijuana entrepreneurs by surprise, often in the form of an audit notice from the IRS. Some marijuana businesses in Colorado, California, and other marijuana-friendly states have taken the IRS to tax court. This year, Allgreens, a marijuana shop in Colorado, successfully challenged an IRS policy that imposed about $30,000 in penalties for paying its payroll taxes in cash — common in an industry in which businesses cannot get bank accounts. “We’re talking about legal businesses, licensed businesses,’’ said Rachel Gillette, the executive director of Colorado’s chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and the lawyer who represented Allgreens. “There’s no reason that they should be taxed out of existence by the federal government. ~ Anonymous,
584:ONE OF THE main differences between standard and behavioral economics involves this concept of “free lunches.” According to the assumptions of standard economics, all human decisions are rational and informed, motivated by an accurate concept of the worth of all goods and services and the amount of happiness (utility) all decisions are likely to produce. Under this set of assumptions, everyone in the marketplace is trying to maximize profit and striving to optimize his experiences. As a consequence, economic theory asserts that there are no free lunches—if there were any, someone would have already found them and extracted all their value. Behavioral economists, on the other hand, believe that people are susceptible to irrelevant influences from their immediate environment (which we call context effects), irrelevant emotions, shortsightedness, and other forms of irrationality (see any chapter in this book or any research paper in behavioral economics for more examples). What good news can accompany this realization? The good news is that these mistakes also provide opportunities for improvement. If we all make systematic mistakes in our decisions, then why not develop new strategies, tools, and methods to help us make better decisions and improve our overall well-being? That’s exactly the meaning of free lunches from the perspective of behavioral economics—the idea that there are tools, methods, and policies that can help all of us make better decisions and as a consequence achieve what we desire. ~ Dan Ariely,
585:challenge for the Integral Yogin :::
   Nor is the seeker of the integral fulfilment permitted to solve too arbitrarily even the conflict of his own inner members. He has to harmonise deliberate knowledge with unquestioning faith; he must conciliate the gentle soul of love with the formidable need of power; the passivity of the soul that lives content in transcendent calm has to be fused with the activity of the divine helper and the divine warrior. To him as to all seekers of the spirit there are offered for solution the oppositions of the reason, the clinging hold of the senses, the perturbations of the heart, the ambush of the desires, the clog of the physical body; but he has to deal in another fashion with their mutual and internal conflicts and their hindrance to his aim, for he must arrive at an infinitely more difficult perfection in the handling of all this rebel matter. Accepting them as instruments for the divine realisation and manifestation, he has to convert their jangling discords, to enlighten their thick darknesses, to transfigure them separately and all together, harmonising them in themselves and with each other, -- integrally, omitting no grain or strand or vibration, leaving no iota of imperfection anywhere. All exclusive concentration, or even a succession of concentrations of that kind, can be in his complex work only a temporary convenience; it has to be abandoned as soon as its utility is over. An all-inclusive concentration is the difficult achievement towards which he must labour.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 78, [T9],
586:Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.

In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world.

The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use. ~ Karl Marx,
587:The Lowly Thermostat, Now Minter of Megawatts How Nest is turning its consumer hit into a service for utilities. Peter Fairley | 945 words • Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs in January put the Internet of things on the map. Everyone had vaguely understood that connecting everyday objects to the Internet could be a big deal. Here was an eye-popping price tag to prove it. Nest, founded by former Apple engineers in 2010, had managed to turn the humble thermostat into a slick, Internet-connected gadget. By this year, Nest was selling 100,000 of them a month, according to an estimate by Morgan Stanley. At $249 a pop, that’s a nice business. But more interesting is what Nest has been up to since last May in Texas, where an Austin utility is paying Nest to remotely turn down people’s air conditioners in order to conserve power on hot summer days—just when electricity is most expensive. For utilities, this kind of “demand response” has long been seen as a killer app for a smart electrical grid, because if electricity use can be lowered just enough at peak times, utilities can avoid firing up costly (and dirty) backup plants. Demand response is a neat trick. The Nest thermostat manages it by combining two things that are typically separate—price information and control over demand. It’s consumers who control the air conditioners, electric heaters, and furnaces that dominate a home’s energy diet. But the actual cost of energy can vary widely, in ways that consumers only dimly appreciate and can’t influence. While utilities frequently carry out demand ~ Anonymous,
588:To what end does consciousness exist at all when it is basically superfluous? If one is willing to hear my answer and its possibly extravagant conjecture, it seems to me that the subtlety and strength of consciousness is always related to a person's (or animal's) ability to communicate; and the ability to communicate, in turn, to the need to communicate: the latter not to be understood as if precisely the individual himself who is master in the art of communicating and making known his necessities would at the same time have to be most dependent upon others for his necessities seems to me however to be so in relation to whole races and successions of generations: where necessity and need have long compelled men to communicate with their fellows and understand each other rapidly and subtly, a surplus of the power and art of communication is at last acquired as if it were a fortune which had gradually accumulated, and now waited for an heir to squander it prodigally (the so called artists are these heirs in like manner the orators, preachers, and authors: all of them people who come at the end of a long chain, each of them 'born late' in the best sense of the term, and each of them, again, squanderers by nature). Assuming this observation is correct, I may go on to conjecture that consciousness in general has developed only under the pressure of the need to communicate: that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man (especially between those commanding and those obeying) and has only developed in proportion to its utility. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
589:Tell me!” Cecily insisted later, shaking Colby by both arms.
“Cut it out, you’ll dismember me,” Colby said, chuckling.
She let go of the artificial arm and wrapped both hands around the good one. “I want to know. Listen, this is my covert operation. You’re just a stand-in!”
“I promised I wouldn’t tell.”
“You promised in Lakota. Tell me in English what you promised in Lakota.”
He gave in. He did tell her, but not Leta, what was said, but only about the men coming to the reservation soon.
“We’ll need the license plate number,” she said. “It can be traced.
“Oh, of course,” he said facetiously. “They’ll certainly come here with their own license plate on the car so that everyone knows who they are!”
“Damn!”
He chuckled at her irritation. He was about to tell her about his alternative method when a big sport utility vehicle came flying down the dirt road and pulled up right in front of Leta’s small house.
Tate Winthrop got out, wearing jeans and a buckskin jacket and sunglasses. His thick hair fell around his shoulders and down his back like a straight black silk curtain. Cecily stared at it with curious fascination. In all the years she’d known him, she’d very rarely seen his hair down.
“All you need is the war paint,” Colby said in a resigned tone. He turned the uninjured cheek toward the newcomer. “Go ahead. I like matching scars.”
Tate took off the dark glasses and looked from Cecily to Colby without smiling. “Holden won’t tell me a damned thing. I want answers.”
“Come inside, then,” Cecily replied. “We’re attracting enough attention as it is. ~ Diana Palmer,
590:Through unpathed haunts of the Pierides,
Trodden by step of none before. I joy
To come on undefiled fountains there,
To drain them deep; I joy to pluck new flowers,
To seek for this my head a signal crown
From regions where the Muses never yet
Have garlanded the temples of a man:
First, since I teach concerning mighty things,
And go right on to loose from round the mind
The tightened coils of dread Religion;
Next, since, concerning themes so dark, I frame
Song so pellucid, touching all throughout
Even with the Muses' charm- which, as 'twould seem,
Is not without a reasonable ground:
For as physicians, when they seek to give
Young boys the nauseous wormwood, first do touch
The brim around the cup with the sweet juice
And yellow of the honey, in order that
The thoughtless age of boyhood be cajoled
As far as the lips, and meanwhile swallow down
The wormwood's bitter draught, and, though befooled,
Be yet not merely duped, but rather thus
Grow strong again with recreated health:
So now I too (since this my doctrine seems
In general somewhat woeful unto those
Who've had it not in hand, and since the crowd
Starts back from it in horror) have desired
To expound our doctrine unto thee in song
Soft-speaking and Pierian, and, as 'twere,
To touch it with sweet honey of the Muse-
If by such method haply I might hold
The mind of thee upon these lines of ours,
Till thou dost learn the nature of all things
And understandest their utility.


author class:Lucretius
~ afield, thriving in sturdy thought,, Proem
,
591: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,
592:the way investors fluctuate rather than hold firmly to rational thinking and the resulting rational decisions; the tendency of investors to hold distorted views of what’s going on, engaging in selective perception and skewed interpretation; quirks like confirmation bias, which makes people accept evidence that confirms their thesis and reject that which doesn’t, and the tendency toward non-linear utility, which causes most people to value a dollar lost more highly than a dollar made (or a dollar of potential profit forgone); the gullibility that makes investors swallow tall tales of profit potential in good times, and the excessive skepticism that makes them reject all possibility of gains in bad times; the fluctuating nature of investors’ risk tolerance and risk aversion, and thus of their demands for compensatory risk premiums; the herd behavior that results from pressure to fall into line with what others are doing, and as a result the difficulty of holding non-conformist positions; the extreme discomfort that comes from watching others make money doing something you’ve rejected; thus the tendency of investors who have resisted an asset bubble to ultimately succumb to the pressure, throw in the towel and buy (even though — no, because — the asset that is the subject of the bubble has appreciated substantially); the corresponding tendency to give up on investments that are unpopular and unsuccessful, no matter how intellectually sound, and finally, the fact that investing is all about money, which introduces powerful elements such as greed for more, envy of the money others are making, and fear of loss. ~ Howard Marks,
593:Net wages: “It’s not what you make, but what you net” after paying the FIRE sector, basic utilities and taxes. The usual measure of disposable personal income (DPI) refers to how much employees take home after income-tax withholding (designed in part by Milton Friedman during World War II) and over 15% for FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) to produce a budget surplus for Social Security and health care (half of which are paid by the employer). This forced saving is lent to the U.S. Treasury, enabling it to cut taxes on the higher income brackets. Also deducted from paychecks may be employee withholding for private health insurance and pensions. What is left is by no means freely available for discretionary spending. Wage earners have to pay a monthly financial and real estate “nut” off the top, headed by mortgage debt or rent to the landlord, plus credit card debt, student loans and other bank loans. Electricity, gas and phone bills must be paid, often by automatic bank transfer – and usually cable TV and Internet service as well. If these utility bills are not paid, banks increase the interest rate owed on credit card debt (typically to 29%). Not much is left to spend on goods and services after paying the FIRE sector and basic monopolies, so it is no wonder that markets are shrinking. (See Hudson Bubble Model later in this book.) A similar set of subtrahends occurs with net corporate cash flow (see ebitda). After paying interest and dividends – and using about half their revenue for stock buybacks – not much is left for capital investment in new plant and equipment, research or development to expand production. ~ Michael Hudson,
594:All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived-not without reason-that their very existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought could help them win. Germany, having let Hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals-often of a greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility. ~ Winston S Churchill,
595:Prior to modern times, the term 'Islamic' (Islami in Arabic) was almost never used to define the provenance, status, or substance of things. There was no such thing as 'Islamic art', 'Islamic economics', or even 'Islamic law.' ... The encounter with the modern West, however, ultimately changed the status of 'Islamic.' Inasmuch as the rise of the West converted the achievements of Darwin, Descartes, and Hegel from mere English, French, or German achievements into explicitly 'Western' ones, it also engendered the need for a parallel convention for demarcating the non-Western 'other.' The Western provenance of the modern neologism 'Islamic' is perhaps best revealed in its tendency to connote geography and ethnicity. 'Islamic', in other words, connotes not simply that which is related to or a product of Islam as a religion but that which relates to a particularly non-European people in a non-European part of the world. In this capacity, it carries both a descriptive and a prescriptive force... For no modern Muslim nor non-Muslim would include the likes of such Arab Christians as Michel Aflaq or San' Allah Ibrahim among the 'thinkers of Islam.' Rather, in Western parlance, the modern 'Islamic' began as an instrument to demarcate the boundary between the west and a particular set of 'others.' In Muslim hands, it would go on to evolve into a full-blown signifier of normative Islam and a tool for delineating the boundary between it and Islam. Its added utility, moreover, as a mechanism for elevating the achievements of Muslims to the level of a civilization rivaling that of Europe rendered it all the more irresistible and gained for it universal acceptance throughout the Muslim world. ~ Sherman A Jackson,
596:Tho' I seldom attended any public worship, I had still an opinion of its propriety, and of its utility when rightly conducted, and I regularly paid my annual subscription for the support of the only Presbyterian minister or meeting we had in Philadelphia. He us'd to visit me sometimes as a friend, and admonished me to attend his administrations, and I was now and then prevail'd on to do so, once for five Sundays successively. Had he been in my opinion a good preacher, perhaps I might have continued, [65] notwithstanding the occasion I had for the Sunday's leisure in my course of study; but his discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments, or explications of the peculiar doctrines of our sect, and were all to me very dry, uninteresting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforc'd, their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens. At length he took for his text that verse of the fourth chapter of Philippians, "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue, or any praise, think on these things." And I imagin'd, in a sermon on such a text, we could not miss of having some morality. But he confin'd himself to five points only, as meant by the apostle, viz.: 1. Keeping holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the holy Scriptures. 3. Attending duly the publick worship. 4. Partaking of the Sacrament. 5. Paying a due respect to God's ministers. These might be all good things; but, as they were not the kind of good things that I expected from that text, I despaired of ever meeting with them from any other, was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more. ~ Benjamin Franklin,
597:The Sumerians considered themselves destined to “clothe and feed” such gods, because they viewed themselves as the servants, in a sense, of what we would call instinctive forces, “elicited” by the “environment.” Such forces can be reasonably regarded as the Sumerians regarded them—as deities inhabiting a “supracelestial place,” extant prior to the dawn of humanity. Erotic attraction, for example—a powerful god—has a developmental history that predates the emergence of humanity, is associated with relatively “innate” releasing “stimuli” (those that characterize erotic beauty), is of terrible power, and has an existence “transcending” that of any individual who is currently “possessed.” Pan, the Greek god of nature, produced/represented fear (produced “panic”); Ares or the Roman Mars, warlike fury and aggression. We no longer personify such “instincts,” except for the purposes of literary embellishment, so we don't think of them “existing” in a “place” (like heaven, for example). But the idea that such instincts inhabit a space—and that wars occur in that space—is a metaphor of exceeding power and explanatory utility. Transpersonal motive forces do wage war with one another over vast spans of time; are each forced to come to terms with their powerful “opponents” in the intrapsychic hierarchy. The battles between the different “ways of life” (or different philosophies) that eternally characterize human societies can usefully be visualized as combat undertaken by different standards of value (and, therefore, by different hierarchies of motivation). The “forces” involved in such wars do not die, as they are “immortal”: the human beings acting as “pawns of the gods” during such times are not so fortunate. ~ Jordan Peterson,
598:The Sumerians considered themselves destined to “clothe and feed” such gods, because they viewed themselves as the servants, in a sense, of what we would call instinctive forces, “elicited” by the “environment.” Such forces can be reasonably regarded as the Sumerians regarded them—as deities inhabiting a “supracelestial place,” extant prior to the dawn of humanity. Erotic attraction, for example—a powerful god—has a developmental history that predates the emergence of humanity, is associated with relatively “innate” releasing “stimuli” (those that characterize erotic beauty), is of terrible power, and has an existence “transcending” that of any individual who is currently “possessed.” Pan, the Greek god of nature, produced/represented fear (produced “panic”); Ares or the Roman Mars, warlike fury and aggression. We no longer personify such “instincts,” except for the purposes of literary embellishment, so we don't think of them “existing” in a “place” (like heaven, for example). But the idea that such instincts inhabit a space—and that wars occur in that space—is a metaphor of exceeding power and explanatory utility. Transpersonal motive forces do wage war with one another over vast spans of time; are each forced to come to terms with their powerful “opponents” in the intrapsychic hierarchy. The battles between the different “ways of life” (or different philosophies) that eternally characterize human societies can usefully be visualized as combat undertaken by different standards of value (and, therefore, by different hierarchies of motivation). The “forces” involved in such wars do not die, as they are “immortal”: the human beings acting as “pawns of the gods” during such times are not so fortunate. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
599:The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the “principle of understanding”. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized “egoboo” (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin’s “principle of shared understanding”. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. We may view Linus’s method as a way to create an efficient market in “egoboo” — to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. ~ Eric S Raymond,
600:In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A ~ Nicholas Carr,
601:Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue; however they may believe (as they do) that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than virtue; yet this being granted, and it having been decided, from considerations of this description, what is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to the ultimate end, but they also recognise as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it; and hold that the mind is not in a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner—as a thing desirable in itself, even although, in the individual instance, it should not produce those other desirable consequences which it tends to produce, and on account of which it is held to be virtue. This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. The ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely when considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle of utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who love it disinterestedly it has become so, and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness. ~ John Stuart Mill,
602:The science of Raja-Yoga, in the first place, proposes to give us such a means of observing the internal states. The instrument is the mind itself. The power of attention, when properly guided, and directed towards the internal world, will analyse the mind, and illumine facts for us. The powers of the mind are like rays of light dissipated; when they are concentrated, they illumine. This is our only means of knowledge. Everyone is using it, both in the external and the internal world; but, for the psychologist, the same minute observation has to be directed to the internal world, which the scientific man directs to the external; and this requires a great deal of practice. From our childhood upwards we have been taught only to pay attention to things external, but never to things internal; hence most of us have nearly lost the faculty of observing the internal mechanism. To turn the mind as it were, inside, stop it from going outside, and then to concentrate all its powers, and throw them upon the mind itself, in order that it may know its own nature, analyse itself, is very hard work. Yet that is the only way to anything which will be a scientific approach to the subject. What is the use of such knowledge? In the first place, knowledge itself is the highest reward of knowledge, and secondly, there is also utility in it. It will take away all our misery. When by analysing his own mind, man comes face to face, as it were, with something which is never destroyed, something which is, by its own nature, eternally pure and perfect, he will no more be miserable, no more unhappy. All misery comes from fear, from unsatisfied desire. Man will find that he never dies, and then he will have no more fear of death. When he knows that he is perfect, he will have no more vain desires, and both these causes being absent, there will be no more misery — there will be perfect bliss, even while in this body. There ~ Swami Vivekananda,
603:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being ( caitya guru or antaryamin ), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62 [T1],
604:the assumption is the foundation stone of Letherii society, perhaps all societies the world over. The notion of inequity, my friends. For from inequity derives the concept of value, whether measured by money or the countless other means of gauging human worth. Simply put, there resides in all of us the unchallenged belief that the poor and the starving are in some way deserving of their fate. In other words, there will always be poor people. A truism to grant structure to the continual task of comparison, the establishment through observation of not our mutual similarities, but our essential differences. ‘I know what you’re thinking, to which I have no choice but to challenge you both. Like this. Imagine walking down this street, doling out coins by the thousands. Until everyone here is in possession of vast wealth. A solution? No, you say, because among these suddenly rich folk there will be perhaps a majority who will prove wasteful, profligate and foolish, and before long they will be poor once again. Besides, if wealth were distributed in such a fashion, the coins themselves would lose all value – they would cease being useful. And without such utility, the entire social structure we love so dearly would collapse. ‘Ah, but to that I say, so what? There are other ways of measuring self-worth. To which you both heatedly reply: with no value applicable to labour, all sense of worth vanishes! And in answer to that I simply smile and shake my head. Labour and its product become the negotiable commodities. But wait, you object, then value sneaks in after all! Because a man who makes bricks cannot be equated with, say, a man who paints portraits. Material is inherently value-laden, on the basis of our need to assert comparison – but ah, was I not challenging the very assumption that one must proceed with such intricate structures of value? ‘And so you ask, what’s your point, Tehol? To which I reply with a shrug. Did I say my discourse was a valuable means of using this time? I did not. No, you assumed it was. Thus proving my point!’ ‘I’m ~ Steven Erikson,
605:In any case, Klossowski, mentioned again during Acéphale's sessional meeting of 25 July 1938, would later return to his opposition between Nietzsche and Bataille in a lecture given in 1941 at the end of a retreat in a Dominican monastery, 'Le Corps du néant', later printed in the first edition of his book Sade my Neighbour (1947) and which Bataille later told him he 'does not like'. Here Klossowski recapitulated the two stages in the evolution of Nietzsche's thought outlined in Löwith's essay 'Nietzsche and the doctrine of the Eternal Return', which he had reviewed in Acéphale 2:
1. Liberation from the Christian YOU MUST to achieve the I WANT of supra-nihilism;
2. Liberation from the I WANT to attain the I AM of superhumanity in the eternal return.
It is precisely in this 'cyclical movement', according to Klossowski, that man 'takes on the immeasurable responsibility of the death of God'. Furthermore, he associates Bataille's negation of God with the negation of utility upon which the notion of expenditure was founded, and hence the source of his 'absolute political nihilism'. His conclusion, however, was a little more ambiguous: 'In his desire to relive the Nietzschean experience of the death of God [...] he did not have the privilege [...] of suffering Nietzsche's punishment: the delirium that transfigures the executioner into a victim [...] To be guilty or not to be, that is his dilemma. His acephality expresses only the unease of a guilt in which conscience has become alienated because he has put faith to sleep: and this is to experience God in the manner of demons, as St. Augustine said'. Unlike Nietzsche. who 'accused himself' of causing the death of God 'in the name of all men' and paid for his guilt with madness, unlike Kirillov, the nihilist in Dostoyevsky's Demons who chose to commit suicide so as to kill men's fear of death and thus kill God himself, Bataille shows us this frightful torment of not being able to make his guilt real and so attain that state of responsibility that gives knowledge of the path to absolution. ~ Georges Bataille,
606:a spider and a fly

i heard a spider
and a fly arguing
wait said the fly
do not eat me
i serve a great purpose
in the world

you will have to
show me said the spider

i scurry around
gutters and sewers
and garbage cans
said the fly and gather
up the germs of
typhoid influenza
and pneumonia on my feet
and wings
then i carry these germs
into households of men
and give them diseases
all the people who
have lived the right
sort of life recover
from the diseases
and the old soaks who
have weakened their systems
with liquor and iniquity
succumb it is my mission
to help rid the world
of these wicked persons
i am a vessel of righteousness
scattering seeds of justice
and serving the noblest uses

it is true said the spider
that you are more
useful in a plodding
material sort of way
than i am but i do not
serve the utilitarian deities
i serve the gods of beauty
look at the gossamer webs
i weave they float in the sun
like filaments of song
if you get what i mean
i do not work at anything
i play all the time
i am busy with the stuff
of enchantment and the materials
of fairyland my works
transcend utility
i am the artist
a creator and demi god
it is ridiculous to suppose
that i should be denied
the food i need in order
to continue to create
beauty i tell you
plainly mister fly it is all
damned nonsense for that food
to rear up on its hind legs
and say it should not be eaten

you have convinced me
said the fly say no more
and shutting all his eyes
he prepared himself for dinner
and yet he said i could
have made out a case
for myself too if i had
had a better line of talk

of course you could said the spider
clutching a sirloin from him
but the end would have been
just the same if neither of
us had spoken at all

boss i am afraid that what
the spider said is true
and it gives me to think
furiously upon the futility
of literature

archy ~ Don Marquis,
607:The roots of Campanella’s “Solar City” (and the District of Columbia) can be found in deeper occult parallels within the literature formulated by hermetical philosophers Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino in Renaissance Florence; both prophetically predicting the restoration of the Egyptian solar religion as the correct political theology of the planet and itself the model for a “New World” civil religion.  In another words they believed the Abrahamic solar faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam would ultimately be exposed as substituted forms of Egyptian sun worship with in “New World” - the United States. It would be this “New World” that would midwife civilization from the waning Piscean Age into the “Masonic” Aquarian Age, a new age of the holy spirit. Simon Greenleaf's Druids and Campanella's Solarians are the de-facto “mediating” Joachimite order through which heavenly signs are mediated by a Sun Priest - an executive or President - who frames policy based upon his knowledge of the correspondences between science (i.e. Egyptian natural religion), grades of being, and heavenly correspondences. This polity was replicated from 1797 within the General Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons with reference both to Enoch (cf. Webb’s 1797 Monitor) and the priest king Melchizedek of which the Grand Master DeWitt Clinton became the symbolic presiding executive.  This configuration is important to make because it establishes the position of the District of Columbia as a utopian ideal city in relationship to the history of mystical utopias of Sir Thomas More (Utopia, 1516), through Tommaso Campanella, and Sir Francis Bacon (The New Atlantis, 1626) in terms of the “entelechy” or interior dynamic of the occult “magic” or “science” from numinous vitalism of the hermetical Renaissance into the period of modern scientific inquiry.  DeWitt Clinton’s uncle George Clinton (1739 - 1812) resided in the District as the first Vice President to do so.  Thus its empirical utility and its mythological associations with Merkabah Kabbalah in arch and dome symbolism would have born a higher intensity of symbolic resonance than to subsequent generations. ~ Robert W Sullivan IV,
608:As they walked, Tehol spoke. ‘…the assumption is the foundation stone of Letherii society, perhaps all societies the world over. The notion of inequity, my friends. For from inequity derives the concept of value, whether measured by money or the countless other means of gauging human worth. Simply put, there resides in all of us the unchallenged belief that the poor and the starving are in some way deserving of their fate. In other words, there will always be poor people. A truism to grant structure to the continual task of comparison, the establishment through observation of not our mutual similarities, but our essential differences. ‘I know what you’re thinking, to which I have no choice but to challenge you both. Like this. Imagine walking down this street, doling out coins by the thousands. Until everyone here is in possession of vast wealth. A solution? No, you say, because among these suddenly rich folk there will be perhaps a majority who will prove wasteful, profligate and foolish, and before long they will be poor once again. Besides, if wealth were distributed in such a fashion, the coins themselves would lose all value—they would cease being useful. And without such utility, the entire social structure we love so dearly would collapse. ‘Ah, but to that I say, so what? There are other ways of measuring self-worth. To which you both heatedly reply: with no value applicable to labour, all sense of worth vanishes! And in answer to that I simply smile and shake my head. Labour and its product become the negotiable commodities. But wait, you object, then value sneaks in after all! Because a man who makes bricks cannot be equated with, say, a man who paints portraits. Material is inherently value-laden, on the basis of our need to assert comparison—but ah, was I not challenging the very assumption that one must proceed with such intricate structures of value? ‘And so you ask, what’s your point, Tehol? To which I reply with a shrug. Did I say my discourse was a valuable means of using this time? I did not. No, you assumed it was. Thus proving my point!’ ‘I’m sorry, master,’ Bugg said, ‘but what was that point again?’ ‘I forget. But we’ve arrived. Behold, gentlemen, the poor. ~ Steven Erikson,
609:Jackson shrugged off Gentry’s hand. “You want to worry about drugs in your parish, Agent Broussard, why don’t you check my sister’s bag? Or is it okay for your agents to be racing around with guns while they’re buzzing on painkillers? Is it okay for her to work four months after she tried to slit her wrists with a f**king utility knife?”
A chill washed across Jena’s shoulders. Who was this person? The brother she’d known her whole life would never try to throw her under the squad car.
“We aren’t talking about your sister, who, by the way, is a skilled law-enforcement agent who took two bullets in the line of duty a few months ago, son.” Gentry’s voice was low, but serious. “We’re talking about you, an unemployed twenty four year old who had almost an ounce of an illegal synthetic drug stashed in his bedroom, not to mention what’s probably still in your system. All we’d need is one simple blood test.”
Gentry paused. “We’re talking about jail time, Jackson. Do you understand what kind of trouble you could be in?”
Time seemed to stretch into slow motion. Jackson turned like an enraged devil, tightened his fingers around Gentry’s throat, and squeezed. He moved so fast that Gentry wasn’t able to get his hands up to protect himself and was left trying to breathe and pry Jacks’s hands off at the same time. Jackson wasn’t nearly as strong as Gentry, so it had to be the drugs. Jena had heard stories of users having almost superhuman strength.
She ran toward them, but Adam got there first. He kicked Jacks’s legs out from beneath him and, by the time her brother hit the floor, Meizel was kneeling on his back, one hand pressing his head against the tile. The handcuffs clicked shut with a loud scrape of metal, and Meizel jerked Jacks to his feet. It was over in a matter of seconds.
All four of them stood still for a moment. Until Jacks, his chin bleeding from hitting the floor, began spewing more accusations at Jena, laced with a liberal dose of f-bombs. Then life sped up again. Meizel held one of Jacks’s arms while Gentry held the other. The deputy had started his Miranda by the time they’d gotten Jacks out the front door, shoving him toward the patrol car none too gently. ~ Susannah Sandlin,
610:The granite complex inside the Great Pyramid, therefore, is poised ready to convert vibrations from the Earth into electricity. What is lacking is a sufficient amount of energy to drive the beams and activate the piezoelectric properties within them. The ancients, though, had anticipated the need for more energy than what would be collected only within the King's Chamber. They had determined that they needed to tap into the vibrations of the Earth over a larger area inside the pyramid and deliver that energy to the power center—the King's Chamber —thereby substantially increasing the amplitude of the oscillations of the granite.
Modern concert halls are designed and built to interact with the instruments performing within. They are huge musical instruments in themselves. The Great Pyramid can be seen as a huge musical instrument with each element designed to enhance the performance of the other. While modern research into architectural acoustics might focus predominantly upon minimizing the reverberation effects of sound in enclosed spaces, there is reason to believe that the ancient pyramid builders were attempting to achieve the opposite. The Grand Gallery, which is considered to be an architectural masterpiece, is an enclosed space in which resonators were installed in the slots along the ledge that runs the length of the gallery. As the Earth's vibration flowed through the Great Pyramid, the resonators converted the vibrational energy to airborne sound. By design, the angles and surfaces of the Grand Gallery walls and ceiling caused reflection of the sound, and its focus into the King's Chamber. Although the King's Chamber also was responding to the energy flowing through the pyramid, much of the energy would flow past it. The specific design and utility of the Grand Gallery was to transfer the energy flowing through a large area of the pyramid into the resonant King's Chamber. This sound was then focused into the granite resonating cavity at sufficient amplitude to drive the granite ceiling beams to oscillation. These beams, in turn, compelled the beams above them to resonate in harmonic sympathy. Thus, with the input of sound and the maximization of resonance, the entire granite complex, in effect, became a vibrating mass of energy. ~ Christopher Dunn,
611:In all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones. You call this a Paradox, and demand my Reasons. They are these:

1. Because as they have more Knowledge of the World and their Minds are better stor’d with Observations, their Conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreable.

2. Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a 1000 Services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.

3. Because there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produc’d may be attended with much Inconvenience.

4. Because thro’ more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin’d to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

6. Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

7. Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend the making an old Woman happy.

8thly and Lastly They are so grateful!! ~ Benjamin Franklin,
612:A finished or even a competent reasoner is not the work of nature alone... education develops faculties which would otherwise never have manifested their existence. It is, therefore, as necessary to learn to reason before we can expect to be able to reason, as it is to learn to swim or fence, in order to attain either of those arts. Now, something must be reasoned upon, it matters not much what it is, provided that it can be reasoned upon with certainty. The properties of mind or matter, or the study of languages, mathematics, or natural history may be chosen for this purpose. Now, of all these, it is desirable to choose the one... in which we can find out by other means, such as measurement and ocular demonstration of all sorts, whether the results are true or not.
  ..Now the mathematics are peculiarly well adapted for this purpose, on the following grounds:—
  1. Every term is distinctly explained, and has but one meaning, and it is rarely that two words are employed to mean the same thing.
  2. The first principles are self-evident, and, though derived from observation, do not require more of it than has been made by children in general.
  3. The demonstration is strictly logical, taking nothing for granted except the self-evident first principles, resting nothing upon probability, and entirely independent of authority and opinion.
  4. When the conclusion is attained by reasoning, its truth or falsehood can be ascertained, in geometry by actual measurement, in algebra by common arithmetical calculation. This gives confidence, and is absolutely necessary, if... reason is not to be the instructor, but the pupil.
  5. There are no words whose meanings are so much alike that the ideas which they stand for may be confounded.
  ...These are the principal grounds on which... the utility of mathematical studies may be shewn to rest, as a discipline for the reasoning powers. But the habits of mind which these studies have a tendency to form are valuable in the highest degree. The most important of all is the power of concentrating the ideas which a successful study of them increases where it did exist, and creates where it did not. A difficult position or a new method of passing from one proposition to another, arrests all the attention, and forces the united faculties to use their utmost exertions. The habit of mind thus formed soon extends itself to other pursuits, and is beneficially felt in all the business of life. ~ Augustus De Morgan, Ch. I.,
613:Our team’s vision for the facility was a cross between a shooting range and a country club for special forces personnel. Clients would be able to schedule all manner of training courses in advance, and the gear and support personnel would be waiting when they arrived. There’d be seven shooting ranges with high gravel berms to cut down noise and absorb bullets, and we’d carve a grass airstrip, and have a special driving track to practice high-speed chases and real “defensive driving”—the stuff that happens when your convoy is ambushed. There would be a bunkhouse to sleep seventy. And nearby, the main headquarters would have the feel of a hunting lodge, with timber framing and high stone walls, with a large central fireplace where people could gather after a day on the ranges. This was the community I enjoyed; we never intended to send anyone oversees. This chunk of the Tar Heel State was my “Field of Dreams.” I bought thirty-one hundred acres—roughly five square miles of land, plenty of territory to catch even the most wayward bullets—for $900,000. We broke ground in June 1997, and immediately began learning about do-it-yourself entrepreneurship. That land was ugly: Logging the previous year had left a moonscape of tree stumps and tangled roots lorded over by mosquitoes and poisonous creatures. I killed a snake the first twelve times I went to the property. The heat was miserable. While a local construction company carved the shooting ranges and the lake, our small team installed the culverts and forged new roads and planted the Southern pine utility poles to support the electrical wiring. The basic site work was done in about ninety days—and then we had to figure out what to call the place. The leading contender, “Hampton Roads Tactical Shooting Center,” was professional, but pretty uptight. “Tidewater Institute for Tactical Shooting” had legs, but the acronym wouldn’t have helped us much. But then, as we slogged across the property and excavated ditches, an incessant charcoal mud covered our boots and machinery, and we watched as each new hole was swallowed by that relentless peat-stained black water. Blackwater, we agreed, was a name. Meanwhile, within days of being installed, the Southern pine poles had been slashed by massive black bears marking their territory, as the animals had done there since long before the Europeans settled the New World. We were part of this land now, and from that heritage we took our original logo: a bear paw surrounded by the stylized crosshairs of a rifle scope. ~ Anonymous,
614:But if you will not take this Counsel, and persist in thinking a Commerce with the Sex inevitable, then I repeat my former Advice, that in all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones. You call this a Paradox, and demand my Reasons. They are these:

1. Because as they have more Knowledge of the World and their Minds are better stor'd with Observations, their Conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreable.

2. Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a 1000 Services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.

3. Because there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produc'd may be attended with much Inconvenience.

4. Because thro' more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding2 only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

6. Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

7. Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend the making an old Woman happy.

8thly and Lastly They are so grateful!!

Thus much for my Paradox. But still I advise you to marry directly; being sincerely Your affectionate Friend. ~ Benjamin Franklin,
615:More profoundly, Nihilist "simplification" may be seen in the universal prestige today accorded the lowest order of knowledge, the scientific, as well as the simplistic ideas of men like Marx, Freud, and Darwin, which underlie virtually the whole of contemporary thought and life.

We say "life," for it is important to see that the Nihilist history of our century has not been something imposed from without or above, or at least has not been predominantly this; it has rather presupposed, and drawn its nourishment from, a Nihilist soil that has long been preparing in the hearts of the people. It is precisely from the Nihilism of the commonplace, from the everyday Nihilism revealed in the life and thought and aspiration of the people, that all the terrible events of our century have sprung.
The world-view of Hitler is very instructive in this regard, for in him the most extreme and monstrous Nihilism rested upon the foundation of a quite unexceptional and even typical Realism. He shared the common faith in "science," "progress," and "enlightenment" (though not, of course, in "democracy"), together with a practical materialism that scorned all theology, metaphysics, and any thought or action concerned with any other world than the "here and now," priding himself on the fact that he had "the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations." He had a crude worship of efficiency and utility that freely tolerated "birth control", laughed at the institution of marriage as a mere legalization of a sexual impulse that should be "free", welcomed sterilization of the unfit, despised "unproductive elements" such as monks, saw nothing in the cremation of the dead but a "practical" question and did not even hesitate to put the ashes, or the skin and fat, of the dead to "productive use." He possessed the quasi-anarchist distrust of sacred and venerable institutions, in particular the Church with its "superstitions" and all its "outmoded" laws and ceremonies. He had a naive trust in the "natural mom, the "healthy animal" who scorns the Christian virtues--virginity in particular--that impede the "natural functioning" of the body. He took a simple-minded delight in modern conveniences and machines, and especially in the automobile and the sense of speed and "freedom" it affords.

There is very little of this crude Weltanschauung that is not shared, to some degree, by the multitudes today, especially among the young, who feel themselves "enlightened" and "liberated," very little that is not typically "modern. ~ Seraphim Rose,
616:The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within us. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence, - these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within. He will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by a natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as a utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine. And he will be on his guard against any turning of the means into a limitation, against the mechanising of process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set working the divine force of which he himself is only a means and an aid, a body or a channel.

The example is more powerful than the instruction; but it is not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal character which is of most importance. These have their place and their utility; but what will most stimulate aspiration in others is the central fact of the divine realisation within him governing his whole life and inner state and all his activities. This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to individual person and circumstance. It is this dynamic realisation that the sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of right and natural fruits.

Influence is more important than example. Influence is not the outward authority of the Teacher over his disciple, but the power of his contact, of his presence, of the nearness of his soul to the soul of another, infusing into it, even though in silence, that which he himself is and possesses. This is the supreme sign of the Master. For the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive around him.

And it shall also be a sign of the teacher of the integral Yoga that he does not arrogate to himself Guruhood in a humanly vain and self-exalting spirit. His work, if he has one, is a trust from above, he himself a channel, a vessel or a representative. He is a man helping his brothers, a child leading children, a Light kindling other lights, an awakened Soul awakening souls, at highest a Power or Presence of the Divine calling to him other powers of the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga,
617:The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the “principle of understanding”. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized “egoboo” (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin’s “principle of shared understanding”. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. We may view Linus’s method as a way to create an efficient market in “egoboo” — to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux’s free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers. Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks’s Law I counter-propose the following: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one. ~ Eric S Raymond,
618:WHY ADDICTION IS NOT A DISEASE In its present-day form, the disease model of addiction asserts that addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease. This disease is evidenced by changes in the brain, especially alterations in the striatum, brought about by the repeated uptake of dopamine in response to drugs and other substances. But it’s also shown by changes in the prefrontal cortex, where regions responsible for cognitive control become partially disconnected from the striatum and sometimes lose a portion of their synapses as the addiction progresses. These are big changes. They can’t be brushed aside. And the disease model is the only coherent model of addiction that actually pays attention to the brain changes reported by hundreds of labs in thousands of scientific articles. It certainly explains the neurobiology of addiction better than the “choice” model and other contenders. It may also have some real clinical utility. It makes sense of the helplessness addicts feel and encourages them to expiate their guilt and shame, by validating their belief that they are unable to get better by themselves. And it seems to account for the incredible persistence of addiction, its proneness to relapse. It even demonstrates why “choice” cannot be the whole answer, because choice is governed by motivation, which is governed by dopamine, and the dopamine system is presumably diseased. Then why should we reject the disease model? The main reason is this: Every experience that is repeated enough times because of its motivational appeal will change the wiring of the striatum (and related regions) while adjusting the flow and uptake of dopamine. Yet we wouldn’t want to call the excitement we feel when visiting Paris, meeting a lover, or cheering for our favourite team a disease. Each rewarding experience builds its own network of synapses in and around the striatum (and OFC), and those networks continue to draw dopamine from its reservoir in the midbrain. That’s true of Paris, romance, football, and heroin. As we anticipate and live through these experiences, each network of synapses is strengthened and refined, so the uptake of dopamine gets more selective as rewards are identified and habits established. Prefrontal control is not usually studied when it comes to travel arrangements and football, but we know from the laboratory and from real life that attractive goals frequently override self-restraint. We know that ego fatigue and now appeal, both natural processes, reduce coordination between prefrontal control systems and the motivational core of the brain (as I’ve called it). So even though addictive habits can be more deeply entrenched than many other habits, there is no clear dividing line between addiction and the repeated pursuit of other attractive goals, either in experience or in brain function. London just doesn’t do it for you anymore. It’s got to be Paris. Good food, sex, music . . . they no longer turn your crank. But cocaine sure does. ~ Marc Lewis,
619:The philosophers who in their treatises of ethics assigned supreme value to justice and applied the yardstick of justice to ali social institutions were not guilty of such deceit. They did not support selfish group concerns by declaring them alone just, fair, and good, and smear ali dissenters by depicting them as the apologists of unfair causes. They were Platonists who believed that a perennial idea of absolute justice exists and that it is the duty of man to organize ali human institutions in conformity with this ideal. Cognition of justice is imparted to man by an inner voice, i.e., by intuition. The champions of this doctrine did not ask what the consequences of realizing the schemes they called just would be. They silently assumed either that these consequences will be beneficiai or that mankind is bound to put up even with very painful consequences of justice. Still less did these teachers of morality pay attention to the fact that people can and really do disagree with regard to the interpretation of the inner voice and that no method of peacefully settling such disagreements can be found.
Ali these ethical doctrines have failed to comprehend that there is, outside of social bonds and preceding, temporally or logically, the existence of society, nothing to which the epithet "just" can be given. A hypothetical isolated individual must under the pressure of biological competition look upon ali other people as deadly foes. His only concern is to preserve his own life and health; he does not need to heed the consequences which his own survival has for other men; he has no use for justice. His only solicitudes are hygiene and defense. But in social cooperation with other men the individual is forced to abstain from conduct incompatible with life in society. Only then does the distinction between what is just and what is unjust emerge. It invariably refers to interhuman social relations. What is beneficiai to the individual without affecting his fellows, such as the observance of certain rules in the use of some drugs, remains hygiene.
The ultimate yardstick of justice is conduciveness to the preservation of social cooperation. Conduct suited to preserve social cooperation is just, conduct detrimental to the preservation of society is unjust. There cannot be any question of organizing society according to the postulates of an arbitrary preconceived idea of justice. The problem is to organize society for the best possible realization of those ends which men want to attain by social cooperation. Social utility is the only standard of justice. It is the sole guide of legislation.
Thus there are no irreconcilable conflicts between selfíshness and altruism, between economics and ethics, between the concerns of the individual and those of society. Utilitarian philosophy and its finest product, economics, reduced these apparent antagonisms to the opposition of shortrun and longrun interests. Society could not have come into existence or been preserved without a harmony of the rightly understood interests of ali its members. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
620:What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon. ~ James Joyce,
621:Can it be said in justification of one's past that whatever has happened in one's life had to happen?

The Mother: Obviously, what has happened had to happen; it would not have been, if it had not been intended. Even the mistakes that we have committed and the adversities that fell upon us had to be, because there was some necessity in them, some utility for our lives. But in truth these things cannot be explained mentally and should not be. For all that happened was necessary, not for any mental reason, but to lead us to something beyond what the mind imagines. But is there any need to explain after all? The whole universe explains everything at every moment and a particular thing happens because the whole universe is what it is. But this does not mean that we are bound over to a blind acquiescence in Nature's inexorable law. You can accept the past as a settled fact and perceive the necessity in it, and still you can use the experience it gave you to build up the power consciously to guide and shape your present and your future.

Is the time also of an occurrence arranged in the Divine Plan of things?

The Mother: All depends upon the plane from which one sees and speaks. There is a plane of divine consciousness in which all is known absolutely, and the whole plan of things foreseen and predetermined. That way of seeing lives in the highest reaches of the Supramental; it is the Supreme's own vision. But when we do not possess that consciousness, it is useless to speak in terms that hold good only in that region and are not our present effective way of seeing things. For at a lower level of consciousness nothing is realised or fixed beforehand; all is in the process of making. Here there are no settled facts, there is only the play of possibilities; out of the clash of possibilities is realised the thing that has to happen. On this plane we can choose and select; we can refuse one possibility and accept another; we can follow one path, turn away from another. And that we can do, even though what is actually happening may have been foreseen and predetermined in a higher plane.

The Supreme Consciousness knows everything beforehand, because everything is realised there in her eternity. But for the sake of her play and in order to carry out actually on the physical plane what is foreordained in her own supreme self, she moves here upon earth as if she did not know the whole story; she works as if it was a new and untried thread that she was weaving. It is this apparent forgetfulness of her own foreknowledge in the higher consciousness that gives to the individual in the active life of the world his sense of freedom and independence and initiative. These things in him are her pragmatic tools or devices, and it is through this machinery that the movements and issues planned and foreseen elsewhere are realised here.

It may help you to understand if you take the example of an actor. An actor knows the whole part he has to play; he has in his mind the exact sequence of what is to happen on the stage. But when he is on the stage, he has to appear as if he did not know anything; he has to feel and act as if he were experiencing all these things for the first time, as if it was an entirely new world with all its chance events and surprises that was unrolling before his eyes. 28th April ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,
622:Why can't we sit together? What's the point of seat reservations,anyway? The bored woman calls my section next,and I think terrible thoughts about her as she slides my ticket through her machine. At least I have a window seat. The middle and aisle are occupied with more businessmen. I'm reaching for my book again-it's going to be a long flight-when a polite English accent speaks to the man beside me.
"Pardon me,but I wonder if you wouldn't mind switching seats.You see,that's my girlfriend there,and she's pregnant. And since she gets a bit ill on airplanes,I thought she might need someone to hold back her hair when...well..." St. Clair holds up the courtesy barf bag and shakes it around. The paper crinkles dramatically.
The man sprints off the seat as my face flames. His pregnant girlfriend?
"Thank you.I was in forty-five G." He slides into the vacated chair and waits for the man to disappear before speaking again. The guy onhis other side stares at us in horror,but St. Clair doesn't care. "They had me next to some horrible couple in matching Hawaiian shirts. There's no reason to suffer this flight alone when we can suffer it together."
"That's flattering,thanks." But I laugh,and he looks pleased-until takeoff, when he claws the armrest and turns a color disturbingy similar to key lime pie. I distract him with a story about the time I broke my arm playing Peter Pan. It turned out there was more to flying than thinking happy thoughts and jumping out a window. St. Clair relaxes once we're above the clouds.
Time passes quickly for an eight-hour flight.
We don't talk about what waits on the other side of the ocean. Not his mother. Not Toph.Instead,we browse Skymall. We play the if-you-had-to-buy-one-thing-off-each-page game. He laughs when I choose the hot-dog toaster, and I tease him about the fogless shower mirror and the world's largest crossword puzzle.
"At least they're practical," he says.
"What are you gonna do with a giant crossword poster? 'Oh,I'm sorry Anna. I can't go to the movies tonight. I'm working on two thousand across, Norwegian Birdcall."
"At least I'm not buying a Large Plastic Rock for hiding "unsightly utility posts.' You realize you have no lawn?"
"I could hide other stuff.Like...failed French tests.Or illegal moonshining equipment." He doubles over with that wonderful boyish laughter, and I grin. "But what will you do with a motorized swimming-pool snack float?"
"Use it in the bathtub." He wipes a tear from his cheek. "Ooo,look! A Mount Rushmore garden statue. Just what you need,Anna.And only forty dollars! A bargain!"
We get stumped on the page of golfing accessories, so we switch to drawing rude pictures of the other people on the plane,followed by rude pictures of Euro Disney Guy. St. Clair's eyes glint as he sketches the man falling down the Pantheon's spiral staircase.
There's a lot of blood. And Mickey Mouse ears.
After a few hours,he grows sleepy.His head sinks against my shoulder. I don't dare move.The sun is coming up,and the sky is pink and orange and makes me think of sherbet.I siff his hair. Not out of weirdness.It's just...there.
He must have woken earlier than I thought,because it smells shower-fresh. Clean. Healthy.Mmm.I doze in and out of a peaceful dream,and the next thing I know,the captain's voice is crackling over the airplane.We're here.
I'm home. ~ Stephanie Perkins,
623:Sophie Bushwick/Popular Science 7/16-inch inner diameter ribbed hose 5/16-inch wood dowel 1/4-inch outer diameter vinyl tubing Small hose clamps Five 1/4-inch hose barbs x 1/4-inch male threaded adapters Five 1/4-inch hose barbs x 1/4-inch female threaded adapters Electrical tape Yellow Teflon thread tape Several long balloons (type 350Q) 1-inch x 6-inch board or other support Fluidic control board Robot Hand Instructions 1. Insert the 5/16-inch dowel into the ribbed hose to hold it straight. Use the center punch to carefully punch holes between each rib in a line along the seam of the hose. Flip the hose over and repeat along other seam. (Photo ) 2. Use the drill press to drill a hole at each center-punched location between the hose ribs, leaving the dowel in place to provide support. It is best to drill the holes on each side of the hose separately, rather than drill straight through. When you are done you should have a neat line of holes on each side of the ribbed hose. These holes will act as a stress relief and prevent the hose from splitting when it is flexed. (Photo ) 3. Remove the dowel and cut the hose into five 3-inch fingers with the utility knife. For each finger, use the utility knife to very carefully cut between each rib from the hole on one side to the hole on the other. Leave the first two ribs on each end uncut. Cut through one side of the hose only. It is critical that you do not nick the far side of the stress relief holes or you will reduce the reliability of the finger dramatically. Now the hose can flex in one direction more than in the opposite direction. (Photo ) 4. Insert another piece of dowel into one of the long balloons. Use it to gently feed the balloon into one of the fingers until the end of the balloon sticks out enough to grab it. Remove the dowel, and fold about 1/4-inch of the balloon tip over the rim of the hose. Secure it by wrapping a piece of electrical tape all the way around the tip of the finger. (Photo ) 5. Now feed the dowel back inside the finger from the non-taped end, but on the outside of the balloon. Insert it until it is just within two ribs of the tip of the finger. Fill the tip of the finger with hot glue, allow to cool, and then carefully remove the dowel. 6. Use electrical tape over the end of the finger, covering the hot-glued end. Another wrap of electrical tape over this will seal the end of the finger. (Photo ) 7. Cut the open end of the balloon away, leaving about an inch beyond the end of the finger. Stretch the open end of the balloon out and over the end of the finger. (Photo ) 8. Repeat steps 4 through 7 for each finger. (Photo ) 9. Use the yellow Teflon tape to wrap the threads on each of the male hose barbs. Thread each male hose barb onto each female hose barb and tighten firmly with the crescent wrenches. Then use more yellow Teflon tape and wrap each female hose barb several times around. The ends of these hose barbs should fit snugly into the open ends of each finger. (Photo ) 10. Use the small hose clamps to affix each finger onto the Teflon wrapped ends of the five hose barbs. (Photo ) 11. Now use hot glue to firmly attach each finger to the end of the 1x6-inch board (or other support) to form a hand. Finally, attach a length of 1/4-inch O.D. vinyl hose to the open hose barb on each finger. (Photo ) 12. Now the hand is complete--but it still needs a control system. Check out Harvard’s Soft Robotics Toolkit for inspiration, or just follow the instructions below. Building The ~ Anonymous,
624:It will be seen how there can be the idea of a special science, the *critique of pure reason* as it may be called. For reason is the faculty which supplies the *principles* of *a priori* knowledge. Pure reason therefore is that which contains the principles of knowing something entirely *a priori*. An *organon* of pure reason would be the sum total of the principles by which all pure *a priori* knowledge can be acquired and actually established. Exhaustive application of such an organon would give us a system of pure reason. But as this would be a difficult task, and as at present it is still doubtful whether indeed an expansion of our knowledge is possible here at all, we may regard a science that merely judges pure reason, its sources and limits, as the *propaedeutic* to the system of pure reason. In general, it would have to be called only a *critique*, not a *doctrine* of pure reason. Its utility, in regard to speculation, would only be negative, for it would serve only to purge rather than to expand our reason, and, which after all is a considerable gain, would guard reason against errors. I call all knowledge *transcendental* which deals not so much with objects as with our manner of knowing objects insofar as this manner is to be possible *a priori*. A system of such concepts would be called *transcendental philosophy*. But this is still, as a beginning, too great an undertaking. For since such a science must contain completely both analytic and synthetic *a priori* knowledge, it is, as far as our present purpose is concerned, much too comprehensive. We will be satisfied to carry the analysis only so far as is indispensably necessary in order to understand in their whole range the principles of *a priori* synthesis, with which alone we are concerned. This investigation, which properly speaking should be called only a transcendental critique but not a doctrine, is all we are dealing with at present. It is not meant to expand our knowledge but only to correct it, and to become the touchstone of the value, or lack of value, of all *a priori* knowledge. Such a critique is therefore the preparation, as far as possible, for a new organon, or, if this should turn out not to be possible, for a canon at least, according to which, thereafter, the complete system of a philosophy of pure reason, whether it serve as an expansion or merely as a limitation of its knowledge, may be carried out both analytically and synthetically. That such a system is possible, indeed that it need not be so comprehensive as to cut us off from the hope of completing it, may already be gathered from the fact that it would have to deal not with the nature of things, which is inexhaustible, but with the understanding which makes judgments about the nature of things, and with this understanding again only as far as its *a priori* knowledge is concerned. The supply of this *a priori* knowledge cannot be hidden from us, as we need not look for it outside the understanding, and we may suppose this supply to prove sufficiently small for us to record completely, judge as to its value or lack of value and appraise correctly. Still less ought we to expect here a critique of books and systems of pure reason, but only the critique of the faculty of pure reason itself. Only once we are in possession of this critique do we have a reliable touchstone for estimating the philosophical value of old and new works on this subject. Otherwise, an unqualified historian and judge does nothing but pass judgments upon the groundless assertions of others by means of his own, which are equally groundless. ~ Immanuel Kant,
625:I looked up--for he was half a head taller than I--into his gold-colored eyes, and though their expression was merely contemplative, and his manner mild, I felt my neck go hot. Turning away from that direct, steady gaze, I just couldn’t find the words to ask him about his mother’s political plans. So I said, “I came to ask a favor of you.”
“Speak, then,” he said, his voice just a shade deeper than usual.
I looked over my shoulder and realized then that he was laughing. Not out loud, but internally. All the signs were there; the shadows at the corners of his mouth, the sudden brightness of his gaze. He was laughing at me--at my reaction.
I sighed. “It concerns the party I must give for my brother’s coming marriage,” I said shortly, and stole another quick look.
His amusement was gone--superficially, anyway.
“You must forgive my obtuseness,” he murmured. “But you could have requested your assistance by letter.”
“I did. Oh.” I realized what he meant, and then remembered belatedly one of Nee’s more delicate hints about pursuit--and pursuers. “Oh!” So he hadn’t guessed why I’d come; he thought I’d come courting. And, well, here we were alone.
My first reaction was alarm. I did find him attractive--I realized it just as I was standing there--but in the way I’d admire a beautifully cut diamond or a sunset above sheer cliffs. Another person, finding herself in my place, could probably embark happily into dalliance and thus speed along her true purpose. But the prospect simply terrified me.
He touched my arm, lightly, just enough to guide us back to his window. “It is not merely the sight of water that I find salubrious,” he said. “Its function as a metaphor for study is as…as adaptable--”
“You were going to say fluid,” I cut in, almost giddy with relief at the deft change of subject.
Once again I saw that brightness in his eyes that indicated internal laughter. “I wasn’t,” he insisted. “I would never be so maladroit.”
Forgive my maladroitness… For an instant I was back in that corner room in the State Wing, with Shevraeth standing opposite me.
I dismissed the memory as Flauvic went on, “As adaptable, to resume our discourse, as its inherent properties. The clarity, the swift change and movement, the ability to fill the boundaries it encounters, all these accommodating characteristics blind those who take its utility and artistry for granted and overlook its inexorable power.”
As if to underline his words--it really was uncanny--the threatening downpour chose that moment to strike, and for a long moment we stood side by side as rain thundered on the glass, running down in rivulets that blurred the scene beyond.
Then he turned his back to it. “How may I be of service?”
“My brother’s party. I want it to be special,” I said. “I should have been planning it long before. I just found out that it’s a custom, and to cover my ignorance I would like to make it seem I’ve been planning it a long time, so I need some kind of new idea. I want to know what the latest fashion for parties in the Empire’s Court is, and I thought the best thing I could do would be to come to you.”
“So you do not, in fact, regard me as an arbiter of taste?” He placed a hand over his heart, mock-solemn. “You wound me.” His tone said, You wound me again.
Once again I blushed, and hated it. “You know you’re an arbiter of taste, Flauvic,” I said with some asperity. “If you think I’m here just to get you to parrot out Erev-li-Erval’s latest fad, then you’re--well, I know you don’t believe it. And I didn’t think you fished for compliments.”
He laughed out loud, a musical sound that suddenly rendered him very much more like the age we shared. It also made him, just for that moment, devastatingly attractive. I realized that I had to get out of there before I got myself into trouble that it would take a lifetime to get out of. ~ Sherwood Smith,
626:It was the general opinion of ancient nations, that the divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men... and modern nations, in the consecrations of kings, and in several superstitious chimeras of divine rights in princes and nobles, are nearly unanimous in preserving remnants of it... Is the jealousy of power, and the envy of superiority, so strong in all men, that no considerations of public or private utility are sufficient to engage their submission to rules for their own happiness? Or is the disposition to imposture so prevalent in men of experience, that their private views of ambition and avarice can be accomplished only by artifice? — … There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. As Copley painted Chatham, West, Wolf, and Trumbull, Warren and Montgomery; as Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, and Humphries composed their verse, and Belknap and Ramzay history; as Godfrey invented his quadrant, and Rittenhouse his planetarium; as Boylston practised inoculation, and Franklin electricity; as Paine exposed the mistakes of Raynal, and Jefferson those of Buffon, so unphilosophically borrowed from the Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains those despicable dreams of de Pauw — neither the people, nor their conventions, committees, or sub-committees, considered legislation in any other light than ordinary arts and sciences, only as of more importance. Called without expectation, and compelled without previous inclination, though undoubtedly at the best period of time both for England and America, to erect suddenly new systems of laws for their future government, they adopted the method of a wise architect, in erecting a new palace for the residence of his sovereign. They determined to consult Vitruvius, Palladio, and all other writers of reputation in the art; to examine the most celebrated buildings, whether they remain entire or in ruins; compare these with the principles of writers; and enquire how far both the theories and models were founded in nature, or created by fancy: and, when this should be done, as far as their circumstances would allow, to adopt the advantages, and reject the inconveniences, of all. Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind.

[Preface to 'A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America', 1787] ~ John Adams,
627:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1,
628:The Ruling Thought
Most sweet, most powerful,
Controller of my inmost soul;
The terrible, yet precious gift
Of heaven, companion kind
Of all my days of misery,
O thought, that ever dost recur to me;
Of thy mysterious power
Who speaketh not? Who hath not felt
Its subtle influence?
Yet, when one is by feeling deep impelled
Its secret joys and sorrows to unfold,
The theme seems ever new however old.
How isolated is my mind,
Since thou in it hast come to dwell!
As by some magic spell,
My other thoughts have all,
Like lightning, disappeared;
And thou, alone, like some huge tower,
In a deserted plain,
Gigantic, solitary, dost remain.
How worthless quite,
Save but for thee, have in my sight
All earthly things, and life itself become!
How wearisome its days;
And all its works, and all its plays,
A vain pursuit of pleasures vain,
Compared with the felicity,
The heavenly joy, that springs from thee!
As from the naked rocks
Of the rough Apennine,
The weary pilgrim turns his longing eyes
To the bright plain that in the distance lies;
So from the rough and barren intercourse
Of worldly men, to thee I gladly turn,
As to a Paradise, my weary mind,
104
And sweet refreshment for my senses find.
It seems to me incredible, that I
This dreary world, this wretched life,
So full of folly and of strife,
Without thy aid, could have so long endured;
Nor can I well conceive,
How one's desires _could_ cling
To other joys than those which thou dost bring.
Never, since first I knew
By hard experience what life is,
Could fear of death my soul subdue.
To-day, a jest to me appears,
That which the silly world,
Praising at times, yet ever hates and fears,
The last extremity!
If danger comes, I, with undaunted mien,
Its threats encounter with a smile serene.
I always hated coward souls,
And meanness held in scorn.
_Now_, each unworthy act
At once through all my senses thrills;
Each instance vile of human worthlessness,
My soul with holy anger fills.
This arrogant, this foolish age,
Which feeds itself on empty hopes,
Absorbed in trifles, virtue's enemy,
Which idly clamors for utility,
And has not sense enough to see
How _useless_ all life thenceforth must become,
I feel _beneath_ me, and its judgments laugh
To scorn. The motley crew,
The foes of every lofty thought,
Who laugh at _thee_, I trample under foot.
To that, which thee inspires,
What passion yieldeth not?
What other, save this one,
Controls our hearts' desires?
Ambition, avarice, disdain, and hate,
105
The love of power, love of fame,
What are they but an empty name,
Compared with it? And this,
The source, the spring of all,
That sovereign reigns within the breast,
Eternal laws have on our hearts impressed.
Life hath no value, meaning hath,
Save but for thee, our only hope and stay;
The sole excuse for Fate,
That cruelly hath placed us here,
To undergo such useless misery;
For thee alone, the wise man, not the fool,
To life still fondly clings,
Nor calls on death to end his sufferings.
Thy joys to gather, thou sweet thought,
Long years of sorrow I endure,
And bear of weary life the strain;
But not in vain!
And I would still return,
In spite of all my sad experience,
Towards such a goal, my course to recommence;
For through the sands, and through the viper-brood
Of this, our mortal wilderness,
My steps I ne'er so wearily have dragged
To thee, that all the danger and distress
Were not repaid by such pure happiness.
O what a world, what new immensity,
What paradise is that,
To which, so oft, by thy stupendous charm
Impelled, I seem to soar! Where I
Beneath a brighter light am wandering,
And my poor earthly state,
And all life's bitter truths forget!
Such are, I ween, the dreams
Of the Immortals. Ah, what _but_ a dream,
Art thou, sweet thought,
The truth, that thus embellished?
A dream, an error manifest!
But of a nature, still divine,
106
An error brave and strong,
That will with truth the fight prolong,
And oft for truth doth compensate;
Nor leave us e'er, till summoned hence by Fate.
And surely thou, my thought,
Thou sole sustainer of my days,
The cause beloved of sorrows infinite,
In Death alone wilt be extinguished quite;
For by sure signs within my soul I feel
Thy sovereign sway, perpetual.
All other fancies sweet
The aspect of the truth
Hath weakened ever. But whene'er I turn
To gaze again on her, of whom with thee
To speak, is all I live for, ah,
That great delight increases still,
That frenzy fine, the breath of life, to me!
Angelic beauty! Every lovely face,
On which I gaze,
A phantom seems to me,
That vainly strives to copy thee,
Of all the graces that our souls inthral,
Sole fount, divine original!
Since first I thee beheld,
Of what most anxious care of mine,
Hast thou not been the end and aim?
What day has ever passed, what hour,
When I thought not of thee? What dream of mine
Has not been haunted by thy face divine?
Angelic countenance, that we
In dreams, alas, alone may see,
What else on earth, what in the universe,
Do I e'er ask, or hope for, more,
Than those dear eyes forever to behold?
Than thy sweet thought still in my heart to hold?
~ Count Giacomo Leopardi,
629:J'Aime Le Souvenir De Ces Époques Nues (I Love The
Naked Ages Long Ago)
J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues,
Dont Phoebus se plaisait à dorer les statues.
Alors l'homme et la femme en leur agilité
Jouissaient sans mensonge et sans anxiété,
Et, le ciel amoureux leur caressant l'échine,
Exerçaient la santé de leur noble machine.
Cybèle alors, fertile en produits généreux,
Ne trouvait point ses fils un poids trop onéreux,
Mais, louve au coeur gonflé de tendresses communes
Abreuvait l'univers à ses tétines brunes.
L'homme, élégant, robuste et fort, avait le droit
D'être fier des beautés qui le nommaient leur roi;
Fruits purs de tout outrage et vierges de gerçures,
Dont la chair lisse et ferme appelait les morsures!
Le Poète aujourd'hui, quand il veut concevoir
Ces natives grandeurs, aux lieux où se font voir
La nudité de l'homme et celle de la femme,
Sent un froid ténébreux envelopper son âme
Devant ce noir tableau plein d'épouvantement.
Ô monstruosités pleurant leur vêtement!
Ô ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques!
Ô pauvres corps tordus, maigres, ventrus ou flasques,
Que le dieu de l'Utile, implacable et serein,
Enfants, emmaillota dans ses langes d'airain!
Et vous, femmes, hélas! pâles comme des cierges,
Que ronge et que nourrit la débauche, et vous, vierges,
Du vice maternel traînant l'hérédité
Et toutes les hideurs de la fécondité!
Nous avons, il est vrai, nations corrompues,
Aux peuples anciens des beautés inconnues:
Des visages rongés par les chancres du coeur,
Et comme qui dirait des beautés de langueur;
Mais ces inventions de nos muses tardives
N'empêcheront jamais les races maladives
202
De rendre à la jeunesse un hommage profond,
— À la sainte jeunesse, à l'air simple, au doux front,
À l'oeil limpide et clair ainsi qu'une eau courante,
Et qui va répandant sur tout, insouciante
Comme l'azur du ciel, les oiseaux et les fleurs,
Ses parfums, ses chansons et ses douces chaleurs!
I Love to Think of Those Naked Epochs
I love to think of those naked epochs
Whose statues Phoebus liked to tinge with gold.
At that time men and women, lithe and strong,
Tasted the thrill of love free from care and prudery,
And with the amorous sun caressing their loins
They gloried in the health of their noble bodies.
Then Cybele, generous with her fruits,
Did not find her children too heavy a burden;
A she-wolf from whose heart flowed boundless love for all,
She fed the universe from her tawny nipples.
Man, graceful, robust, strong, was justly proud
Of the beauties who proclaimed him their king;
Fruits unblemished and free from every scar,
Whose smooth, firm flesh invited biting kisses!
Today, when the Poet wishes to imagine
This primitive grandeur, in places where
Men and women show themselves in a state of nudity,
He feels a gloomy cold enveloping his soul
Before this dark picture full of terror.
Monstrosities bewailing their clothing!
Ridiculous torsos appropriate for masks!
Poor bodies, twisted, thin, bulging or flabby,
That the god Usefulness, implacable and calm,
Wrapped up at tender age in swaddling clothes of brass!
And you, women, alas! pale as candies,
Whom Debauch gnaws and feeds, and you, virgins,
Who trail the heritage of the maternal vice
And all the hideousness of fecundity!
203
Degenerate races, we have, it's true,
Types of beauty unknown to the ancient peoples:
Visages gnawed by cankers of the heart
And what one might say were languor's marks of beauty;
But these inventions of our backward Muses
Will never prevent unhealthy races
From paying to their youth deep and sincere homage,
— To holy youth, with serene brow and guileless air,
With eyes bright and clear, like a running brook,
Which goes spreading over all things, as free from care
As the blue of the sky, the birds and the flowers,
Its perfumes, its songs and its sweet ardor!
— Translated by William Aggeler
I Love the Thought of Those Old Naked Days
I love the thought of those old naked days
When Phoebus gilded torsos with his rays,
When men and women sported, strong and fleet,
Without anxiety or base deceit,
And heaven caressed them, amorously keen
To prove the health of each superb machine.
Cybele then was lavish of her guerdon
And did not find her sons too gross a burden:
But, like a she-wolf, in her love great-hearted,
Her full brown teats to all the world imparted.
Bold, handsome, strong, Man, rightly, might evince
Pride in the glories that proclaimed him prince —
Fruits pure of outrage, by the blight unsmitten,
With firm, smooth flesh that cried out to be bitten.
Today the Poet, when he would assess
Those native splendours in the nakedness
Of man or woman, feels a sombre chill
Enveloping his spirit and his will.
He meets a gloomy picture, which be loathes,
Wherein deformity cries out for clothes.
Oh comic runts! Oh horror of burlesque!
204
Lank, flabby, skewed, pot-bellied, and grotesque!
Whom their smug god, Utility (poor brats!)
Has swaddled in his brazen clouts 'ersatz'
As with cheap tinsel. Women tallow-pale,
Both gnawed and nourished by debauch, who trail
The heavy burden of maternal vice,
Or of fecundity the hideous price.
We have (corrupted nations) it is true
Beauties the ancient people never knew —
Sad faces gnawed by cancers of the heart
And charms which morbid lassitudes impart.
But these inventions of our tardy muse
Can't force our ailing peoples to refuse
Just tribute to the holiness of youth
With its straightforward mien, its forehead couth,
The limpid gaze, like running water bright,
Diffusing, careless, through all things, like the light
Of azure skies, the birds, the winds, the flowers,
The songs, and perfumes, and heart-warming powers.
— Translated by Roy Campbell,
I Love The Naked Ages Long Ago
I love the naked ages long ago
When statues were gilded by Apollo,
When men and women of agility
Could play without lies and anxiety,
And the sky lovingly caressed their spines,
As it exercised its noble machine.
Fertile Cybele, mother of nature, then,
Would not place on her daughters a burden,
But, she-wolf sharing her heart with the people,
Would feed creation from her brown nipples.
Men, elegant and strong, would have the right
To be proud to have beauty named their king;
Virgin fruit free of blemish and cracking,
Whose flesh smooth and firm would summon a bite!
The Poet today, when he would convey
205
This native grandeur, would not be swept away
By man free and woman natural,
But would feel darkness envelop his soul
Before this black tableau full of loathing.
O malformed monsters crying for clothing!
O ludicrous heads! Torsos needing disguise!
O poor writhing bodies of every wrong size,
Children that the god of the Useful swaths
In the language of bronze and brass!
And women, alas! You shadow your heredity,
You gnaw nourishment from debauchery,
A virgin holds maternal lechery
And all the horrors of fecundity!
We have, it is true, corrupt nations,
Beauty unknown to the radiant ancients:
Faces that gnaw through the heart's cankers,
And talk with the cool beauty of languor;
But these inventions of our backward muses
Are never hindered in their morbid uses
Of the old for profound homage to youth,
—To the young saint, the sweet air, the simple truth,
To the eye as limpid as the water current,
To spread out over all, insouciant
Like the blue sky, the birds and the flowers,
Its perfumes, its songs and its sweet fervors.
Translated by William A. Sigler
~ Charles Baudelaire,
630:Captain Craig
I doubt if ten men in all Tilbury Town
Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig,
Or called him by his name, or looked at him
So curiously, or so concernedly,
As they had looked at ashes; but a few—
Say five or six of us—had found somehow
The spark in him, and we had fanned it there,
Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ,
By Tilbury prudence. He had lived his life
And in his way had shared, with all mankind,
Inveterate leave to fashion of himself,
By some resplendent metamorphosis,
Whatever he was not. And after time,
When it had come sufficiently to pass
That he was going patch-clad through the streets,
Weak, dizzy, chilled, and half starved, he had laid
Some nerveless fingers on a prudent sleeve,
And told the sleeve, in furtive confidence,
Just how it was: “My name is Captain Craig,”
He said, “and I must eat.” The sleeve moved on,
And after it moved others—one or two;
For Captain Craig, before the day was done,
Got back to the scant refuge of his bed
And shivered into it without a curse—
Without a murmur even. He was cold,
And old, and hungry; but the worst of it
Was a forlorn familiar consciousness
That he had failed again. There was a time
When he had fancied, if worst came to worst,
And he could do no more, that he might ask
Of whom he would. But once had been enough,
And soon there would be nothing more to ask.
He was himself, and he had lost the speed
He started with, and he was left behind.
There was no mystery, no tragedy;
And if they found him lying on his back
Stone dead there some sharp morning, as they might,—
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Well, once upon a time there was a man—
Es war einmal ein König, if it pleased him.
And he was right: there were no men to blame:
There was just a false note in the Tilbury tune—
A note that able-bodied men might sound
Hosannas on while Captain Craig lay quiet.
They might have made him sing by feeding him
Till he should march again, but probably
Such yielding would have jeopardized the rhythm;
They found it more melodious to shout
Right on, with unmolested adoration,
To keep the tune as it had always been,
To trust in God, and let the Captain starve.
He must have understood that afterwards—
When we had laid some fuel to the spark
Of him, and oxidized it—for he laughed
Out loud and long at us to feel it burn,
And then, for gratitude, made game of us:
“You are the resurrection and the life,”
He said, “and I the hymn the Brahmin sings;
O Fuscus! and we’ll go no more a-roving.”
We were not quite accoutred for a blast
Of any lettered nonchalance like that,
And some of us—the five or six of us
Who found him out—were singularly struck.
But soon there came assurance of his lips,
Like phrases out of some sweet instrument
Man’s hand had never fitted, that he felt
“No penitential shame for what had come,
No virtuous regret for what had been,—
But rather a joy to find it in his life
To be an outcast usher of the soul
For such as had good courage of the Sun
To pattern Love.” The Captain had one chair;
And on the bottom of it, like a king,
For longer time than I dare chronicle,
Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized
His opportunity. My friends got out,
Like brokers out of Arcady; but I—
May be for fascination of the thing,
Or may be for the larger humor of it—
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Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung.
When they were gone the Captain’s tuneful ooze
Of rhetoric took on a change; he smiled
At me and then continued, earnestly:
“Your friends have had enough of it; but you,
For a motive hardly vindicated yet
By prudence or by conscience, have remained;
And that is very good, for I have things
To tell you: things that are not words alone—
Which are the ghosts of things—but something firmer.
“First, would I have you know, for every gift
Or sacrifice, there are—or there may be—
Two kinds of gratitude: the sudden kind
We feel for what we take, the larger kind
We feel for what we give. Once we have learned
As much as this, we know the truth has been
Told over to the world a thousand times;—
But we have had no ears to listen yet
For more than fragments of it: we have heard
A murmur now and then, and echo here
And there, and we have made great music of it;
And we have made innumerable books
To please the Unknown God. Time throws away
Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows
No death denies not one: the books all count,
The songs all count; and yet God’s music has
No modes, his language has no adjectives.”
“You may be right, you may be wrong,” said I;
“But what has this that you are saying now—
This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk—
To do with you and me?” The Captain raised
His hand and held it westward, where a patched
And unwashed attic-window filtered in
What barren light could reach us, and then said,
With a suave, complacent resonance: “There shines
The sun. Behold it. We go round and round,
And wisdom comes to us with every whirl
We count throughout the circuit. We may say
The child is born, the boy becomes a man,
The man does this and that, and the man goes,—
But having said it we have not said much,
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Not very much. Do I fancy, or you think,
That it will be the end of anything
When I am gone? There was a soldier once
Who fought one fight and in that fight fell dead.
Sad friends went after, and they brought him home
And had a brass band at his funeral,
As you should have at mine; and after that
A few remembered him. But he was dead,
They said, and they should have their friend no more.—
However, there was once a starveling child—
A ragged-vested little incubus,
Born to be cuffed and frighted out of all
Capacity for childhood’s happiness—
Who started out one day, quite suddenly,
To drown himself. He ran away from home,
Across the clover-fields and through the woods,
And waited on a rock above a stream,
Just like a kingfisher. He might have dived,
Or jumped, or he might not; but anyhow,
There came along a man who looked at him
With such an unexpected friendliness,
And talked with him in such a common way,
That life grew marvelously different:
What he had lately known for sullen trunks
And branches, and a world of tedious leaves,
Was all transmuted; a faint forest wind
That once had made the loneliest of all
Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music;
And water that had called him once to death
Now seemed a flowing glory. And that man,
Born to go down a soldier, did this thing.
Not much to do? Not very much, I grant you:
Good occupation for a sonneteer,
Or for a clown, or for a clergyman,
But small work for a soldier. By the way,
When you are weary sometimes of your own
Utility, I wonder if you find
Occasional great comfort pondering
What power a man has in him to put forth?
‘Of all the many marvelous things that are,
Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’
Said Sophocles; and he lived long ago;
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‘And earth, unending ancient of the gods
He furrows; and the ploughs go back and forth,
Turning the broken mould, year after year.’…
“I turned a little furrow of my own
Once on a time, and everybody laughed—
As I laughed afterwards; and I doubt not
The First Intelligence, which we have drawn
In our competitive humility
As if it went forever on two legs,
Had some diversion of it: I believe
God’s humor is the music of the spheres—
But even as we draft omnipotence
Itself to our own image, we pervert
The courage of an infinite ideal
To finite resignation. You have made
The cement of your churches out of tears
And ashes, and the fabric will not stand:
The shifted walls that you have coaxed and shored
So long with unavailing compromise
Will crumble down to dust and blow away,
And younger dust will follow after them;
Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled
First atom of the least that ever flew
Shall be by man defrauded of the touch
God thrilled it with to make a dream for man
When Science was unborn. And after time,
When we have earned our spiritual ears,
And art’s commiseration of the truth
No longer glorifies the singing beast,
Or venerates the clinquant charlatan,—
Then shall at last come ringing through the sun,
Through time, through flesh, a music that is true.
For wisdom is that music, and all joy
That wisdom:—you may counterfeit, you think,
The burden of it in a thousand ways;
But as the bitterness that loads your tears
Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom,
The penance, and the woeful pride you keep,
Make bitterness your buoyance of the world.
And at the fairest and the frenziedest
Alike of your God-fearing festivals,
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You so compound the truth to pamper fear
That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith
You clamor for the food that shadows eat.
You call it rapture or deliverance,—
Passion or exaltation, or what most
The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness
Lives in it yet: you quiver and you clutch
For something larger, something unfulfilled,
Some wiser kind of joy that you shall have
Never, until you learn to laugh with God.”
And with a calm Socratic patronage,
At once half sombre and half humorous,
The Captain reverently twirled his thumbs
And fixed his eyes on something far away;
Then, with a gradual gaze, conclusive, shrewd,
And at the moment unendurable
For sheer beneficence, he looked at me.
“But the brass band?” I said, not quite at ease
With altruism yet.—He made a sort
Of reminiscent little inward noise,
Midway between a chuckle and a laugh,
And that was all his answer: not a word
Of explanation or suggestion came
From those tight-smiling lips. And when I left,
I wondered, as I trod the creaking snow
And had the world-wide air to breathe again,—
Though I had seen the tremor of his mouth
And honored the endurance of his hand—
Whether or not, securely closeted
Up there in the stived haven of his den,
The man sat laughing at me; and I felt
My teeth grind hard together with a quaint
Revulsion—as I recognize it now—
Not only for my Captain, but as well
For every smug-faced failure on God’s earth;
Albeit I could swear, at the same time,
That there were tears in the old fellow’s eyes.
I question if in tremors or in tears
There be more guidance to man’s worthiness
Than—well, say in his prayers. But oftentimes
It humors us to think that we possess
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By some divine adjustment of our own
Particular shrewd cells, or something else,
What others, for untutored sympathy,
Go spirit-fishing more than half their lives
To catch—like cheerful sinners to catch faith;
And I have not a doubt but I assumed
Some egotistic attribute like this
When, cautiously, next morning I reduced
The fretful qualms of my novitiate,
For most part, to an undigested pride.
Only, I live convinced that I regret
This enterprise no more than I regret
My life; and I am glad that I was born.
That evening, at “The Chrysalis,” I found
The faces of my comrades all suffused
With what I chose then to denominate
Superfluous good feeling. In return,
They loaded me with titles of odd form
And unexemplified significance,
Like “Bellows-mender to Prince Æolus,”
“Pipe-filler to the Hoboscholiast,”
“Bread-fruit for the Non-Doing,” with one more
That I remember, and a dozen more
That I forget. I may have been disturbed,
I do not say that I was not annoyed,
But something of the same serenity
That fortified me later made me feel
For their skin-pricking arrows not so much
Of pain as of a vigorous defect
In this world’s archery. I might have tried,
With a flat facetiousness, to demonstrate
What they had only snapped at and thereby
Made out of my best evidence no more
Than comfortable food for their conceit;
But patient wisdom frowned on argument,
With a side nod for silence, and I smoked
A series of incurable dry pipes
While Morgan fiddled, with obnoxious care,
Things that I wished he wouldn’t. Killigrew,
Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass,
Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made
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Remarks. The learned Plunket made remarks.
It may have been for smoke that I cursed cats
That night, but I have rather to believe
As I lay turning, twisting, listening,
And wondering, between great sleepless yawns,
What possible satisfaction those dead leaves
Could find in sending shadows to my room
And swinging them like black rags on a line,
That I, with a forlorn clear-headedness
Was ekeing out probation. I had sinned
In fearing to believe what I believed,
And I was paying for it.—Whimsical,
You think,—factitious; but “there is no luck,
No fate, no fortune for us, but the old
Unswerving and inviolable price
Gets paid: God sells himself eternally,
But never gives a crust,” my friend had said;
And while I watched those leaves, and heard those cats,
And with half mad minuteness analyzed
The Captain’s attitude and then my own,
I felt at length as one who throws himself
Down restless on a couch when clouds are dark,
And shuts his eyes to find, when he wakes up
And opens them again, what seems at first
An unfamiliar sunlight in his room
And in his life—as if the child in him
Had laughed and let him see; and then I knew
Some prowling superfluity of child
In me had found the child in Captain Craig
And let the sunlight reach him. While I slept,
My thought reshaped itself to friendly dreams,
And in the morning it was with me still.
Through March and shifting April to the time
When winter first becomes a memory
My friend the Captain—to my other friend’s
Incredulous regret that such as he
Should ever get the talons of his talk
So fixed in my unfledged credulity—
Kept up the peroration of his life,
Not yielding at a threshold, nor, I think,
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Too often on the stairs. He made me laugh
Sometimes, and then again he made me weep
Almost; for I had insufficiency
Enough in me to make me know the truth
Within the jest, and I could feel it there
As well as if it were the folded note
I felt between my fingers. I had said
Before that I should have to go away
And leave him for the season; and his eyes
Had shone with well-becoming interest
At that intelligence. There was no mist
In them that I remember; but I marked
An unmistakable self-questioning
And a reticence of unassumed regret.
The two together made anxiety—
Not selfishness, I ventured. I should see
No more of him for six or seven months,
And I was there to tell him as I might
What humorous provision we had made
For keeping him locked up in Tilbury Town.
That finished—with a few more commonplace
Prosaics on the certified event
Of my return to find him young again—
I left him neither vexed, I thought, with us,
Nor over much at odds with destiny.
At any rate, save always for a look
That I had seen too often to mistake
Or to forget, he gave no other sign.
That train began to move; and as it moved,
I felt a comfortable sudden change
All over and inside. Partly it seemed
As if the strings of me had all at once
Gone down a tone or two; and even though
It made me scowl to think so trivial
A touch had owned the strength to tighten them,
It made me laugh to think that I was free.
But free from what—when I began to turn
The question round—was more than I could say:
I was no longer vexed with Killigrew,
Nor more was I possessed with Captain Craig;
But I was eased of some restraint, I thought,
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Not qualified by those amenities,
And I should have to search the matter down;
For I was young, and I was very keen.
So I began to smoke a bad cigar
That Plunket, in his love, had given me
The night before; and as I smoked I watched
The flying mirrors for a mile or so,
Till to the changing glimpse, now sharp, now faint,
They gave me of the woodland over west,
A gleam of long-forgotten strenuous years
Came back, when we were Red Men on the trail,
With Morgan for the big chief Wocky-Bocky;
And yawning out of that I set myself
To face again the loud monotonous ride
That lay before me like a vista drawn
Of bag-racks to the fabled end of things.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson,
631:The Book Of Annandale
Partly to think, more to be left alone,
George Annandale said something to his friends—
A word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough
To suit their funeral gaze—and went upstairs;
And there, in the one room that he could call
His own, he found a sort of meaningless
Annoyance in the mute familiar things
That filled it; for the grate’s monotonous gleam
Was not the gleam that he had known before,
The books were not the books that used to be,
The place was not the place. There was a lack
Of something; and the certitude of death
Itself, as with a furtive questioning,
Hovered, and he could not yet understand.
He knew that she was gone—there was no need
Of any argued proof to tell him that,
For they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the leaves and snow; and still there was
A doubt, a pitiless doubt, a plunging doubt,
That struck him, and upstartled when it struck,
The vision, the old thought in him. There was
A lack, and one that wrenched him; but it was
Not that—not that. There was a present sense
Of something indeterminably near—
The soul-clutch of a prescient emptiness
That would not be foreboding. And if not,
What then?—or was it anything at all?
Yes, it was something—it was everything—
But what was everything? or anything?
Tired of time, bewildered, he sat down;
But in his chair he kept on wondering
That he should feel so desolately strange
And yet—for all he knew that he had lost
More of the world than most men ever win—
So curiously calm. And he was left
Unanswered and unsatisfied: there came
No clearer meaning to him than had come
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Before; the old abstraction was the best
That he could find, the farthest he could go;
To that was no beginning and no end—
No end that he could reach. So he must learn
To live the surest and the largest life
Attainable in him, would he divine
The meaning of the dream and of the words
That he had written, without knowing why,
On sheets that he had bound up like a book
And covered with red leather. There it was—
There in his desk, the record he had made,
The spiritual plaything of his life:
There were the words no eyes had ever seen
Save his; there were the words that were not made
For glory or for gold. The pretty wife
Whom he had loved and lost had not so much
As heard of them. They were not made for her.
His love had been so much the life of her,
And hers had been so much the life of him,
That any wayward phrasing on his part
Would have had no moment. Neither had lived enough
To know the book, albeit one of them
Had grown enough to write it. There it was,
However, though he knew not why it was:
There was the book, but it was not for her,
For she was dead. And yet, there was the book.
Thus would his fancy circle out and out,
And out and in again, till he would make
As if with a large freedom to crush down
Those under-thoughts. He covered with his hands
His tired eyes, and waited: he could hear—
Or partly feel and hear, mechanically—
The sound of talk, with now and then the steps
And skirts of some one scudding on the stairs,
Forgetful of the nerveless funeral feet
That she had brought with her; and more than once
There came to him a call as of a voice—
A voice of love returning—but not hers.
Whose he knew not, nor dreamed; nor did he know,
Nor did he dream, in his blurred loneliness
Of thought, what all the rest might think of him.
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For it had come at last, and she was gone
With all the vanished women of old time,—
And she was never coming back again.
Yes, they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the frozen leaves and the cold earth,
Under the leaves and snow. The flickering week,
The sharp and certain day, and the long drowse
Were over, and the man was left alone.
He knew the loss—therefore it puzzled him
That he should sit so long there as he did,
And bring the whole thing back—the love, the trust,
The pallor, the poor face, and the faint way
She last had looked at him—and yet not weep,
Or even choose to look about the room
To see how sad it was; and once or twice
He winked and pinched his eyes against the flame
And hoped there might be tears. But hope was all,
And all to him was nothing: he was lost.
And yet he was not lost: he was astray—
Out of his life and in another life;
And in the stillness of this other life
He wondered and he drowsed. He wondered when
It was, and wondered if it ever was
On earth that he had known the other face—
The searching face, the eloquent, strange face—
That with a sightless beauty looked at him
And with a speechless promise uttered words
That were not the world’s words, or any kind
That he had known before. What was it, then?
What was it held him—fascinated him?
Why should he not be human? He could sigh,
And he could even groan,—but what of that?
There was no grief left in him. Was he glad?
Yet how could he be glad, or reconciled,
Or anything but wretched and undone?
How could he be so frigid and inert—
So like a man with water in his veins
Where blood had been a little while before?
How could he sit shut in there like a snail?
What ailed him? What was on him? Was he glad?
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Over and over again the question came,
Unanswered and unchanged,—and there he was.
But what in heaven’s name did it all mean?
If he had lived as other men had lived,
If home had ever shown itself to be
The counterfeit that others had called home,
Then to this undivined resource of his
There were some key; but now … Philosophy?
Yes, he could reason in a kind of way
That he was glad for Miriam’s release—
Much as he might be glad to see his friends
Laid out around him with their grave-clothes on,
And this life done for them; but something else
There was that foundered reason, overwhelmed it,
And with a chilled, intuitive rebuff
Beat back the self-cajoling sophistries
That his half-tutored thought would half-project.
What was it, then? Had he become transformed
And hardened through long watches and long grief
Into a loveless, feelingless dead thing
That brooded like a man, breathed like a man,—
Did everything but ache? And was a day
To come some time when feeling should return
Forever to drive off that other face—
The lineless, indistinguishable face—
That once had thrilled itself between his own
And hers there on the pillow,—and again
Between him and the coffin-lid had flashed
Like fate before it closed,—and at the last
Had come, as it should seem, to stay with him,
Bidden or not? He were a stranger then,
Foredrowsed awhile by some deceiving draught
Of poppied anguish, to the covert grief
And the stark loneliness that waited him,
And for the time were cursedly endowed
With a dull trust that shammed indifference
To knowing there would be no touch again
Of her small hand on his, no silencing
Of her quick lips on his, no feminine
Completeness and love-fragrance in the house,
No sound of some one singing any more,
278
No smoothing of slow fingers on his hair,
No shimmer of pink slippers on brown tiles.
But there was nothing, nothing, in all that:
He had not fooled himself so much as that;
He might be dreaming or he might be sick,
But not like that. There was no place for fear,
No reason for remorse. There was the book
That he had made, though.… It might be the book;
Perhaps he might find something in the book;
But no, there could be nothing there at all—
He knew it word for word; but what it meant—
He was not sure that he had written it
For what it meant; and he was not quite sure
That he had written it;—more likely it
Was all a paper ghost.… But the dead wife
Was real: he knew all that, for he had been
To see them bury her; and he had seen
The flowers and the snow and the stripped limbs
Of trees; and he had heard the preacher pray;
And he was back again, and he was glad.
Was he a brute? No, he was not a brute:
He was a man—like any other man:
He had loved and married his wife Miriam,
They had lived a little while in paradise
And she was gone; and that was all of it.
But no, not all of it—not all of it:
There was the book again; something in that
Pursued him, overpowered him, put out
The futile strength of all his whys and wheres,
And left him unintelligibly numb—
Too numb to care for anything but rest.
It must have been a curious kind of book
That he had made it: it was a drowsy book
At any rate. The very thought of it
Was like the taste of some impossible drink—
A taste that had no taste, but for all that
Had mixed with it a strange thought-cordial,
So potent that it somehow killed in him
The ultimate need of doubting any more—
Of asking any more. Did he but live
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The life that he must live, there were no more
To seek.—The rest of it was on the way.
Still there was nothing, nothing, in all this—
Nothing that he cared now to reconcile
With reason or with sorrow. All he knew
For certain was that he was tired out:
His flesh was heavy and his blood beat small;
Something supreme had been wrenched out of him
As if to make vague room for something else.
He had been through too much. Yes, he would stay
There where he was and rest.—And there he stayed;
The daylight became twilight, and he stayed;
The flame and the face faded, and he slept.
And they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the tight-screwed lid of a long box,
Under the earth, under the leaves and snow.
II
Look where she would, feed conscience how she might,
There was but one way now for Damaris—
One straight way that was hers, hers to defend,
At hand, imperious. But the nearness of it,
The flesh-bewildering simplicity,
And the plain strangeness of it, thrilled again
That wretched little quivering single string
Which yielded not, but held her to the place
Where now for five triumphant years had slept
The flameless dust of Argan.—He was gone,
The good man she had married long ago;
And she had lived, and living she had learned,
And surely there was nothing to regret:
Much happiness had been for each of them,
And they had been like lovers to the last:
And after that, and long, long after that,
Her tears had washed out more of widowed grief
Than smiles had ever told of other joy.—
But could she, looking back, find anything
That should return to her in the new time,
And with relentless magic uncreate
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This temple of new love where she had thrown
Dead sorrow on the altar of new life?
Only one thing, only one thread was left;
When she broke that, when reason snapped it off,
And once for all, baffled, the grave let go
The trivial hideous hold it had on her,—
Then she were free, free to be what she would,
Free to be what she was.—And yet she stayed,
Leashed, as it were, and with a cobweb strand,
Close to a tombstone—maybe to starve there.
But why to starve? And why stay there at all?
Why not make one good leap and then be done
Forever and at once with Argan’s ghost
And all such outworn churchyard servitude?
For it was Argan’s ghost that held the string,
And her sick fancy that held Argan’s ghost—
Held it and pitied it. She laughed, almost,
There for the moment; but her strained eyes filled
With tears, and she was angry for those tears—
Angry at first, then proud, then sorry for them.
So she grew calm; and after a vain chase
For thoughts more vain, she questioned of herself
What measure of primeval doubts and fears
Were still to be gone through that she might win
Persuasion of her strength and of herself
To be what she could see that she must be,
No matter where the ghost was.—And the more
She lived, the more she came to recognize
That something out of her thrilled ignorance
Was luminously, proudly being born,
And thereby proving, thought by forward thought,
The prowess of its image; and she learned
At length to look right on to the long days
Before her without fearing. She could watch
The coming course of them as if they were
No more than birds, that slowly, silently,
And irretrievably should wing themselves
Uncounted out of sight. And when he came
Again, she might be free—she would be free.
Else, when he looked at her she must look down,
Defeated, and malignly dispossessed
281
Of what was hers to prove and in the proving
Wisely to consecrate. And if the plague
Of that perverse defeat should come to be—
If at that sickening end she were to find
Herself to be the same poor prisoner
That he had found at first—then she must lose
All sight and sound of him, she must abjure
All possible thought of him; for he would go
So far and for so long from her that love—
Yes, even a love like his, exiled enough,
Might for another’s touch be born again—
Born to be lost and starved for and not found;
Or, at the next, the second wretchedest,
It might go mutely flickering down and out,
And on some incomplete and piteous day,
Some perilous day to come, she might at last
Learn, with a noxious freedom, what it is
To be at peace with ghosts. Then were the blow
Thrice deadlier than any kind of death
Could ever be: to know that she had won
The truth too late—there were the dregs indeed
Of wisdom, and of love the final thrust
Unmerciful; and there where now did lie
So plain before her the straight radiance
Of what was her appointed way to take,
Were only the bleak ruts of an old road
That stretched ahead and faded and lay far
Through deserts of unconscionable years.
But vampire thoughts like these confessed the doubt
That love denied; and once, if never again,
They should be turned away. They might come back—
More craftily, perchance, they might come back—
And with a spirit-thirst insatiable
Finish the strength of her; but now, today
She would have none of them. She knew that love
Was true, that he was true, that she was true;
And should a death-bed snare that she had made
So long ago be stretched inexorably
Through all her life, only to be unspun
With her last breathing? And were bats and threads,
Accursedly devised with watered gules,
282
To be Love’s heraldry? What were it worth
To live and to find out that life were life
But for an unrequited incubus
Of outlawed shame that would not be thrown down
Till she had thrown down fear and overcome
The woman that was yet so much of her
That she might yet go mad? What were it worth
To live, to linger, and to be condemned
In her submission to a common thought
That clogged itself and made of its first faith
Its last impediment? What augured it,
Now in this quick beginning of new life,
To clutch the sunlight and be feeling back,
Back with a scared fantastic fearfulness,
To touch, not knowing why, the vexed-up ghost
Of what was gone?
Yes, there was Argan’s face,
Pallid and pinched and ruinously marked
With big pathetic bones; there were his eyes,
Quiet and large, fixed wistfully on hers;
And there, close-pressed again within her own,
Quivered his cold thin fingers. And, ah! yes,
There were the words, those dying words again,
And hers that answered when she promised him.
Promised him? … yes. And had she known the truth
Of what she felt that he should ask her that,
And had she known the love that was to be,
God knew that she could not have told him then.
But then she knew it not, nor thought of it;
There was no need of it; nor was there need
Of any problematical support
Whereto to cling while she convinced herself
That love’s intuitive utility,
Inexorably merciful, had proved
That what was human was unpermanent
And what was flesh was ashes. She had told
Him then that she would love no other man,
That there was not another man on earth
Whom she could ever love, or who could make
So much as a love thought go through her brain;
And he had smiled. And just before he died
283
His lips had made as if to say something—
Something that passed unwhispered with his breath,
Out of her reach, out of all quest of it.
And then, could she have known enough to know
The meaning of her grief, the folly of it,
The faithlessness and the proud anguish of it,
There might be now no threads to punish her,
No vampire thoughts to suck the coward blood,
The life, the very soul of her.
Yes, Yes,
They might come back.… But why should they come back?
Why was it she had suffered? Why had she
Struggled and grown these years to demonstrate
That close without those hovering clouds of gloom
And through them here and there forever gleamed
The Light itself, the life, the love, the glory,
Which was of its own radiance good proof
That all the rest was darkness and blind sight?
And who was she? The woman she had known—
The woman she had petted and called “I”—
The woman she had pitied, and at last
Commiserated for the most abject
And persecuted of all womankind,—
Could it be she that had sought out the way
To measure and thereby to quench in her
The woman’s fear—the fear of her not fearing?
A nervous little laugh that lost itself,
Like logic in a dream, fluttered her thoughts
An instant there that ever she should ask
What she might then have told so easily—
So easily that Annandale had frowned,
Had he been given wholly to be told
The truth of what had never been before
So passionately, so inevitably
Confessed.
For she could see from where she sat
The sheets that he had bound up like a book
And covered with red leather; and her eyes
Could see between the pages of the book,
Though her eyes, like them, were closed. And she could read
284
As well as if she had them in her hand,
What he had written on them long ago,—
Six years ago, when he was waiting for her.
She might as well have said that she could see
The man himself, as once he would have looked
Had she been there to watch him while he wrote
Those words, and all for her.… For her whose face
Had flashed itself, prophetic and unseen,
But not unspirited, between the life
That would have been without her and the life
That he had gathered up like frozen roots
Out of a grave-clod lying at his feet,
Unconsciously, and as unconsciously
Transplanted and revived. He did not know
The kind of life that he had found, nor did
He doubt, not knowing it; but well he knew
That it was life—new life, and that the old
Might then with unimprisoned wings go free,
Onward and all along to its own light,
Through the appointed shadow.
While she gazed
Upon it there she felt within herself
The growing of a newer consciousness—
The pride of something fairer than her first
Outclamoring of interdicted thought
Had ever quite foretold; and all at once
There quivered and requivered through her flesh,
Like music, like the sound of an old song,
Triumphant, love-remembered murmurings
Of what for passion’s innocence had been
Too mightily, too perilously hers,
Ever to be reclaimed and realized
Until today. Today she could throw off
The burden that had held her down so long,
And she could stand upright, and she could see
The way to take, with eyes that had in them
No gleam but of the spirit. Day or night,
No matter; she could see what was to see—
All that had been till now shut out from her,
The service, the fulfillment, and the truth,
And thus the cruel wiseness of it all.
285
So Damaris, more like than anything
To one long prisoned in a twilight cave
With hovering bats for all companionship,
And after time set free to fight the sun,
Laughed out, so glad she was to recognize
The test of what had been, through all her folly,
The courage of her conscience; for she knew,
Now on a late-flushed autumn afternoon
That else had been too bodeful of dead things
To be endured with aught but the same old
Inert, self-contradicted martyrdom
Which she had known so long, that she could look
Right forward through the years, nor any more
Shrink with a cringing prescience to behold
The glitter of dead summer on the grass,
Or the brown-glimmered crimson of still trees
Across the intervale where flashed along,
Black-silvered, the cold river. She had found,
As if by some transcendent freakishness
Of reason, the glad life that she had sought
Where naught but obvious clouds could ever be—
Clouds to put out the sunlight from her eyes,
And to put out the love-light from her soul.
But they were gone—now they were all gone;
And with a whimsied pathos, like the mist
Of grief that clings to new-found happiness
Hard wrought, she might have pity for the small
Defeated quest of them that brushed her sight
Like flying lint—lint that had once been thread.…
Yes, like an anodyne, the voice of him,
There were the words that he had made for her,
For her alone. The more she thought of them
The more she lived them, and the more she knew
The life-grip and the pulse of warm strength in them.
They were the first and last of words to her,
And there was in them a far questioning
That had for long been variously at work,
Divinely and elusively at work,
With her, and with the grace that had been hers;
They were eternal words, and they diffused
A flame of meaning that men’s lexicons
286
Had never kindled; they were choral words
That harmonized with love’s enduring chords
Like wisdom with release; triumphant words
That rang like elemental orisons
Through ages out of ages; words that fed
Love’s hunger in the spirit; words that smote;
Thrilled words that echoed, and barbed words that clung;—
And every one of them was like a friend
Whose obstinate fidelity, well tried,
Had found at last and irresistibly
The way to her close conscience, and thereby
Revealed the unsubstantial Nemesis
That she had clutched and shuddered at so long;
And every one of them was like a real
And ringing voice, clear toned and absolute,
But of a love-subdued authority
That uttered thrice the plain significance
Of what had else been generously vague
And indolently true. It may have been
The triumph and the magic of the soul,
Unspeakably revealed, that finally
Had reconciled the grim probationing
Of wisdom with unalterable faith,
But she could feel—not knowing what it was,
For the sheer freedom of it—a new joy
That humanized the latent wizardry
Of his prophetic voice and put for it
The man within the music.
So it came
To pass, like many a long-compelled emprise
That with its first accomplishment almost
Annihilates its own severity,
That she could find, whenever she might look,
The certified achievement of a love
That had endured, self-guarded and supreme,
To the glad end of all that wavering;
And she could see that now the flickering world
Of autumn was awake with sudden bloom,
New-born, perforce, of a slow bourgeoning.
And she had found what more than half had been
The grave-deluded, flesh-bewildered fear
287
Which men and women struggle to call faith,
To be the paid progression to an end
Whereat she knew the foresight and the strength
To glorify the gift of what was hers,
To vindicate the truth of what she was.
And had it come to her so suddenly?
There was a pity and a weariness
In asking that, and a great needlessness;
For now there were no wretched quivering strings
That held her to the churchyard any more:
There were no thoughts that flapped themselves like bats
Around her any more. The shield of love
Was clean, and she had paid enough to learn
How it had always been so. And the truth,
Like silence after some far victory,
Had come to her, and she had found it out
As if it were a vision, a thing born
So suddenly!—just as a flower is born,
Or as a world is born—so suddenly.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson,

IN CHAPTERS [150/245]



  122 Integral Yoga
   14 Philosophy
   11 Christianity
   7 Psychology
   5 Occultism
   2 Yoga
   2 Theosophy
   2 Poetry
   2 Education
   1 Sufism
   1 Hinduism
   1 Alchemy


  152 Sri Aurobindo
   29 The Mother
   26 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   10 Satprem
   8 A B Purani
   6 Plotinus
   5 Jordan Peterson
   4 Saint Augustine of Hippo
   3 James George Frazer
   3 Carl Jung
   3 Aldous Huxley
   2 Swami Vivekananda
   2 Plato
   2 Lucretius
   2 George Van Vrekhem
   2 Friedrich Nietzsche


   34 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   19 The Life Divine
   19 Record of Yoga
   14 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   9 The Human Cycle
   8 Letters On Yoga IV
   8 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   8 Essays On The Gita
   6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
   6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   5 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
   5 Maps of Meaning
   5 Isha Upanishad
   5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   4 Savitri
   4 Letters On Yoga II
   4 Letters On Yoga I
   4 Essays Divine And Human
   4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
   4 City of God
   4 Agenda Vol 01
   3 The Perennial Philosophy
   3 The Golden Bough
   3 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
   3 Questions And Answers 1956
   3 Questions And Answers 1953
   3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
   3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
   3 Agenda Vol 02
   2 Words Of The Mother II
   2 Vedic and Philological Studies
   2 Twilight of the Idols
   2 The Problems of Philosophy
   2 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
   2 Preparing for the Miraculous
   2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
   2 On Education
   2 Of The Nature Of Things
   2 Letters On Poetry And Art


0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Greatness is magnetic and in a sense contagious. Wherever manifested, greatness is claimed by humanity as something that reveals the possibility of the race. The highest utility of greatness is not merely to attract us but to inspire us to follow it and rise to our own highest spiritual stature. To the majority of men Truth remains abstract, impersonal and far unless it is seen and felt concretely in a human personality. A man never knows a truth actively except through a person and by embodying it in his own personality. Some glimpse of the Truth-Consciousness which Sri Aurobindo embodied may be caught in these Evening Talks.
   ***

0.01 - Life and Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  HERE are two necessities of Nature's workings which seem always to intervene in the greater forms of human activity, whether these belong to our ordinary fields of movement or seek those exceptional spheres and fulfilments which appear to us high and divine. Every such form tends towards a harmonised complexity and totality which again breaks apart into various channels of special effort and tendency, only to unite once more in a larger and more puissant synthesis. Secondly, development into forms is an imperative rule of effective manifestation; yet all truth and practice too strictly formulated becomes old and loses much, if not all, of its virtue; it must be constantly renovated by fresh streams of the spirit revivifying the dead or dying vehicle and changing it, if it is to acquire a new life. To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material immortality. We are in an age, full of the throes of travail, when all forms of thought and activity that have in themselves any strong power of utility or any secret virtue of persistence are being subjected to a supreme test and given their opportunity of rebirth. The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence. Indian Yoga, in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of humanity. The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the secret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and is seeking its place in the future sum of living human powers and utilities. But it has first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface
  The Conditions of the Synthesis
  --
  God. Therefore we see in India that a sharp incompatibility has been created between life in the world and spiritual growth and perfection, and although the tradition and ideal of a victorious harmony between the inner attraction and the outer demand remains, it is little or else very imperfectly exemplified. In fact, when a man turns his vision and energy inward and enters on the path of Yoga, he is popularly supposed to be lost inevitably to the great stream of our collective existence and the secular effort of humanity. So strongly has the idea prevailed, so much has it been emphasised by prevalent philosophies and religions that to escape from life is now commonly considered as not only the necessary condition, but the general object of Yoga. No synthesis of Yoga can be satisfying which does not, in its aim, reunite God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life or, in its method, not only permit but favour the harmony of our inner and outer activities and experiences in the divine consummation of both. For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower. To avoid the life which is given him for the realisation of that possibility, can never be either the indispensable condition or the whole and ultimate object of his supreme endeavour or of his most powerful means of self-fulfilment. It can only be a temporary necessity under certain conditions or a specialised extreme effort imposed on the individual so as to prepare a greater general possibility for the race. The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious
  Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: "All life is Yoga."

0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Yoga, a specialising and separative tendency which, like all things in Nature, had its justifying and even imperative utility and we seek a synthesis of the specialised aims and methods which have, in consequence, come into being.
  But in order that we may be wisely guided in our effort, we must know, first, the general principle and purpose underlying this separative impulse and, next, the particular utilities upon which the method of each school of Yoga is founded. For the general principle we must interrogate the universal workings of Nature herself, recognising in her no merely specious and illusive activity of a distorting Maya, but the cosmic energy and working of God Himself in His universal being formulating and inspired by a vast, an infinite and yet a minutely selective
  --
  Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there for a great utility; they too demand the divine realisation of their possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment. The great part assigned to this element in the universal scheme is powerfully emphasised by the catholic wisdom of the Upanishads. "As the spokes of a wheel in its nave, so in the Life-Energy is all established, the triple knowledge and the Sacrifice and the power of the strong and the purity of the wise. Under the control of the LifeEnergy is all this that is established in the triple heaven."2 It is therefore no integral Yoga that kills these vital energies, forces them into a nerveless quiescence or roots them out as the source
   annakos.a and pran.akos.a.

0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But by that very utility such men and the life they lead are condemned to be limited, irrationally conservative and earthbound. The customary routine, the customary institutions, the inherited or habitual forms of thought, - these things are the life-breath of their nostrils. They admit and jealously defend the changes compelled by the progressive mind in the past, but combat with equal zeal the changes that are being made by it in the present. For to the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. The old Semites who stoned the living prophets and adored their memories when dead, were the very incarnation of this instinctive and unintelligent principle in Nature. In the ancient Indian distinction between the once born and the twice born, it is to this material man that the former description can be applied. He does Nature's inferior works; he assures the basis for her higher activities; but not to him easily are opened the glories of her second birth.
  Yet he admits so much of spirituality as has been enforced on his customary ideas by the great religious outbursts of the past and he makes in his scheme of society a place, venerable though not often effective, for the priest or the learned theologian who can be trusted to provide him with a safe and ordinary spiritual pabulum. But to the man who would assert for himself the liberty of spiritual experience and the spiritual life, he assigns, if he admits him at all, not the vestment of the priest but the robe of the Sannyasin. Outside society let him exercise his dangerous freedom. So he may even serve as a human lightning-rod receiving the electricity of the Spirit and turning it away from the social edifice.
  --
  The utility of the compromise in the then actual state of the world cannot be doubted. It secured in India a society which lent itself to the preservation and the worship of spirituality, a country apart in which as in a fortress the highest spiritual ideal could maintain itself in its most absolute purity unoverpowered by the siege of the forces around it. But it was a compromise, not an absolute victory. The material life lost the divine impulse to growth, the spiritual preserved by isolation its height and purity, but sacrificed its full power and serviceableness to the world. Therefore, in the divine Providence the country of the Yogins and the Sannyasins has been forced into a strict and imperative contact with the very element it had rejected, the element of the progressive Mind, so that it might recover what was now wanting to it.
  We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God's intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others.
  Therefore from a concrete view of human life in its threefold potentialities we come to the same conclusion that we had drawn from an observation of Nature in her general workings and the three steps of her evolution. And we begin to perceive a complete aim for our synthesis of Yoga.

0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine perfection embraces the realisation of ourselves in being, in life and in love through others as well as through ourselves, the extension of our liberty and of its results in others would be the inevitable outcome as well as the broadest utility of our liberation and perfection. And the constant and inherent attempt of such an extension would be towards its increasing and ultimately complete generalisation in mankind.
  The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect

0.06 - INTRODUCTION, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
  understand, and of great practical utility, comparable to those in the first book of
  the Ascent which deal with the active purgation of the desires of sense.

01.03 - Rationalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   What is Reason, the faculty that is said to be the proud privilege of man, the sovereign instrument he alone possesses for the purpose of knowing? What is the value of knowledge that Reason gives? For it is the manner of knowing, the particular faculty or instrument by which we know, that determines the nature and content of knowledge. Reason is the collecting of available sense-perceptions and a certain mode of working upon them. It has three component elements that have been defined as observation, classification and deduction. Now, the very composition of Reason shows that it cannot be a perfect instrument of knowledge; the limitations are the inherent limitations of the component elements. As regards observation there is a two-fold limitation. First, observation is a relative term and variable quantity. One observes through the prism of one's own observing faculty, through the bias of one's own personality and no two persons can have absolutely the same manner of observation. So Science has recognised the necessity of personal equation and has created an imaginary observer, a "mean man" as the standard of reference. And this already takes us far away from the truth, from the reality. Secondly, observation is limited by its scope. All the facts of the world, all sense-perceptions possible and actual cannot be included within any observation however large, however collective it may be. We have to go always upon a limited amount of data, we are able to construct only a partial and sketchy view of the surface of existence. And then it is these few and doubtful facts that Reason seeks to arrange and classify. That classification may hold good for certain immediate ends, for a temporary understanding of the world and its forces, either in order to satisfy our curiosity or to gain some practical utility. For when we want to consider the world only in its immediate relation to us, a few and even doubtful facts are sufficient the more immediate the relation, the more immaterial the doubtfulness and insufficiency of facts. We may quite confidently go a step in darkness, but to walk a mile we do require light and certainty. Our scientific classification has a background of uncertainty, if not, of falsity; and our deduction also, even while correct within a very narrow range of space and time, cannot escape the fundamental vices of observation and classification upon which it is based.
   It might be said, however, that the guarantee or sanction of Reason does not lie in the extent of its application, nor can its subjective nature (or ego-centric predication, as philosophers would term it) vitiate the validity of its conclusions. There is, in fact, an inherent unity and harmony between Reason and Reality. If we know a little of Reality, we know the whole; if we know the subjective, we know also the objective. As in the part, so in the whole; as it is within, so it is without. If you say that I will die, you need not wait for my actual death to have the proof of your statement. The generalising power inherent in Reason is the guarantee of the certitude to which it leads. Reason is valid, as it does not betray us. If it were such as anti-intellectuals make it out to be, we would be making nothing but false steps, would always remain entangled in contradictions. The very success of Reason is proof of its being a reliable and perfect instrument for the knowledge of Truth and Reality. It is beside the mark to prove otherwise, simply by analysing the nature of Reason and showing the fundamental deficiencies of that nature. It is rather to the credit of Reason that being as it is, it is none the less a successful and trustworthy agent.

01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  And the harsh utility of death and tears,
  Acquiescing in the gradual steps of Time,

01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Indeed, it would be interesting to compare and contrast the Eastern and Western approach to Divine Love, the Christian and the Vaishnava, for example. Indian spirituality, whatever its outer form or credal formulation, has always a background of utter unity. This unity, again, is threefold or triune and is expressed in those great Upanishadic phrases,mahvkyas,(1) the transcendental unity: the One alone exists, there is nothing else than theOneekamevdvityam; (2) the cosmic unity: all existence is one, whatever exists is that One, thereare no separate existences:sarvam khalvidam brahma neha nnsti kincaa; (3) That One is I, you too are that One:so' ham, tattvamasi; this may be called the individual unity. As I have said, all spiritual experiences in India, of whatever school or line, take for granted or are fundamentally based upon this sense of absolute unity or identity. Schools of dualism or pluralism, who do not apparently admit in their tenets this extreme monism, are still permeated in many ways with that sense and in some form or other take cognizance of the truth of it. The Christian doctrine too says indeed, 'I and my Father in Heaven are one', but this is not identity, but union; besides, the human soul is not admitted into this identity, nor the world soul. The world, we have seen, according to the Christian discipline has to be altogether abandoned, negatived, as we go inward and upward towards our spiritual status reflecting the divine image in the divine company. It is a complete rejection, a cutting off and casting away of world and life. One extreme Vedantic path seems to follow a similar line, but there it is not really rejection, but a resolution, not the rejection of what is totally foreign and extraneous, but a resolution of the external into its inner and inmost substance, of the effect into its original cause. Brahman is in the world, Brahman is the world: the world has unrolled itself out of the Brahmansi, pravttiit has to be rolled back into its, cause and substance if it is to regain its pure nature (that is the process of nivitti). Likewise, the individual being in the world, "I", is the transcendent being itself and when it withdraws, it withdraws itself and the whole world with it and merges into the Absolute. Even the Maya of the Mayavadin, although it is viewed as something not inherent in Brahman but superimposed upon Brahman, still, has been accepted as a peculiar power of Brahman itself. The Christian doctrine keeps the individual being separate practically, as an associate or at the most as an image of God. The love for one's neighbour, charity, which the Christian discipline enjoins is one's love for one's kind, because of affinity of nature and quality: it does not dissolve the two into an integral unity and absolute identity, where we love because we are one, because we are the One. The highest culmination of love, the very basis of love, according to the Indian conception, is a transcendence of love, love trans-muted into Bliss. The Upanishad says, where one has become the utter unity, who loves whom? To explain further our point, we take two examples referred to in the book we are considering. The true Christian, it is said, loves the sinner too, he is permitted to dislike sin, for he has to reject it, but he must separate from sin the sinner and love him. Why? Because the sinner too can change and become his brother in spirit, one loves the sinner because there is the possibility of his changing and becoming a true Christian. It is why the orthodox Christian, even such an enlightened and holy person as this mediaeval Canon, considers the non-Christian, the non-baptised as impure and potentially and fundamentally sinners. That is also why the Church, the physical organisation, is worshipped as Christ's very body and outside the Church lies the pagan world which has neither religion nor true spirituality nor salvation. Of course, all this may be symbolic and it is symbolic in a sense. If Christianity is taken to mean true spirituality, and the Church is equated with the collective embodiment of that spirituality, all that is claimed on their behalf stands justified. But that is an ideal, a hypothetical standpoint and can hardly be borne out by facts. However, to come back to our subject, let us ow take the second example. Of Christ himself, it is said, he not only did not dislike or had any aversion for Judas, but that he positively loved the traitor with a true and sincere love. He knew that the man would betray him and even when he was betraying and had betrayed, the Son of Man continued to love him. It was no make-believe or sham or pretence. It was genuine, as genuine as anything can be. Now, why did he love his enemy? Because, it is said, the enemy is suffered by God to do the misdeed: he has been allowed to test the faith of the faithful, he too has his utility, he too is God's servant. And who knows even a Judas would not change in the end? Many who come to scoff do remain to pray. But it can be asked, 'Does God love Satan too in the same way?' The Indian conception which is basically Vedantic is different. There is only one reality, one truth which is viewed differently. Whether a thing is considered good or evil or neutral, essentially and truly, it is that One and nothing else. God's own self is everywhere and the sage makes no difference between the Brahmin and the cow and the elephant. It is his own self he finds in every person and every objectsarvabhtsthitam yo mm bhajati ekatvamsthitah"he has taken his stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings."2
   This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of manone level or mode of his being and consciousness purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that in the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised humanity.

01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   There is a beautiful quotation from the Chinese sage, Wu Ch'ng-n, regarding the doubtful utility of written Scriptures:
   "'Listen to this!' shouted Monkey. 'After all the trouble we had getting here from China, and after you specially ordered that we were to be given the scriptures, Ananda and Kasyapa made a fraudulent delivery of goods. They gave us blank copies to take away; I ask you, what is the good of that to us?' 'You needn't shout,' said the Buddha, smiling. 'As a matter of fact, it is such blank scrolls as these that are the true scriptures. But I quite see that the people of China are too foolish and ignorant to believe this, so there is nothing for it but to give them copies with some writing on.' "

01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The truth behind a credal religion is the aspiration towards the realization of the Divine, some ultimate reality that gives a permanent meaning and value to the human life, to the existence lodged in this 'sphere of sorrow' here below. Credal paraphernalia were necessary to express or buttress this core of spiritual truth when mankind, in the mass, had not attained a certain level of enlightenment in the mind and a certain degree of development in its life-relations. The modern age is modern precisely because it had attained to a necessary extent this mental enlightenment and this life development. So the scheme or scaffolding that was required in the past is no longer unavoidable and can have either no reality at all or only a modified utility.
   A modern people is a composite entity, especially with regard to its religious affiliation. Not religion, but culture is the basis of modern collective life, national or social. Culture includes in its grain that fineness of temperament which appreciates all truths behind all forms, even when there is a personal allegiance to one particular form.

0 1956-03-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   But the age of Communism, too, will pass. For Communism as it is preached is not constructive, it is a weapon to combat plutocracy. But when the battle is over and the armies are disbanded for want of employment, then Communism, having no more utility, will be transformed into something else that will express a higher truth.
   We know this truth, and we are working for it so that it may reign upon earth.

0 1958-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   It is precisely this state of perfect Harmony beyond all attacks that will become possible with the supramental realization. It is what all those who are destined for the supramental transformation will realize. The hostile forces know it well; in the supramental world, they will automatically disappear. Having no more utility, they will be dissolved without our having to do anything, simply through the presence of the supramental force. So now they are being unleashed with a fury in a negation of everything, everything.
   The link between the two worlds has not yet been built, but it is in the process of being built; this was the meaning of the experience of February 3 1958, 1: to build a link between the two worlds. For both worlds are indeed therenot one above the other, but within each other, in two different dimensions. Only, there is no communication between them; they overlap, as it were, without being connected. In the experience of February 3, I saw certain people from here (and from elsewhere) who already belong to the supramental world in a part of their being, but there is no connection, no link. But now the hour has come in universal history for this link to be built.

0 1960-11-05, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   I have so totally forgotten a whole world of incidents and events that when someone reminds me of something (the people around me have lived with me, so theyve seen things and remember them), I get the feeling that they are speaking of someone or something elseit no longer has any connection with me at all. And its the same with everything, whether near or far, which has brought to my consciousness whatever it had to bring, lost its utility anddisappeared. Only, these memories probably still have some utility for the others, so they remain. But for me its completely erased, absolutely, as if it had never been.
   Its the only way to forget.
   People often try to forget the past, but it doesnt work. Only once it has brought all the lessons that it was meant to bring into your life (its decanted, so you see the thing in its deepest truth), is its utility finished, and it disappears.
   I am convinced that at heart Karma is simply all the things we havent used in the true way that we drag along behind us If totally and clearly we have learned the lesson which each event or each circumstance ought to have brought, then its finished, its utility is gone and it dissolves.
   Its an interesting experience to follow and observe.

0 1960-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   So for persons who are severe and grave (there are two such examples here, but its not necessary to name them) There are beings who are grave, so serious, so sincere, who find it hypocritical; and when it borders on certain (how shall I put it?) vital excesses, they call it vice. There are others who have lived their entire lives in a yogic or religious discipline, and they see this as an obstacle, illusion, dirtyness (Mother makes a gesture of rejecting with disgust), but above all, its this terrible illusion that prevents you from nearing the Divine. And when I saw the way these two people here reacted, in fact, I said to myself, but you see, I FELT So strongly that this too is the Divine, it too is a way of getting out of something that has had its place in evolution, and still has a place, individually, for certain individuals. Naturally, if you remain there, you keep turning in circles; it will always be (not eternally, but indefinitely) the woman of my life, to take that as a symbol. But once youre out of it, you see that this had its place, its utilityit made you emerge from a kind of very animal-like wisdom and quietude that of the herd or of the being who sees no further than his daily round. It was necessary. We mustnt condemn it, we mustnt use harsh words.
   The mistake we make is to remain there too long, for if you spend your whole life in that, well, youll probably need many more lifetimes. But once the chance to get out of it comes, you can look at it with a smile and say, Yes, its really a sort of love for fiction!people love fiction, they want fiction, they need fiction! Otherwise its boring and all much too flat.
  --
   I know I told you that I had had a vision, but you didnt understand what I told you that day. It was a vision of the place you occupy in my being and of the work we have to do together. Thats really how it is. These things [that I tell you] have their utility and a concrete life, and I see them as very powerful for world transformation theyre what I call experiences (which is much more than an experience because it extends far beyond the individual)and its the same whether its said or not said: the Action is done. But the fact that it is said, that it is formulated here and preserved, is exclusively for you, because you were made for this and this is why we met.
   It doesnt need a lot of explaining.

0 1961-02-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The Darshan went rather well, much better than I was expecting; but the following two days it was difficult here [in the body]. Then one night (I dont remember which), I I cant say grumbled, but (it wasnt my body grumbling, it is very docile and doesnt protest), but I sometimes find that well, I found it a little exaggerated that day. All the same, I said, this may be demanding a bit too much of it! And then (Mother laughs) the whole night through, each time I awoke and looked (not with my physical eyes), I saw serpents! They were drawn up straight in a circlemagnificent cobras with white bellies, pearl gray backs and flecks of gold on their hoods! They surrounded me, watching, exactly as though they were saying, All the necessary energy is there! You neednt worry! So I concluded that this whole affair11 must have its utilityit cant be simply the bodys lack of plasticity and incapacity to receive. It must have a usefulness but what? I havent understood. Perhaps I will get the explanation later, once its over.
   And the next afternoon, I closed my eyes while I was bathing and what did I see but an enormous, magnificent cobra! It gazed at me, almost smiling, and stuck out its tongue! Good, I said, then everything is all right! (laughing) I have only to hold on.

0 1961-03-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I am determined to cure myself they told me it was incurable. The doctors poison you to cure you (as they poisoned our poor S.), and thats no cure! When they dont feel the need to show off in front of the patient, they openly acknowledge that it isnt at all sure that their medicines cure: they merely make you inoffensive to others! But I dont believe in it I dont believe in doctors, I dont believe in their remedies and I dont believe in their science (they are very useful, they have a great social utility, but for myself, I dont believe in it).
   I knew when I caught it: it was at the Playground.4 Certain people poisoned me with a mosquito bite the instant the mosquito bit me, I knew, because it so happens I am a little bit conscious! But I controlled it like this (gesture of holding the disease in abeyance and under control), so it couldnt stir. Probably it would never have stirred if I hadnt had that experience of January 24 and the body didnt need to be made ready. For the body to be ready, a host of things belonging to the dasyus, as the Vedas say, cant be stored inside it! These are very nasty little dasyus (laughing), they have to be chased away!

0 1961-12-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Because there comes a time when one perceives the entire universe in such a total and comprehensive way that, in truth, it is impossible to remove anything from it without disturbing everything. And going a couple of steps further, one knows for certain that things which shock us as contradictions of the Divine are simply things out of place. Each thing must be exactly in its place, and whats more, be supple enough, plastic enough, to admit into a harmonious, progressive organization all the new elements constantly being added to the manifest universe. The universe is in a perpetual movement of internal reorganization, and at the same time its growing: its becoming more and more complex, more and more complete, more and more integralindefinitely. And as the new elements manifest, the whole reorganization must be built on a new basis, and thus there isnt a second when ALL is not in perpetual movement. And when the movement is in accord with the divine order, its harmonious, so perfectly harmonious that its almost imperceptible. Now, if you descend from this consciousness towards a more external consciousness, you begin naturally to have a very precise feeling of what helps you attain the true consciousness and what bars the way or pulls you backwards or even fights against your progress. And so the perspective changes and you are obliged to say: this is divine or a help towards the Divine; and that goes against the Divine, its the Divines enemy. But this is a pragmatic standpoint, geared to action, to movement in material lifebecause you havent yet attained the consciousness surpassing all that; because you havent reached that inner perfection where you no longer have to fight, since you have gone beyond the field or the time or the utility of struggle. But before reaching that state in your consciousness and action, there is necessarily struggle; and if there is struggle, there is choice; and to choose, you need discrimination.
   (Mother remains silent)

0 1962-10-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   But I tell you, it also has an EXTRAORDINARY utility: it automatically renews all the energies. Actually, thats the true reason for sleep: to be able to enter that state. And thats why those who can enter it consciously in meditation need much less sleep. Much less. Its what enables the body to last: Sat. And whenever I have meditated with you, Ive always had a feeling of entering that state.
   Pure existence, outside of the Manifestation. It is wonderfully luminous, immobile, tranquil, and a sort of bliss devoid of any vibration, beyond vibration.

0 1972-01-12, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Did you read in the Cosmic Review about the cosmic square: 1, 2, 3, 4, and one in the center? The cosmic square was conceived by Thon, and I know he put Love in the center. But the four sides what are the four sides? I dont remember anymore. I used to know all that so well; its all gone. I know there was Light, Life, and utility the fourth was utility, but the first? utility was the last. What was the first? Its all gone.
   That would have given me a clue.

02.01 - Metaphysical Thought and the Supreme Truth, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Any seeking of the supreme Truth through intellect alone must end either in Agnosticism of this kind or else in some intellectual system or mind-constructed formula. There have been hundreds of these systems and formulas and there can be hundreds more, but none can be definitive. Each may have its value for the mind, and different systems with their contrary conclusions can have an equal appeal to intelligences of equal power and competence. All this labour of speculation has its utility in training the human mind and helping to keep before it the idea of Something beyond and Ultimate towards which it must turn. But the intellectual Reason can only point vaguely or feel gropingly towards it or try to indicate partial and even conflicting aspects of its manifestation here; it cannot enter into and know it. As long as we remain in the domain of the intellect only, an impartial pondering over all that has been thought and sought after, a constant throwing up of ideas, of all the possible ideas, and the formation of this or that philosophical belief, opinion or conclusion is all that can be done. This kind of disinterested search after Truth would be the only possible attitude for any wide and plastic intelligence. But any conclusion so arrived at would be only speculative; it could have no spiritual value; it would not give the decisive experience or the spiritual certitude for which the soul is seeking. If the intellect is our highest possible instrument and there is no other means of arriving at supraphysical Truth, then a wise and large Agnosticism must be our ultimate attitude. Things in the manifestation may be known to some degree, but the Supreme and all that is beyond the Mind must remain for ever unknowable.
  It is only if there is a greater consciousness beyond Mind and that consciousness is accessible to us that we can know and enter into the ultimate Reality. Intellectual speculation, logical reasoning as to whether there is or is not such a greater consciousness cannot carry us very far. What we need is a way to get the experience of it, to reach it, enter into it, live in it.

02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   This war is a great menace; it is also a great opportunity. It can land humanity into a catastrophe; it can also raise it to levels which would not have been within its reach but for the occasion. The Forces of Darkness have precipitated themselves with all their might upon the world, but by their very downrush have called upon the higher Forces of Light also to descend. The true' use of the opportunity offered to man would be to bring about a change, better still, a reversal, in his consciousness, that is to say, it will be of highest utility if it forces upon him by the pressure of inexorable circumstancessince normally he is so unwilling and incapable to do it through a spontaneous inner awakening the inescapable decision that he must change and shall change; and the change is to be for or towards the birth of a spiritual consciousness in earthly life. Indeed the war might be viewed" as the birth-pangs of such a spiritual consciousness. Whether the labour would be sublimely fruitful here and how or end in barrenness is the question the Fates and the gods are asking of man the mortal beingtoday.
   ***

02.07 - The Descent into Night, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
    Power and utility were their Truth and Right,
    An eagle rapacity clawed its coveted good,

02.10 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  To reach utility’s immense bazaar.
  68.66

02.11 - New World-Conditions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It is a trite saying that one must change with the changing times. But how many can really do so or know even how to do so? In politics, as in life generally (politics is a part of life, the "precipitated" part, one may say in chemical language), the principle is well-known, though often in a pejorative sense, as policy or tactics. Anyhow the policy pays: for it is one of the main lines, if not the main line of action along which lies success in the practical field. And precisely he who cannot change, who does not see the necessity of change, although conditions and circumstances have changed, is known as the ideologist, the doctrinaire, the fanatic. The no-changer does not change with the times: for, according to him, that is the nature of the weather-cock, the time-server. On the contrary, he seeks to impose his ideas (sometimes called ideals), notions, prejudgments and even prejudices upon time and circumstance. Such an endeavour, on most occasions, can have only a modicum of success; and a blind insistence may even lead to disaster. It may not be difficult to modify some surface movements of the oceanic surge of life, but to control and comm and it is quite a different proposition. This, however, is not to say that opportunism, slavery to circumstances should be the order of the day. Not at all. One is not asked to sacrifice the bed-rock truth and principle and run after the fleeting mode, the momentary need, the passing interest, to follow always the comfortable line of least resistance. But one has to distinguish. There are things of local and transient utility and there are things of abiding value brought up by deeper world-currents in the conditions and circumstances that face us. When such great occasionsgolden opportunities they are calledcome, they come with their own norms, and then it is foolish to force upon them the narrow strait-jacket forms fabricated by our old habits and preconceived notions.
   We talk even today of British Imperialism, of the Shylock nature of the white coloniser and exploiter
  --
   International co-operation has become a thing of immediate necessity, of practical utility. We met in San Francisco, not out of the spirit of sheer idealism or altruism but because we were forced to it. Circumstances have come to such a pass that even local needs, natural aspirations can be best met and served in and through international understanding. It is the solution of international problems, the amelioration of international relations first that would more easily lead to the solution of national problems than the other way round, which was perhaps the normal direction of the world-forces even a decade or two ago. Such world-organisations as the UNRRA or even the Red Cross, although they do not go deep enough into the root problems and are not powerful enough to mould or control world-forces, appearing more or less as charitable institutions, are still concrete expressions of an urgent immediate demand for mutuality and solidarity among the nations, even between warring nations.
   The relation between India and Britain is peculiar and has an especial significance. It is not enough to say that Britain is the imperialist overlord and India the subject underling. The two stand for two world-forces and their relation is symbolic. The difficulty that will be solved between them will be a world-difficulty solved; what they achieve in common will be a world-achievement. India means nations in bondage aspiring to be free, peoples living in conditions of want and weakness and internecine quarrel, still struggling towards a harmonious and prosperous organised life; she is the cry of the down-trodden demanding her share of earth's air and lightlife-room. Britain represents the other side, the free people, organised, strong and successful. Neither America nor Russia fills this role. America is young; she has a wonderful grasp over life's externals; none can compare or compete with her in the ordering and marshalling of an efficient pattern of life, but what escapes her is the more abiding and deeper truth of life and living. Russia started to create on totally new foundations, indeed the outer aspect here has changed very much. But the forces that ruled Russia's past do not seem to have changed to the same extent. In spite of the rise of the proletariate, in spite of all local autonomies, it is doubtful if the true breath of freedom is blowing over the country, if the country is creating out of a deeper soul-vision. Life movement in either of these two countries seems to have a rigid mould; that is because they seek to build or reform, that is to say, fabricate life, in other words, they impose upon life a pattern conceived by notions and prejudgments, even perhaps idio-syncracies. The British are more amenable to change, precisely because they do not force a change and do not know they are changing. The British Empire is more loosely formed, its units have more freedom than is the case with other Empires built upon the pattern of the extremely centralised Roman Empire. Truly it has the spirit of a commonwealth. The spirit of decentralisation and federation that is increasing today and has seized even old-world Empires the Dutch, the French, the Russianhas come largely from the British example. Therefore, the unravelling of the Britain and India tangle would mean the solution of a world-problem. These two countries have been put together precisely because the solution is possible here and an ideal solution for all others to profit by.
   The British people do not move by ideals and idealism, as the French do, for example. The French rise naturally in revolt and rebellion and revolution for the sake of an idea the motto of the Great Revolution was "Liberty or Death". Without an upsetting they cannot bring about a change; for the social moulds are rigid and more presistent. The AngloSaxons, on the contrary, go by an unfailing instinct, as it were, gradually and slowly, but surely and inevitablyfrom precedent to precedent", as they themselves say. A life-intuition guides them: the inherent merit of an ideal has not such a great value in their eye, but if the ideal means a practical utility, a thing demanded by time and circumstances, a clear issue out of a dead impasse, well, they hesitate no longer and go about it in right earnest as practical men of affairs.
   Now, there can be no doubt that the British wish, are even eager, to have a settlement with India: they wish to have an India free and united and strong and they are willing to lend their help as far as lies in their power and competence,not because it is an ideal, something good in the abstract and therefore worth pursuing and they are altruistic or philanthropic by nature, but because it is a matter of self-interest to them, it is a thing to be done because of the actual life conditions. A strong free and friendly India is an asset they wish to build and conserve. They feel that the old-world methods of one-sided exploitation is neither possible nor desirable any longer; they must move with the moving times. And, as I have already said, they do not move principally by ideas and notions and brain formations, they are in closer touch with life forces and are more easily responsive to these.

02.14 - Panacea of Isms, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   And yet internationalism is not the one thing needful either. If it means the obliteration of all national values, of all cultural diversity, it will not certainly conduce to the greater enrichment and perfection of humanity. Taken by itself and in its absolute sense, it cannot be a practical success. The fact is being proved every moment these days. Internationalism in the economic sphere, however, seems to have a greater probability and utility than in the merely political sphere. Economics is forcing peoples and nations to live together and move together: it has become the soldering agent in modern times of all the elements the groups and types of the human family that were so long separate from each other, unknown to each other or clashing with each other. But that is good so far as it goes. Powerful as economic forces are, they are not the only deciding or directing agents in human affairs. That is the great flaw in the "International", the Marxian type of internationalism which has been made familiar to us. Man is not a political animal, in spite of Aristotle, nor is he an economic animal, in spite of Marx and Engels. Mere economics, even when working for a greater unity of mankind, tends to work more for uniformity: it reduces man to the position of a machine and a physical or material machine at that. By an irony of fate the human value for which the international proletariate raised its banner of revolt is precisely what suffers in the end. The Beveridge Plan, so much talked of nowadays, made such an appeal, no doubt because of the economic advantages it ensures, but also, by far and large, because it views man as a human being in and against the machine to which he belongs, because it is psychologically a scheme to salvage the manhood of man, so far as is possible, out of a rigidly mechanistic industrial organization.
   Humanism

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

03.10 - The Mission of Buddhism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   We say then that it was a necessity: it was a necessity that the rational, logical, ratiocinative, analytic mentality should be brought out and given its play and place. It is perhaps an inferior power of the mind or consciousness, but it is a strong power and has its use and utility. It is the power that gives the form and pattern for the display of consciousness and intelligence in outward expression and external living; it is a firm weapon that gives control over these inferior ranges of consciousness. The leap from the sense-consciousness or the elements of consciousness, from a mental growth just adequate and not too specialised, straight into the supra-sensuous and the transcendent had been an inevitable necessity, so that the human consciousness might get the first taste of its supreme status and value: a similar necessity brought to the fore this element of the mind, the mind's own powerof judgement and willso that there might be a greater and wider integration of human nature and also that the higher realities may be captured in our normal consciousness. Even for the withdrawal of the mind from the outer objects to the inner sources, the mind itself can be used with much effect. And Buddha showed it magnificently. And of course, Shankara too who followed in his footsteps.
   To abrogate the matter of fact, rational view of life in order to view it spiritually, to regard it wholly as an expression or embodiment or vibration of consciousness-delight was possible to the Vedic discipline which saw and adored the Immanent Godhead. It was not possible to Buddha and Buddhistic consciousness; for the Immanent Divine was ignored in the Buddhistic scheme. Philosophically, in regard to ultimate principles, Buddhism was another name for nihilism, creation being merely an assemblage of particles of consciousness that is desire; the particles scattered and dissolved, remains only the supreme incomparable Nirvana. But pragmatically Buddhism was supremely humanistic.

03.14 - Mater Dolorosa, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It is not to say that other remediesless radical but more normal to human naturecannot be undertaken in the meanwhile. The higher truths do not rule out the lower. These too have their place and utility in Nature's integral economy. An organisation based on science and ethicism can be of help as a palliative and measure of relief; it may be even immediately necessary under the circumstances, but however imperative at the moment it does not go to the root of the matter.
   The action of the three gunas is the subject matter of the Veda: but do thou become free from the triple guna, O Arjuna.The Gita, II.45

04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It can be mentioned here that there can be a knowledge of ends without a corresponding knowledge of means, even there can be a control over ends without a preliminary control over meansperhaps not to perfection, but to a sufficient degree of practical utility. Much of the knowledgeespecially secular and scientificin ancient times was of this order; what we mean to say is that the knowledge was more instinctive or intuitive than rational or intellectual. In that knowledge the result only, the end that it to say, was the chief aim and concern, the means for attaining the end was, one cannot perhaps say, ignored, but slurred or slipped over as it were: the process was thus involved or understood, not expressed or detailed out. Thus we know of some mathematical problems to which correct solutions were given of which the process is not extant or lost as some say. Our suggestion is that there was in fact very little of the process as we know it now the solution was reached per saltum, that is to say, somehow, in the same manner as we find it happening even today in child prodigies.
   One can point out however that even before the modern scientific age, there was an epoch of pure intellectual activity, as represented, for example, by scholasticism. The formal intellectualism which was the gift of the Greek sophists or the Mimansakas and grammarians in ancient India has to be recognised as a pure mental movement, freed from all life value or biological bias. What then is the difference? What is the new characteristic element brought in by the modern scientific intellectualism?

05.20 - The Urge for Progression, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In the process of the expression and embodiment of this innermost truth, the first necessary condition is, as we have said, sincerity, that is to say, a constant reference to the demand of that truth, putting everything and judging everything in the light of that truth, a vigilant wakefulness to it. The second condition is progression. It is the law of the Truth that it is expressing itself, seeking to express itself continually and continuously in the march of life; it is always unfolding new norms and forms of its light and power, ever new degrees of realisation. The individual human consciousness has to recognise that progressive flux and march along with it. Human consciousness, the complex of external mind and life and body consciousness, has the habit of halting, clinging to the forms, experiences and gains of the past, storing them in memory, agreeing to a minimum change only just to be able to pour the new into the old. But this conservatism, which is another name for tamasis fatal to the living truth within. Even like the lan vitalso gloriously hymned by Bergson, the inmost consciousness, the central truth of being, the soul lanhas always a forward-looking reference. And it is precisely because the normal instrument of the body and life and mind has always a backward reference, because it slings ,back and cannot keep pace with the march of the soul-consciousness that these members stagnate, wear away, decay and death ends it all. The past has its utility: it marks the stages of progress. It means assimilation, but must not mean stagnation. It may supply the present basis but must always open out to what is coming or may come. If one arrives at a striking realisation, a light is revealed, a Voice, a mantra heard, a norm disclosed, it is simply to be noted, taken in the stuff of the being, made part and parcel of the consciousness; you leave it at that and pass and press on. You must not linger at wayside illuminations however beautiful or even useful some may be. The ideal of the paryataka the wanderermay be taken as a concrete symbol of this principle. The Brahmanas described it graphically in the famous phrase, caraivete, "move on". The Vedic Rishi sang of it in the memorable hymn to Dawn, the goddess who comes today the last of a succession of countless dawns in the immemorial past and the first of a never-ending series of the future. The soul is strung with a golden chain to the Great Fulfilment that moves ahead: even when fulfilled the soul does not rest or come to the end of its mission, it continues to be an ever new expression or instrumentation of the Infinite.
   ***

07.15 - Divine Disgust, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Naturally, the poison will not have the same effect upon the Divine as upon man. For there is an essential difference between a state of ignorance and a state of knowledge. Something untoward happens to you in your normal state of ignorance, it has a certain character and brings mentally certain results: but the same thing happening to you in a state of knowledge will not carry the same effect. For example, take a very material thing, a blow, a right royal physical blow, well, if you are in a state of inconscience and ignorance, as you usually are, you will have to suffer the full consequence which in its turn depends wholly upon the force of the blow, who or what gave the blow and the helplessness of the object. But the the same blow delivered in the same way by the same agent but upon a being who is conscious and full of knowledge, will produce instantly a reaction reducing the natural consequences to a minimum, even annulling the consequences altogether; for the reaction here is a reaction of knowledge, of light and not that of ignorance, of obscurity. On the moral level the action can be clearly noticed. For example, you can receive an emotional shock, not in egoistic blindness, that is to say, identifying yourself with it or drowned in it; you can hold it away from you, look at it in an objective manner, see what it is, note the nature of its vibration, etc., etc., and then you put the light of your knowledge, the ultra-violet ray, as it were, of truth upon it. As a result, there comes a new disposition, the shock loses its effectivity. Even so, the physical result of a physical blow can be obviated. If that were not possible what would be the utility of the Divine taking upon himself the evil thing. Evil would continue in the same way and the world continue suffering in the same way. Precisely because the obscure vibrations are transformed into vibrations of light in the divine consciousness that the Divine takes upon and within himself all the ills of the world.
   In the case of the physical occurrence, the knowledge I speak of is the inner knowledge of the body cells, their existence, composition, distribution and the knowledge of the consequences of the blow, its natural and expected effects. Also at the same time there should be the knowledge of what the cells should be like, how they ought to react to the blow. And the procedure adopted too is quite different from that of physical Nature which takes hours, days, months to repair a damage; the inner knowledge can do the thing immediately. This inner knowledge can be brought down from its highest source. Instead of the mere psychological knowledge, one can call down the supramental knowledge and focus it upon the part of the body endangered. If the elements of the body, the cells come under the influence of the force of truth and receive it, then there can be an immediate new ordering of the elements according to the higher law. That will bring about not only the cure from the blow received, the mending of the accident, but initiate a big progress in the general consciousness. This power to comm and the consciousness has no limit. If you have committed an error, even a grave error, and if you can yet call upon the consciousness of truth, this power of the supramental and allow it to work, it will give you an occasion to make a formidable progress. In other words, never be discouraged if you have blundered, blundered even more than once. Only you must keep your will firm, and take sometimes the unshakable resolution not to repeat. Rest assured you will in the end triumph over your difficulty.

07.42 - The Nature and Destiny of Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In ancient times, in the great ages, in Greece, for example or even during the Italian Renaissance, particularly, however, in Greece and in Egypt, they erected buildings, constructed monuments for the sake of public utility. Their buildings were meant for the most part to be temples, sanctuaries to lodge their gods and deities. What they had in view was something total, whole and entire, beautiful and complete in itself. That was the purpose of architecture embodying the harmony of sweeping and majestic lines: sculpture was a part of architecture supplying details of expression and even painting came up to complete the expression: but the whole held together in a coordinated unity which was the monument itself. The sculpture was for the monument, the painting was for the monument; it was not that each was separate from the other and existed for itself and one did not know why it was there. In India, when a temple was being built, for example, what was aimed at was a total creation, all the parts combined to give effect to one end, to make a beautiful vesture for God, the one object of their adoration. All the great epochs of art were of this kind. But in modern times, in the latter part of the last century, Art' became a matter of business. A painting was done in order to be sold. You do your paintings, put each one in a frame and place them side by side or group them, that is, lump them together without much reason. The same with regard to sculpture. You make a statue and set it up anywhere without any connection whatsoever with the surroundings. It is always something foreign, extraneous in its setting, like a mushroom or a parasite. The thing in itself may not be quite ugly, but it is out of place, it is not part of an organic whole. We exhibit art today. Indeed, it is exhibitionism, it is the showing off of cleverness, talent, skill, virtuosity. A piece of architecture does not incarnate a living force as it used to do once upon a time. It is no longer the expression of an aspiration, of something that uplifts the spirit nor the expression of the magnificence of the Divine whose dwelling it is meant to be. You build houses here and there pell-mell or somehow juxtaposed without any coordinating idea governing them, without any relation to the environment where they are situated. When you enter a house, it is the same thing. A bit of painting here, a bit of sculpture there, some objects of art in one corner, a few others in another. Yes, it is an exhibition, a museum, a kaleidoscopic collection. It gives a shock to the truly sensitive artistic taste.
   I do not say that a museum is not necessary or useful. It is a good means of education, that is to say, getting information about what other people or other epochs did. It is an aid to the historic knowledge of things. But it is far from being artistic. A museum is not the place where art can find its highest or its true expression. There is an art which seeks to coordinate, integrate distinct, discrete, contrary objects. It is called decorative art. And in so far as this art is successful, we are a step forward even in these days towards true art.

08.02 - Order and Discipline, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   You are sent to school, you are asked to do exercises (both mental and physical); do you think it is just to put you to trouble? No, it is because a surrounding is absolutely necessary where you can learn to form yourself. If you tried by yourself this work of individualisation, integral formation, all alone in one corner, you would be asked nothing till you have done it; but you are not likely to do it, not a single child would do it, he would not even know how to do it or where to begin. If a child is not taught how to live, he would not be able to live, he would not know how to do anything. The most elementary movements it is not able to do unless it is taught. Therefore if every one were to go through the whole experience, unaided, in the matter of forming his individuality, he would be dead long before he could begin to exist even. That is the utility of the experiences of others, accumulated through centuries, of those who have had the experience and who tell you, "If you want to go quick, and learn in a few years what needed centuries to learnwell, do this, do that, this way, that way, read, study, attend to your lessons at school, in the playground." Once you are on the way, you can find your own method if you are a genius. But in the beginning you must know from others how to stand on your legs and walk. It is not easy to go all by oneself. That is why one needs education.
   II

10.03 - The Debate of Love and Death, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  She teaches, an usher in utility's school.
  On the ocean surface of vast Consciousness

1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
  We have touched but little on the subject of the fire, the purpose of the etheric body being to convey it and distribute it to all parts of its system. We have dwelt on facts which might stimulate interest and emphasise the utility of this pranic vehicle. Certain facts need emphasis and consideration as we study this static ring and its circulating fires. Let me briefly recapitulate for the sake of clarity:
  The System receives prana from cosmic sources via three centres, and redistributes it to all parts of its extended influence, or to the bounds of the solar etheric web. This cosmic prana becomes colored by solar quality and reaches the furthest confines of the system. Its mission might be described as the vitalisation of the vehicle which is the physical material expression of the solar Logos.

1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
  For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.
  I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.
  --
  Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits.
  They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on.

1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  accurate descriptive information, but serves to undermine our belief in the utility and meaning of existence.
  This problem has frequently been regarded as tragic (it seems to me, at least, ridiculous) and has been
  --
  simply wrong, regardless of their utility?
  Is it not more likely that we just do not know how it could be that traditional notions are right, given

1.01 - On knowledge of the soul, and how knowledge of the soul is the key to the knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
  Besides, beloved! if man had been created only to eat and drink, it would follow that animals are of greater worth and excellence than man; for they can eat and drink more than man can, and they have useful services devolved upon them of drawing burdens, tilling the ground, and giving meat, butter and milk for food. If also man had been created to fight, kill and domineer, it would follow that beasts of prey are nobler than he, for they are mightier in their ferocity and their power of subjugating other animals. There are, moreover, many animals of manifest utility, as the dog to watch and hunt, and the skins of some of them for clothing. It follows, therefore, that man was not created for these things, but rather to serve God and to grow in the knowledge of him.
  It is plain that mind, discernment and reason were bestowed upon man, that when he looks upon the world and sees in every object illustrations of various forms of perfection, and much to excite his wonder, he might turn his attention from the work of the artist, to the artist himself; from the thing formed to him that formed it; that he might comprehend his own excessive frailty and weakness, and the perfection of the wisdom and power, yea, of all the attributes of the eternal Creator, and that, without ceasing, he might humbly supplicate acceptance in his frailty and weakness on the one hand, and on the other might seek to draw near to the King of kings, and finally obtain rest in [22] the home of the faithful, where the angels are in the presence of God. If men refuse to recognize their own dignity, if they neglect their duty and prefer the qualities of devils and beasts of prey, they will also possess, in the future world, the qualities of beasts of prey, and will be judged with the devils. Our refuge is in God!

1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  From this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but as yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its forms,a freedom which we do not find in the rigidity of savage communities because these have already passed out of the symbolic into the conventional stage though on a curve of degeneration instead of a curve of growth. The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social forms are lax, free and capable of infinite development. One thing, however, begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this is the psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of the four orders, expressingto employ an abstractly figurative language which the Vedic thinkers would not have used nor perhaps understood, but which helps best our modern understanding the Divine as knowledge in man, the Divine as power, the Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine as service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four cosmic principles, the Wisdom that conceives the order and principle of things, the Power that sanctions, upholds and enforces it, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its parts, the Work that carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this idea there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based primarily upon temperament and psychic type2 with a corresponding ethical discipline and secondarily upon the social and economic function.3 But the function was determined by its suitability to the type and its helpfulness to the discipline; it was not the primary or sole factor. The first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea. The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn. The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life.
  This typal stage creates the great social ideals which remain impressed upon the human mind even when the stage itself is passed. The principal active contri bution it leaves behind when it is dead is the idea of social honour; the honour of the Brahmin which resides in purity, in piety, in a high reverence for the things of the mind and spirit and a disinterested possession and exclusive pursuit of learning and knowledge; the honour of the Kshatriya which lives in courage, chivalry, strength, a certain proud self-restraint and self-mastery, nobility of character and the obligations of that nobility; the honour of the Vaishya which maintains itself by rectitude of dealing, mercantile fidelity, sound production, order, liberality and philanthropy; the honour of the Shudra which gives itself in obedience, subordination, faithful service, a disinterested attachment. But these more and more cease to have a living root in the clear psychological idea or to spring naturally out of the inner life of the man; they become a convention, though the most noble of conventions. In the end they remain more as a tradition in the thought and on the lips than a reality of the life.

1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  8:Another kind of Shastra is not Scripture, but a statement of the science and methods, the effective principles and way of working of the path of Yoga which the Sadhaka elects to follow. Each path has its Shastra, either written or traditional, passing from mouth to mouth through a long line of Teachers. In India a great authority, a high reverence even is ordinarily attached to the written or traditional teaching. All the lines of the Yoga are supposed to be fixed and the Teacher who has received the Shastra by tradition and realised it in practice guides the disciple along the immemorial tracks. One often even hears the objection urged against a new practice, a new Yogic teaching, the adoption of a new formula, "It is not according to the Shastra." But neither in fact nor in the actual practice of the Yogins is there really any such entire rigidity of an iron door shut against new truth, fresh revelation, widened experience. The written or traditional teaching expresses the knowledge and experiences of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to the beginner. Its importance and utility are therefore immense. But a great freedom of variation and development is always practicable. Even so highly scientific a system as Rajayoga can be practised on other lines than the organised method of Patanjali. Each of the three paths, trimarga 51, breaks into many bypaths which meet again at the goal. The general knowledge on which the Yoga depends is fixed, but the order, the succession, the devices, the forms must be allowed to vary, for the needs and particular impulsions of the individual nature have to be satisfied even while the general truths remain firm and constant.
  9:An integral and synthetic Yoga needs especially not to be bound by any written or traditional Shastra; for while it embraces the knowledge received from the past, it seeks to organise it anew for the present and the future. An absolute liberty of experience and of the restatement of knowledge in new terms and new combinations is the condition of its self-formation. Seeking to embrace all life in itself, it is in the position not of a pilgrim following the highroad to his destination, but, to that extent at least, of a path-finder hewing his way through a virgin forest. For Yoga has long diverged from life and the ancient systems which sought to embrace it, such as those of our Vedic forefa thers, are far away from us, expressed in terms which are no longer accessible, thrown into forms which are no longer applicable. Since then mankind has moved forward on the current of eternal Time and the same problem has to be approached from a new starting-point.
  --
  16:But still, in the practical development, each of the three stages has its necessity and utility and must be given its time or its place. It will not do, it cannot be safe or effective to begin with the last and highest alone. It would not be the right course, either, to leap prematurely from one to another. For even if from the beginning we recognise in mind and heart the Supreme, there are elements of the nature which long prevent the recognition from becoming realisation. But without realisation our mental belief cannot become a dynamic reality; it is still only a figure of knowledge, not a living truth, an idea, not yet a power. And even if realisation has begun, it may be dangerous to imagine or to assume too soon that we are altogether in the hands of the Supreme or are acting as his instrument. That assumption may introduce a calamitous falsity; it may produce a helpless inertia or, magnifying the movements of the ego with the Divine Name, it may disastrously distort and ruin the whole course of the Yoga. There is a period, more or less prolonged, of internal effort and struggle in which the individual will has to reject the darkness and distortions of the lower nature and to put itself resolutely or vehemently on the side of the divine Light. The mental energies, the heart's emotions, the vital desires, the very physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences. It is only then, only when this has been truly done, that the surrender of the lower to the higher can be effected, because the sacrifice has become acceptable.
  17:The personal will of the Sadhaka has first to seize on the egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right; once turned, he has still to train them to recognise that always, always to accept, always to follow that. Progressing, he learns, still using the personal will, personal effort, personal energies, to employ them as representatives of the higher Power and in conscious obedience to the higher Influence. Progressing yet farther, his will, effort, energy become no longer personal and separate, but activities of that higher Power and Influence at work in the individual. But there is still a sort of gulf of distance which necessitates an obscure process of transit, not always accurate, sometimes even very distorting, between the divine Origin and the emerging human current. At the end of the progress, with the progressive disappearance of egoism and impurity and ignorance, this last separation is removed; all in the individual becomes the divine working.
  --
  21:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being (caitya guru or antaryamin), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
  22:To see, know, become and fulfil this One in our inner selves and in all our outer nature, was always the secret goal and becomes now the conscious purpose of our embodied existence.
  --
  33:The example is more powerful than the instruction; but it is not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal character, which is of most importance. These have their place and their utility; but what will most stimulate aspiration in others is the central fact of the divine realisation within him governing his whole life and inner state and all his activities. This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to individual person and circumstance. It is this dynamic realisation that the Sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself according to his own nature; he need not strive after an imitation from outside which may well be sterilising rather than productive of right and natural fruits.
  34:Influence is more important than example. Influence is not the outward authority of the Teacher over his disciple, but the power of his contact, of his presence, of the nearness of his soul to the soul of another, infusing into it, even though in silence, that which he himself is and possesses. This is the supreme sign of the Master. For the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive around him.

10.21 - Short Notes - 4- Ego, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   And whatever the interim necessity and utility of the ego, originally and also ultimately it has no space or standing. For originally and ultimately and absolutely, it is the Divine that exists in and through the Divine, moves in and through the Divine to the Divine.
   It is the Divine that knows the Divine through the Divine.

1.02.3.2 - Knowledge and Ignorance, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  But having so far attained, what further utility has the soul
  for birth or for works? None for itself, everything for God and

1.02.4.1 - The Worlds - Surya, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  and act on the knowledge so formed for an individual utility.
  The law of the Truth would work in us if we saw the totality

1.02 - Isha Analysis, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  Vidya and Avidya, Becoming and Non-becoming are reconciled by their mutual utility to the progressive self-realisation which proceeds from the state of mortality to the state of Immortality. (Verses 9 - 14)
  FOURTH MOVEMENT

1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  contingencies shift (for whatever reason), the utility of strategies designed for the original circumstance
  (and transmitted through imitation) may become dramatically restricted, or even reversed. The capacity for
  --
  conceptual utility is only provisional, however and the fact of the means/end distinction actually
  obscures more detailed and comprehensive description. Means and ends plans and goals are not
  --
  attention gives us the capability to make provisional but necessary judgments about the valence and utility
  of phenomena. However, we can also shift levels of abstraction which means, can voluntarily focus our
  --
  situation) can have its utility and/or meaning transformed at one level of analysis, but not at another. This
  means that novelty can be bounded; that something can be new in one manner, but remain familiar at
  --
  important thing of all. Reorganization completed. utility of experiential phenomena re-established.
  Emotional integrity and stability re-attained. Good thing I didnt do myself in!
  --
  familiar is most likely to be adopted. This is another example of proof through utility if a solution
  works, (serves to further progress towards a given goal) then it is right. Perhaps it is the frontal cortex
  --
  and that wars occur in that space is a metaphor of exceeding power and explanatory utility. Transpersonal
  motive forces do wage war with one another over vast spans of time; are each forced to come to terms with
  --
  and threat furthering the utility of the female as metaphoric grist because of the union that exists within
  experience between creation of one thing, and destruction and transformation of another.303 The processes
  --
  determination of the truth of that idea or at least of its intrapsychic utility. Hence the power of the martyr
   and the unwillingness of even modern totalitarians to allow their enemies to make public sacrifices of
  --
  Rank-ordering of behavior in terms of comparative utility is (procedural, episodic or semantic) judgment
  rendered upon value. Such judgment constitutes a decision about the nature of good and evil, from the
  --
  The tale takes this diversion to help drive home the general utility of what has been rescued from the
  enchanted kingdom, where the princess dwells. The treasures released from that kingdom have a
  --
  meaning itself maintains its functional utility (including credibility). Maintains its functional utility
  means insofar as the culture posits a reasonable current description, a believable end goal, and a workable

1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  14:Nor is the seeker of the integral fulfilment permitted to solve too arbitrarily even the conflict of his own inner members. He has to harmonise deliberate knowledge with unquestioning faith; he must conciliate the gentle soul of love with the formidable need of power; the passivity of the soul that lives content in transcendent calm has to be fused with the activity of the divine helper and the divine warrior. To him as to all seekers of the spirit there are offered for solution the oppositions of the reason, the clinging hold of the senses, the perturbations of the heart, the ambush of the desires, the clog of the physical body; but he has to deal in another fashion with their mutual and internal conflicts and their hindrance to his aim, for he must arrive at an infinitely more difficult perfection in the handling of all this rebel matter. Accepting them as instruments for the divine realisation and manifestation, he has to convert their jangling discords, to enlighten their thick darknesses, to transfigure them separately and all together, harmonising them in themselves and with each other, -- integrally, omitting no grain or strand or vibration, leaving no iota of imperfection anywhere. All exclusive concentration, or even a succession of concentrations of that kind, can be in his complex work only a temporary convenience; it has to be abandoned as soon as its utility is over. An all-inclusive concentration is the difficult achievement towards which he must labour.
  15:Concentration is indeed the first condition of any Yoga, but it is an all-receiving concentration that is the very nature of the integral Yoga. A separate strong fixing of the thought, of the emotions or of the will on a single idea, object, state, inner movement or principle is no doubt a frequent need here also; but this is only a subsidiary helpful process. A wide massive opening, a harmonised concentration of the whole being in all its parts and through all its powers upon the One who is the All is the larger action of this Yoga without which it cannot achieve its purpose. For it is the consciousness that rests in the One and that acts in the All to which we aspire; it is this that we seek to impose on every element of our being and on every movement of our nature. This wide and concentrated totality is the essential character of the sadhana and its character must determine its practice.

1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is in Europe that the age of individualism has taken birth and exercised its full sway; the East has entered into it only by contact and influence, not from an original impulse. And it is to its passion for the discovery of the actual truth of things and for the governing of human life by whatever law of the truth it has found that the West owes its centuries of strength, vigour, light, progress, irresistible expansion. Equally, it is due not to any original falsehood in the ideals on which its life was founded, but to the loss of the living sense of the Truth it once held and its long contented slumber in the cramping bonds of a mechanical conventionalism that the East has found itself helpless in the hour of its awakening, a giant empty of strength, inert masses of men who had forgotten how to deal freely with facts and forces because they had learned only how to live in a world of stereotyped thought and customary action. Yet the truths which Europe has found by its individualistic age covered only the first more obvious, physical and outward facts of life and only such of their more hidden realities and powers as the habit of analytical reason and the pursuit of practical utility can give to man. If its rationalistic civilisation has swept so triumphantly over the world, it is because it found no deeper and more powerful truth to confront it; for all the rest of mankind was still in the inactivity of the last dark hours of the conventional age.
  The individualistic age of Europe was in its beginning a revolt of reason, in its culmination a triumphal progress of physical Science. Such an evolution was historically inevitable. The dawn of individualism is always a questioning, a denial. The individual finds a religion imposed upon him which does not base its dogma and practice upon a living sense of ever verifiable spiritual Truth, but on the letter of an ancient book, the infallible dictum of a Pope, the tradition of a Church, the learned casuistry of schoolmen and Pundits, conclaves of ecclesiastics, heads of monastic orders, doctors of all sorts, all of them unquestionable tribunals whose sole function is to judge and pronounce, but none of whom seems to think it necessary or even allowable to search, test, prove, inquire, discover. He finds that, as is inevitable under such a regime, true science and knowledge are either banned, punished and persecuted or else rendered obsolete by the habit of blind reliance on fixed authorities; even what is true in old authorities is no longer of any value, because its words are learnedly or ignorantly repeated but its real sense is no longer lived except at most by a few. In politics he finds everywhere divine rights, established privileges, sanctified tyrannies which are evidently armed with an oppressive power and justify themselves by long prescription, but seem to have no real claim or title to exist. In the social order he finds an equally stereotyped reign of convention, fixed disabilities, fixed privileges, the self-regarding arrogance of the high, the blind prostration of the low, while the old functions which might have justified at one time such a distribution of status are either not performed at all or badly performed without any sense of obligation and merely as a part of caste pride. He has to rise in revolt; on every claim of authority he has to turn the eye of a resolute inquisition; when he is told that this is the sacred truth of things or the comm and of God or the immemorial order of human life, he has to reply, But is it really so? How shall I know that this is the truth of things and not superstition and falsehood? When did God comm and it, or how do I know that this was the sense of His comm and and not your error or invention, or that the book on which you found yourself is His word at all, or that He has ever spoken His will to mankind? This immemorial order of which you speak, is it really immemorial, really a law of Nature or an imperfect result of Time and at present a most false convention? And of all you say, still I must ask, does it agree with the facts of the world, with my sense of right, with my judgment of truth, with my experience of reality? And if it does not, the revolting individual flings off the yoke, declares the truth as he sees it and in doing so strikes inevitably at the root of the religious, the social, the political, momentarily perhaps even the moral order of the community as it stands, because it stands upon the authority he discredits and the convention he destroys and not upon a living truth which can be successfully opposed to his own. The champions of the old order may be right when they seek to suppress him as a destructive agency perilous to social security, political order or religious tradition; but he stands there and can no other, because to destroy is his mission, to destroy falsehood and lay bare a new foundation of truth.
  --
  For, eventually, the evolution of Europe was determined less by the Reformation than by the Renascence; it flowered by the vigorous return of the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality of the one rather than by the Hebraic and religio-ethical temperament of the other. The Renascence gave back to Europe on one hand the free curiosity of the Greek mind, its eager search for first principles and rational laws, its delighted intellectual scrutiny of the facts of life by the force of direct observation and individual reasoning, on the other the Romans large practicality and his sense for the ordering of life in harmony with a robust utility and the just principles of things. But both these tendencies were pursued with a passion, a seriousness, a moral and almost religious ardour which, lacking in the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality, Europe owed to her long centuries of Judaeo-Christian discipline. It was from these sources that the individualistic age of Western society sought ultimately for that principle of order and control which all human society needs and which more ancient times attempted to realise first by the materialisation of fixed symbols of truth, then by ethical type and discipline, finally by infallible authority or stereotyped convention.
  Manifestly, the unrestrained use of individual illumination or judgment without either any outer standard or any generally recognisable source of truth is a perilous experiment for our imperfect race. It is likely to lead rather to a continual fluctuation and disorder of opinion than to a progressive unfolding of the truth of things. No less, the pursuit of social justice through the stark assertion of individual rights or class interests and desires must be a source of continual struggle and revolution and may end in an exaggerated assertion of the will in each to live his own life and to satisfy his own ideas and desires which will produce a serious malaise or a radical trouble in the social body. Therefore on every individualistic age of mankind there is imperative the search for two supreme desiderata. It must find a general standard of Truth to which the individual judgment of all will be inwardly compelled to subscribe without physical constraint or imposition of irrational authority. And it must reach too some principle of social order which shall be equally founded on a universally recognisable truth of things; an order is needed that will put a rein on desire and interest by providing at least some intellectual and moral test which these two powerful and dangerous forces must satisfy before they can feel justified in asserting their claims on life. Speculative and scientific reason for their means, the pursuit of a practicable social justice and sound utility for their spirit, the progressive nations of Europe set out on their search for this light and this law.
  They found and held it with enthusiasm in the discoveries of physical Science. The triumphant domination, the all-shattering and irresistible victory of Science in nineteenth-century Europe is explained by the absolute perfection with which it at least seemed for a time to satisfy these great psychological wants of the Western mind. Science seemed to it to fulfil impeccably its search for the two supreme desiderata of an individualistic age. Here at last was a truth of things which depended on no doubtful Scripture or fallible human authority but which Mother Nature herself had written in her eternal book for all to read who had patience to observe and intellectual honesty to judge. Here were laws, principles, fundamental facts of the world and of our being which all could verify at once for themselves and which must therefore satisfy and guide the free individual judgment, delivering it equally from alien compulsion and from erratic self-will. Here were laws and truths which justified and yet controlled the claims and desires of the individual human being; here a science which provided a standard, a norm of knowledge, a rational basis for life, a clear outline and sovereign means for the progress and perfection of the individual and the race. The attempt to govern and organise human life by verifiable Science, by a law, a truth of things, an order and principles which all can observe and verify in their ground and fact and to which therefore all may freely and must rationally subscribe, is the culminating movement of European civilisation. It has been the fulfilment and triumph of the individualistic age of human society; it has seemed likely also to be its end, the cause of the death of individualism and its putting away and burial among the monuments of the past.

1.02 - The Two Negations 1 - The Materialist Denial, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  10:But, first, it is well that we should recognise the enormous, the indispensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism through which humanity has been passing. For that vast field of evidence and experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity; seized on by unripe minds, it lends itself to the most perilous distortions and misleading imaginations and actually in the past encrusted a real nucleus of truth with such an accretion of perverting superstitions and irrationalising dogmas that all advance in true knowledge was rendered impossible. It became necessary for a time to make a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise in order that the road might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance. The rationalistic tendency of Materialism has done mankind this great service.
  11:For the faculties that transcend the senses, by the very fact of their being immeshed in Matter, missioned to work in a physical body, put in harness to draw one car along with the emotional desires and nervous impulses, are exposed to a mixed functioning in which they are in danger of illuminating confusion rather than clarifying truth. Especially is this mixed functioning dangerous when men with unchastened minds and unpurified sensibilities attempt to rise into the higher domains of spiritual experience. In what regions of unsubstantial cloud and semibrilliant fog or a murk visited by flashes which blind more than they enlighten, do they not lose themselves by that rash and premature adventure! An adventure necessary indeed in the way in which Nature chooses to effect her advance, - for she amuses herself as she works, - but still, for the Reason, rash and premature.

10.34 - Effort and Grace, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The whole problem is there: how to make the God-light stay here, stay here for ever. The higher light does come down, but fitfully, one is never certain of it. For it is as it were, "a scout in a reconnaissance from the sun." Here then is this special utility of personal effort, the service it can render,to do the dredging, salvaging work. Personal effort with the ego-sense has been put there to find out and note the barriers and pitfalls, the faults and fissures in the human system, to overcome, remedy and correct them as far as possible. The human receptacle is normally impure and obscure, resistant and recalcitrant: the personal will and endeavour has to be called in to labour, to level and smoo then the field, brea the into it air and light. That is the work of the individual will, to make of the dhr a strong base, strong and capacious, to receive and hold the descent. The temple is to be made clean and pure and inviting so that when the deity arrives he will find a happy home for a permanent dwelling.
   It must be noted however, in the last account the personal effort for self-purification and self-preparation is not altogether personal and mere effort; it is, as I have said, always supported and inspired by the secret presence and pressure of the higher Influence.

10.35 - The Moral and the Spiritual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The world is a gradation of developing consciousness, of growing states or status of being. There is a higher and lower level in point of the measure of consciousness but that involves no moral judgement: the moral judgement is man's; it is man's, one might almost say, idiosyncrasy, that is to say, a notion that is a prop to help him mount the ladder. Though it might be necessary at a certain stage, in certain circumstances, it is not a universal or ineluctable law, not even in his personal domain. The growing consciousness is like the growing tree rising upward first into a trunk, then spreading out into branches, into twigs and tendrils, then in flowers and finally, in fruits. These are mounting grades of growth, but the growth above is not superior to the growth below. It is a one unified whole and each portion has its own absolute value, beauty and utility.
   The modern mind has forgotten this lesson. It is terribly moral I say moral, not immoral Its immorality has found play, has almost been cultured so that its moral sense may remain intact. Its dislike and even abhorrence for things it chooses to call immoral is the ransom it pays for rescuing its sense of morality, and paradoxically this very abhorrence for unholy things has pushed it all the more into their grasp. This is the characteristic turn or twist of the modern consciousness, the perversity unknown to the ancient 'sinners'. Perversity means, you yield, not only yield, but take delight in the thing you dislike, detest or abhor even. In the vein of St. Augustine who said "I believe because it is impossible", 1 the modern consciousness says: I love because I hate.

1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  and the morality of behaviors. Objects attain significance according to their perceived utility with regards
  to their capacity to further movement away from the unbearable present towards the ideal future; likewise,
  --
  fact of eternal change does not eliminate the utility of all moral answers, however, as such answers must
  be formulated, before any action or interpretation an take place. Time merely makes eternal nonsense of the
  --
  objects (considered, always, in terms of their functional utility as tools, in a sense, for the attainment of a
  desired end).

1.03 - Spiritual Realisation, The aim of Bhakti-Yoga, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
  To the Bhakta these dry details are necessary only to streng then his will; beyond that they are of no use to him. For he is treading on a path which is fitted very soon to lead him beyond the hazy and turbulent regions of reason, to lead him to the realm of realisation. He, soon, through the mercy of the Lord, reaches a plane where pedantic and powerless reason is left far behind, and the mere intellectual groping through the dark gives place to the daylight of direct perception. He no more reasons and believes, he almost perceives. He no more argues, he senses. And is not this seeing God, and feeling God, and enjoying God higher than everything else? Nay, Bhaktas have not been wanting who have maintained that it is higher than even Moksha liberation. And is it not also the highest utility? There are people and a good many of them too in the world who are convinced that only that is of use and utility which brings to man creature-comforts. Even religion, God, eternity, soul, none of these is of any use to them, as they do not bring them money or physical comfort. To such, all those things which do not go to gratify the senses and appease the appetites are of no utility. In every mind, utility, however, is conditioned by its own peculiar wants. To men, therefore, who never rise higher than eating, drinking, begetting progeny, and dying, the only gain is in sense enjoyments; and they must wait and go through many more births and reincarnations to learn to feel even the faintest necessity for anything higher. But those to whom the eternal interests of the soul are of much higher value than the fleeting interests of this mundane life, to whom the gratification of the senses is but like the thoughtless play of the baby, to them God and the love of God form the highest and the only utility of human existence. Thank God there are some such still living in this world of too much worldliness.
  Bhakti-Yoga, as we have said, is divided into the Gauni or the preparatory, and the Par or the supreme forms. We shall find, as we go on, how in the preparatory stage we unavoidably stand in need of many concrete helps to enable us to get on; and indeed the mythological and symbological parts of all religions are natural growths which early environ the aspiring soul and help it Godward. It is also a significant fact that spiritual giants have been produced only in those systems of religion where there is an exuberant growth of rich mythology and ritualism. The dry fanatical forms of religion which attempt to eradicate all that is poetical, all that is beautiful and sublime, all that gives a firm grasp to the infant mind tottering in its Godward way the forms which attempt to break down the very ridge-poles of the spiritual roof, and in their ignorant and superstitious conceptions of truth try to drive away all that is life-giving, all that furnishes the formative material to the spiritual plant growing in the human soul such forms of religion too soon find that all that is left to them is but an empty shell, a contentless frame of words and sophistry with perhaps a little flavour of a kind of social scavengering or the socalled spirit of reform.

1.03 - The Gods, Superior Beings and Adverse Forces, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Have they no meaning and no utility?
  It is men who give a meaning to festivals in order to legitimate their presence.

1.04 - Body, Soul and Spirit, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
  rest of the body. There are many prejudices prevalent regarding such statements about thinking as are brought forward here. Many persons are inclined to undervalue thinking, and to place higher the "warm life of feeling" or "emotion." Some, indeed, say it is not by "dry thinking" but by warmth of feeling, by the immediate power of "the emotions," that one raises oneself to higher knowledge. Persons who speak thus fear to blunt the feelings by clear thinking. This certainly results from the ordinary thinking that refers only to matters of utility. But in the case of thoughts that lead to higher regions of existence, the opposite is the result. There is no feeling and no enthusiasm to be compared with the sentiments of warmth, beauty, and exaltation which are enkindled through the pure, crystal-clear thoughts which refer to the higher worlds. For the highest feelings are, as a matter of fact, not those which come "of themselves," but those which are gained by energetic and persevering thinking.
  The human body has a construction adapted to thinking. The same materials and forces which are present in the mineral kingdom are

1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  unfortunately decrease the utility of what they have to offer.
  We are conscious enough to destabilize our beliefs, and our traditional patterns of action, but not
  --
  smaller stories, nested within the larger, are dependent for their continued utility on maintenance of the
  larger as the middle-class family, for example, is dependent for its economic stability on the capitalist
  --
  produces a hierarchy of value (since people and things will inevitably differ in their utility as means to the
  desired end). Every phenomena, experienced within the confines of a particular society, is laden with

1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  We do not find that the Rishi Mahachamasya succeeded in getting his fourth vyahriti accepted by the great body of Vedantic thinkers. With a little reflection we can see the reason why. The vijnana or mahat is superior to reasoning. It sees and knows, hears and knows, remembers & knows by the ideal principles of drishti, sruti and smriti; it does not reason and know.Or withdrawing into the Mahan Atma, it is what it exercises itself upon and therefore knowsas it were, by conscious identity; for that is the nature of the Mahan Atma to be everything separately and collectively & know it as an object of his Knowledge and yet as himself. Always vijnana knows things in the whole & therefore in the part, in the mass & therefore in the particular. But when ideal knowledge, vijnana, looks out on the phenomenal world in its separate details, it then acquires an ambiguous nature. So long as it is not assailed by mind, it is still the pure buddhi and free from liability to errors. The pure buddhi may assign its reasons, but it knows first & reasons afterwards,to explain, not to justify. Assailed by mind, the ideal buddhi ceases to be pure, ceases to be ideal, becomes sensational, emotional, is obliged to found itself on data, ends not in knowledge but in opinion and is obliged to hold doubt with one hand even while it tries to grasp certainty by the other. For it is the nature of mind to be shackled & frightened by its data. It looks at things as entirely outside itself, separate from itself and it approaches them one by one, groups them & thus arrives at knowledge by synthesis; or if [it] looks at things in the mass, it has to appreciate them vaguely and then take its parts and qualities one by one, arriving at knowledge by a process of analysis. But it cannot be sure that the knowledge it acquires, is pure truth; it can never be safe against mixture of truth & error, against one-sided knowledge which leads to serious misconception, against its own sensations, passions, prejudices and false associations. Such truth as it gets can only be correct even so far as it goes, if all the essential data have been collected and scrupulously weighed without any false weights or any unconscious or semi-conscious interference with the balance. A difficult undertaking! So we can form reliable conclusions, and then too always with some reserve of doubt,about the past & the present.Of the future the mind can know nothing except in eternally fixed movements, for it has no data. We try to read the future from the past & present and make the most colossal blunders. The practical man of action who follows there his will, his intuition & his instinct, is far more likely to be correct than the scientific reasoner. Moreover, the mind has to rely for its data on the outer senses or on its own inner sensations & perceptions & it can never be sure that these are informing it correctly or are, even, in their nature anything but lying instruments. Therefore we say we know the objective world on the strength of a perpetual hypothesis. The subjective world we know only as in a dream, sure only of our own inner movements & the little we can learn from them about others, but there too sure only of this objective world & end always in conflict of transitory opinions, a doubt, a perhaps. Yet sure knowledge, indubitable Truth, the Vedic thinkers have held, is not only possible to mankind, but is the goal of our journey. Satyam eva jayate nanritam satyena pantha vitato devayanah yenakramantyrishayo hyaptakama yatra tat satyasya paramam nidhanam. Truth conquers and not falsehood, by truth the path has been extended which the gods follow, by which sages attaining all their desire arrive where is that Supreme Abode of Truth. The very eagerness of man for Truth, his untameable yearning towards an infinite reality, an infinite extension of knowledge, the fact that he has the conception of a fixed & firm truth, nay the very fact that error is possible & persistent, mare indications that pure Truth exists.We follow no chimaera as a supreme good, nor do the Powers of Darkness fight against a mere shadow. The ideal Truth is constantly coming down to us, constantly seeking to deliver us from our slavery to our senses and the magic circle of our limited data. It speaks to our hearts & creates the phenomenon of Faith, but the heart has its lawless & self-regarding emotions & disfigures the message. It speaks to the Imagination, our great intellectual instrument which liberates us from the immediate fact and opens the mind to infinite possibility; but the imagination has her pleasant fictions & her headlong creative impulse and exaggerates the truth & distorts & misplaces circumstances. It speaks to the intellect itself, bids it criticise its instruments by vichara and creates the critical reason, bids it approach the truth directly by a wide passionless & luminous use of the pure judgment, and creates shuddha buddhi or Kants pure reason; bids it divine truth & learn to hold the true divination & reject the counterfeit, and creates the intuitive reason & its guardian, intuitive discrimination or viveka. But the intellect is impatient of error, eager for immediate results and hurries to apply what it receives before it has waited & seen & understood. Therefore error maintains & even extends her reign. At last come the logician & modern rationalist thinker; disgusted with the exaggeration of these movements, seeing their errors, unable to see their indispensable utility, he sets about sweeping them away as intellectual rubbish, gets rid of faith, gets rid of flexibility of mind, gets rid of sympathy, pure reason & intuition, puts critical reason into an ill lightened dungeon & thinks now, delivered from these false issues, to compass truth by laborious observation & a rigid logic. To live on these dry & insufficient husks is the last fate of impure vijnanam or buddhi confined in the data of the mind & sensesuntil man wronged in his nature, cabined in his possibilities revolts & either prefers a luminous error or resumes his broadening & upward march.
  It was this aspect of impure mahas, vijnanam working not in its own home, swe dame but in the house of a stranger, as a servant of an inferior faculty, reason as we call it, which led the Rishi Mahachamasya to include mahas among the vyahritis. But vijnana itself is an integral part of the supreme movement, it is divine thought in divine being,therefore not a vyahriti. The Veda uses to express this pure Truth &ideal knowledge another word, equivalent in meaning to mahat,the word brihat and couples with it two other significant expressions, satyam & ritam. This trinity of satyam ritam brihatSacchidananda objectivisedis the Mahan Atma. Satyam is Truth, the principle of infinite & divine Being, Sat objectivised to Knowledge as the Truth of things self-manifested; Ritam is Law, the motion of things thought out, the principle of divine self-aware energy, Chit-shakti objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things selfarranged; Brihat is full content & fullness, satisfaction, Nature, the principle of divine Bliss objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things contented with its own manifestation in law of being & law of action. For, as the Vedanta tells us, there is no lasting satisfaction in the little, in the unillumined or half-illumined things of mind & sense, satisfaction there is only in the large, the self-true & self-existent. Nalpe sukham asti bhumaiva sukham. Bhuma, brihat, mahat, that is God. It is Ananda therefore that insists on largeness & constitutes the mahat or brihat. Ananda is the soul of Nature, its essentiality, creative power & peace. The harmony of creative power & peace, pravritti & nivritti, jana & shama, is the divine state which we feelas Wordsworth felt itwhen we go back to the brihat, the wide & infinite which, containing & contented with its works, says of it Sukritam, What I have made, is good. Whoever enters this kingdom of Mahat, this Maho Arnas or great sea of ideal knowledge, comes into possession of his true being, true knowledge, true bliss. He attains the ideal powers of drishti, sruti, smritisees truth face to face, hears her unerring voice or knows her by immediate recognising memoryjust as we say of a friend This is he and need no reasoning of observation, comparison, induction or deduction to tell us who he is or to explain our knowledge to ourselvesthough we may, already knowing the truth, use a self-evident reasoning masterfully in order to convince others. The characteristic of ideal knowledge is first that it is direct in its approach, secondly, that it is self-evident in its revelation, swayamprakasha, thirdly, that it is unerring fact of being, sat, satyam in its substance. Moreover, it is always perfectly satisfied & divinely pleasurable; it is atmarati & atmastha, confines itself to itself & does not reach out beyond itself to grasp at error or grope within itself to stumble over ignorance. It is, too, perfectly effective whether for knowledge, speech or action, satyakarma, satyapratijna, satyavadi. The man who rising beyond the state of the manu, manishi or thinker which men are now, becomes the kavi or direct seer, containing what he sees,he who draws the manomaya purusha up into the vijnanamaya,is in all things true. Truth is his characteristic, his law of being, the stamp that God has put upon him. But even for the manishi ideal Truth has its bounties. For from thence come the intuitions of the poet, the thinker, the artist, scientist, man of action, merchant, craftsman, labourer each in his sphere, the seed of the great thoughts, discoveries, faiths that help the world and save our human works & destinies from decay & dissolution. But in utilising these messages from our higher selves for the world, in giving them a form or a practical tendency, we use our intellects, feelings or imaginations and alter to their moulds or colour with their pigments the Truth. That alloy seems to be needed to make this gold from the mines above run current among men. This then is Maho Arnas.The psychological conceptions of our remote forefa thers concerning it have so long been alien to our thought & experience that they may be a little difficult to follow & more difficult to accept mentally. But we must understand & grasp them in their fullness if we have any desire to know the meaning of the Veda. For they are the very centre & keystone of Vedic psychology. Maho Arnas, the Great Ocean, is the stream of our being which at once divides & connects the human in us from the divine, & to cross over from the human to the divine, from this small & divided finite to that one, great & infinite, from this death to that immortality, leaving Diti for Aditi, alpam for bhuma, martyam for amritam is the great preoccupation & final aim of Veda & Vedanta.

1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
     It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in and through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for continually the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation. Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this' defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On the other side. Science and Art and the knowledge of life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance.
     A Yoga turned towards an all-embracing realisation of the Supreme will not despise the works or even the dreams, if dreams they are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself In the human creature. But its first condition for this liberality is that our works in the world too must be part of the sacrifice offered to the Highest and to none else, to the Divine shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance, or between the fuel that burns strongly or brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the altar may impede the ardour of the fire by their damp, heavy and diffused abundance. But otherwise, apart from this division, all activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge, -- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expressions-all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
  --
     This then is the true relation between divine and human knowledge; it is not a separation into disparate fields, sacred and profane, that is the heart of the difference, but the character of the consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested in the outside or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena for their own sake or for the sake of some surface utility or mental or vital satisfaction of Desire or of the Intelligence. But the same activity of knowledge can become part of the Yoga if it proceeds from the spiritual or spiritualising consciousness which seeks and finds in all that it surveys or penetrates the presence of the timeless Eternal and the ways of manifestation of Eternal in Time. It is evident that the need of a concentration indispensable for the transition out of the Ignorance may make it necessary for the seeker to gather together his energies and focus them only on that which will help the transition and to leave aside or subordinate for the time all that is not directly turned towards the one object. He may find that this or that pursuit of human knowledge with which he was accustomed to deal by the surface power of the mind still brings him, by reason of this tendency or habit, out of the depths to the surface or down from the heights which he has climbed or is nearing, to lower levels. These activities then may have to be intermitted or put aside until secure in a higher consciousness he is able to turn its powers on all the mental fields; then, subjected to that light or taken up into it, they are turned, by the transformation of his consciousness, into a province of the spiritual and divine. All that cannot be so transformed or refuses to be part of a divine consciousness he will abandon without hesitation, but not from any preconceived prejudgment of its emptiness or its incapacity to be an element of the new inner life. There can be no fixed mental test or principle for these things; he will therefore follow no unalterable rule, but accept or repel an activity of the mind according to his feeling, insight or experience until the greater Power and Light are there to turn their unerring scrutiny on all that is below and choose or reject their material out of what the human evolution has prepared for the divine labour.
     How precisely or by what stages this progression and change will take place must depend on the form, need and powers of the individual nature. In the spiritual domain the essence is always one, but there is yet an infinite variety and, at any rate in the integral Yoga, the rigidity of a strict and precise mental rule is seldom applicable; for, even when they walk in the same direction, no two natures proceed on exactly the same lines, in the same series of steps or with quite identical stages of their progress. It may yet be said that a logical succession of the states of progress would be very much in this order. First, there is a large turning in which all the natural mental activities proper to the individual nature are taken up or referred to a higher standpoint and dedicated by the soul in us, the psychic being, the priest of the sacrifice, to the divine service; next, there is an attempt at an ascent of the being and a bringing down of the Light and Power proper to some new height of consciousness gained by its upward effort into the whole action of the knowledge. Here there may be a strong concentration on the inward central change of the consciousness and an abandonment of a large part of the outward-going mental life or else its relegation to a small and subordinate place. At different stages it or parts of it may be taken up again from time to time to see how far the new inner psychic and spiritual consciousness can be brought into its movements, but that compulsion of the temperament or the nature which, in human beings, necessitates one kind of activity or another and makes it seem almost an indispensable portion of the existence, will diminish and eventually no attachment will be left, no lower compulsion or driving force felt anywhere. Only the Divine will matter, the Divine alone will be the one need of the whole being; if there is any compulsion to activity it will be not that of implanted desire or of force of Nature, but the luminous driving of some greater Consciousness-Force which is becoming more and more the sole motive power of the whole existence. On the other hand, it is possible at any period of the inner spiritual progress that one may experience an extension rather than a restriction of the' activities; there may be an opening of new capacities of mental creation and new provinces of knowledge by the miraculous touch of the Yoga-shakti. Aesthetic feeling, the power of artistic creation in one field or many fields together, talent or genius of literary expression, a faculty of metaphysical thinking, any power of eye or ear or hand or mind-power may awaken where none was apparent before. The Divine within may throw these latent riches out from the depths in which they were hidden or a Force from above may pour down its energies to equip the instrumental nature for the activity or the creation of which it is meant to be a channel or a builder. But, whatever may be the method or the course of development chosen by the hidden Master of the Yoga, the common culmination of this stage is the growing consciousness of him above as the mover, decider, shaper of all the movements of the mind and all the activities of knowledge.

1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  status of good and status of evil, in accordance with their perceived utility, with regards to a particular goal.
  282
  --
  adult morality, which is the capacity to produce new sets of rules, with (updated) adaptive utility. This is
  also not to say, idiotically, that Jewish morality is adolescent, and Christian adult. Examples of
  --
  finite object; of the endless utility of the object, and its inexhaustible capacity to reveal (become) the
  unknown.
  --
  and still does not, consist solely in its economic utility. Gold has always been associated, in episodic
  representation, with divinity. Prior to development of the scientific world-view, this association made
  --
  constitute recognition of the utility of such potential. From the perspective of such narratives, a totality of
  experience and action comprises the necessary precondition for the attainment of wisdom. This total
  --
  for a discussion of the simplicity and general utility of default-on systems (as opposed to default-off) see
  Brooks, A. & Stein, L.A. (1993); Brooks, A. (1991).
  --
  rather than a multiplicity) with regards to its utility as a means to a given end. In a basic sense, an object is a tool a
  facilitator or an obstacle. What we perceive as objects are phenomena that may be easily utilized (to grant our

1.05 - The Magical Control of the Weather, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  Among the objects of public utility which magic may be employed to
  secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food. The
  --
  of the weather, or any other object of general utility. The
  impotence of the means adopted by most of these practitioners to

1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  mous, the indispensable utility of the very brief period of
  rationalistic Materialism through which humanity has

1.06 - Dhyana and Samadhi, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
  All ethics, all human action and all human thought, hang upon this one idea of unselfishness. The whole idea of human life can be put into that one word, unselfishness. Why should we be unselfish? Where is the necessity, the force, the power, of my being unselfish? You call yourself a rational man, a utilitarian; but if you do not show me a reason for utility, I say you are irrational. Show me the reason why I should not be selfish. To ask one to be unselfish may be good as poetry, but poetry is not reason. Show me a reason. Why shall I be unselfish, and why be good? Because Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so say so does not weigh with me. Where is the utility of my being unselfish? My utility is to be selfish if utility means the greatest amount of happiness. What is the answer? The utilitarian can never give it. The answer is that this world is only one drop in an infinite ocean, one link in an infinite chain. Where did those that preached unselfishness, and taught it to the human race, get this idea? We know it is not instinctive; the animals, which have instinct, do not know it. Neither is it reason; reason does not know anything about these ideas. Whence then did they come?
  We find, in studying history, one fact held in common by all the great teachers of religion the world ever had. They all claim to have got their truths from beyond, only many of them did not know where they got them from. For instance, one would say that an angel came down in the form of a human being, with wings, and said to him, "Hear, O man, this is the message." Another says that a Deva, a bright being, appeared to him. A third says he dreamed that his ancestor came and told him certain things. He did not know anything beyond that. But this is common that all claim that this knowledge has come to them from beyond, not through their reasoning power. What does the science of Yoga teach? It teaches that they were right in claiming that all this knowledge came to them from beyond reasoning, but that it came from within themselves.

1.06 - Man in the Universe, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  3:This Truth of things that has to emerge out of the phenomenal world's contradictions is declared to be an infinite Bliss and self-conscious Existence, the same everywhere, in all things, in all times and beyond Time, and aware of itself behind all these phenomena by whose intensest vibrations of activity or by whose largest totality it can never be entirely expressed or in any way limited; for it is self-existent and does not depend for its being upon its manifestations. They represent it, but do not exhaust it; point to it, but do not reveal it. It is revealed only to itself within their forms. The conscious existence involved in the form comes, as it evolves, to know itself by intuition, by self-vision, by self-experience. It becomes itself in the world by knowing itself; it knows itself by becoming itself. Thus possessed of itself inwardly, it imparts also to its forms and modes the conscious delight of Sachchidananda. This becoming of the infinite Bliss-Existence-Consciousness in mind and life and body, - for independent of them it exists eternally, - is the transfiguration intended and the utility of individual existence. Through the individual it manifests in relation even as of itself it exists in identity.
  4:The Unknowable knowing itself as Sachchidananda is the one supreme affirmation of Vedanta; it contains all the others or on it they depend. This is the one veritable experience that remains when all appearances have been accounted for negatively by the elimination of their shapes and coverings or positively by the reduction of their names and forms to the constant truth that they contain. For fulfilment of life or for transcendence of life, and whether purity, calm and freedom in the spirit be our aim or puissance, joy and perfection, Sachchidananda is the unknown, omnipresent, indispensable term for which the human consciousness, whether in knowledge and sentiment or in sensation and action, is eternally seeking.

1.07 - On Our Knowledge of General Principles, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
  The fact is that, in simple mathematical judgements such as 'two and two are four', and also in many judgements of logic, we can know the general proposition without inferring it from instances, although some instance is usually necessary to make clear to us what the general proposition means. This is why there is real utility in the process of _deduction_, which goes from the general to the general, or from the general to the particular, as well as in the process of _induction_, which goes from the particular to the particular, or from the particular to the general.
  It is an old debate among philosophers whether deduction ever gives

1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  1:THE KNOWLEDGE on which the doer of works in Yoga has to found all his action and development has for the keystone of its structure a more and more concrete perception of unity, the living sense of an all-pervading oneness; he moves in the increasing consciousness of all existence as an indivisible whole: all work too is part of this divine indivisible whole. His personal action and its results can no longer be or seem a separate movement mainly or entirely determined by the egoistic "free" will of an individual, himself separate in the mass. Our works are part of an indivisible cosmic action; they are put or, more accurately, put themselves into their place in the whole out of which they arise and their outcome is determined by forces that overpass us. That world action in its vast totality and in every petty detail is the indivisible movement of the One who manifests himself progressively in the cosmos. Man too becomes progressively conscious of the truth of himself and the truth of things in proportion as he awakens to this One within him and outside him and to the occult, miraculous and significant process of its forces in the motion of Nature. This action, this movement, is not confined even in ourselves and those around us to the little fragmentary portion of the cosmic activities of which we in our superficial consciousness are aware; it is supported by an immense underlying environing existence subliminal to our minds or subconscious, and it is attracted by an immense transcending existence which is superconscious to our nature. Our action arises, as we ourselves have emerged, out of a universality of which we are not aware; we give it a shape by our personal temperament, personal mind and will of thought or force of impulse or desire; but the true truth of things, the true law of action exceeds these personal and human formations. Every standpoint, every man-made rule of action which ignores the indivisible totality of the cosmic movement, whatever its utility in external practice, is to the eye of spiritual Truth an imperfect view and a law of the Ignorance.
  2:Even when we have arrived at some glimpse of this idea or succeeded in fixing it in our consciousness as a knowledge of the mind and a consequent attitude of the soul, it is difficult for us in our outward parts and active nature to square accounts between this universal standpoint and the claims of our personal opinion, our personal will, our personal emotion and desire. We are forced still to go on dealing with this indivisible movement as if it were a mass of impersonal material out of which we, the ego, the person, have to carve something according to our own will and mental fantasy by a personal struggle and effort. This is man's normal attitude towards his environment, actually false because our ego and its will are creations and puppets of the cosmic forces and it is only when we withdraw from ego into the consciousness of the divine Knowledge-Will of the Eternal who acts in them that we can be by a sort of deputation from above their master. And yet is this personal position the right attitude for man so long as he cherishes his individuality and has not yet fully developed it; for without this view-point and motiveforce he cannot grow in his ego, cannot sufficiently develop and differentiate himself out of the subconscious or half-conscious universal mass-existence.
  --
  5:If we are to be free in the spirit, if we are to be subject only to the supreme Truth, we must discard the idea that our mental or moral laws are binding on the Infinite or that there can be anything sacrosanct, absolute or eternal even in the highest of our existing standards of conduct. To form higher and higher temporary standards as long as they are needed is to serve the Divine in his world march; to erect rigidly an absolute standard is to attempt the erection of a barrier against the eternal waters in their onflow. Once the nature-bound soul realises this truth, it is delivered from the duality of good and evil. For good is all that helps the individual and the world towards their divine fullness, and evil is all that retards or breaks up that increasing perfection. But since the perfection is progressive, evolutive in Time, good and evil are also shifting quantities and change from time to time their meaning and value. This thing which is evil now and in its present shape must be abandoned was once helpful and necessary to the general and individual progress. That other thing which we now regard as evil may well become in another form and arrangement an element in some future perfection. And on the spiritual level we transcend even this distinction; for we discover the purpose and divine utility of all these things that we call good and evil. Then have we to reject the falsehood in them and all that is distorted, ignorant and obscure in that which is called good no less than in that which is called evil. For we have then to accept only the true and the divine, but to make no other distinction in the eternal processes.
  6:To those who can act only on a rigid standard, to those who can feel only the human and not the divine values, this truth may seem to be a dangerous concession which is likely to destroy the very foundation of morality, confuse all conduct and establish only chaos. Certainly, if the choice must be between an eternal and unchanging ethics and no ethics at all, it would have that result for man in his ignorance. But even on the human level, if we have light enough and flexibility enough to recognise that a standard of conduct may be temporary and yet necessary for its time and to observe it faithfully until it can be replaced by a better, then we suffer no such loss, but lose only the fanaticism of an imperfect and intolerant virtue. In its place we gain openness and a power of continual moral progression, charity, the capacity to enter into an understanding sympathy with all this world of struggling and stumbling creatures and by that charity a better right and a greater strength to help it upon its way. In the end where the human closes and the divine commences, where the mental disappears into the supramental consciousness and the finite precipitates itself into the infinite, all evil disappears into a transcendent divine Good which becomes universal on every plane of consciousness that it touches.
  --
  24:The ethical idealist tries to discover this supreme law in his own moral data, in the inferior powers and factors that belong to the mental and ethical formula. And to sustain and organise them he selects a fundamental principle of conduct essentially unsound and constructed by the intellect - utility, hedonism, reason, intuitive conscience or any other generalised standard. All such efforts are foredoomed to failure. Our inner nature is the progressive expression of the eternal Spirit and too complex a power to be tied down by a single dominant mental or moral principle. Only the supramental consciousness can reveal to its differing and conflicting forces their spiritual truth and harmonise their divergences.
  25:The later religions endeavour to fix the type of a supreme truth of conduct, erect a system and declare God's law through the mouth of Avatar or prophet. These systems, more powerful and dynamic than the dry ethical idea, are yet for the most part no more than idealistic glorifications of the moral principle sanctified by religious emotion and the label of a superhuman origin. Some, like the extreme Christian ethic, are rejected by Nature because they insist unworkably on an impracticable absolute rule. Others prove in the end to be evolutionary compromises and become obsolete in the march of Time. The true divine law, unlike these mental counterfeits, cannot be a system of rigid ethical determinations that press into their cast-iron moulds all our life-movements. The Law divine is truth of life and truth of the spirit and must take up with a free living plasticity and inspire with the direct touch of its eternal light each step of our action and all the complexity of our life issues. It must act not as a rule and formula but as an enveloping and penetrating conscious presence that determines all our thoughts, activities, feelings, impulsions of will by its infallible power and knowledge.

1.08 - Civilisation and Barbarism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Moreover, although man has not yet really heard and understood the message of the sages,know thyself, he has accepted the message of the thinker, educate thyself, and, what is more, he has understood that the possession of education imposes on him the duty of imparting his knowledge to others. The idea of the necessity of general education means the recognition by the race that the mind and not the life and the body are the man and that without the development of the mind he does not possess his true manhood. The idea of education is still primarily that of intelligence and mental capacity and knowledge of the world and things, but secondarily also of moral training and, though as yet very imperfectly, of the development of the aesthetic faculties. The intelligent thinking being, moralised, controlling his instincts and emotions by his will and his reason, acquainted with all that he should know of the world and his past, capable of organising intelligently by that knowledge his social and economic life, ordering rightly his bodily habits and physical being, this is the conception that now governs civilised humanity. It is, in essence, a return to and a larger development of the old Hellenic ideal, with a greater stress on capacity and utility and a very diminished stress on beauty and refinement. We may suppose, however, that this is only a passing phase; the lost elements are bound to recover their importance as soon as the commercial period of modern progress has been overpassed, and with that recovery, not yet in sight but inevitable, we shall have all the proper elements for the development of man as a mental being.
  The old Hellenic or Graeco-Roman civilisation perished, among other reasons, because it only imperfectly generalised culture in its own society and was surrounded by huge masses of humanity who were still possessed by the barbarian habit of mind. Civilisation can never be safe so long as, confining the cultured mentality to a small minority, it nourishes in its bosom a tremendous mass of ignorance, a multitude, a proletariate. Either knowledge must enlarge itself from above or be always in danger of submergence by the ignorant night from below. Still more must it be unsafe, if it allows enormous numbers of men to exist outside its pale uninformed by its light, full of the natural vigour of the barbarian, who may at any moment seize upon the physical weapons of the civilised without undergoing an intellectual transformation by their culture. The Graeco-Roman culture perished from within and from without, from without by the floods of Teutonic barbarism, from within by the loss of its vitality. It gave the proletariate some measure of comfort and amusement, but did not raise it into the light. When light came to the masses, it was from outside in the form of the Christian religion which arrived as an enemy of the old culture. Appealing to the poor, the oppressed and the ignorant, it sought to capture the soul and the ethical being, but cared little or not at all for the thinking mind, content that that should remain in darkness if the heart could be brought to feel religious truth. When the barbarians captured the Western world, it was in the same way content to Christianise them, but made it no part of its function to intellectualise. Distrustful even of the free play of intelligence, Christian ecclesiasticism and monasticism became anti-intellectual and it was left to the Arabs to reintroduce the beginnings of scientific and philosophical knowledge into a semi-barbarous Christendom and to the half-pagan spirit of the Renaissance and a long struggle between religion and science to complete the return of a free intellectual culture in the re-emerging mind of Europe. Knowledge must be aggressive, if it wishes to survive and perpetuate itself; to leave an extensive ignorance either below or around it, is to expose humanity to the perpetual danger of a barbaric relapse.
  --
  But if Science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deeper culture and if in spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible the return of the true materialism, that of the barbarian mentality, it has encouraged more or less indirectly both by its attitude to life and its discoveries another kind of barbarism,for it can be called by no other name,that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life. The characteristic of Life is desire and the instinct of possession. Just as the physical barbarian makes the excellence of the body and the development of physical force, health and prowess his standard and aim, so the vitalistic or economic barbarian makes the satisfaction of wants and desires and the accumulation of possessions his standard and aim. His ideal man is not the cultured or noble or thoughtful or moral or religious, but the successful man. To arrive, to succeed, to produce, to accumulate, to possess is his existence. The accumulation of wealth and more wealth, the adding of possessions to possessions, opulence, show, pleasure, a cumbrous inartistic luxury, a plethora of conveniences, life devoid of beauty and nobility, religion vulgarised or coldly formalised, politics and government turned into a trade and profession, enjoyment itself made a business, this is commercialism. To the natural unredeemed economic man beauty is a thing otiose or a nuisance, art and poetry a frivolity or an ostentation and a means of advertisement. His idea of civilisation is comfort, his idea of morals social respectability, his idea of politics the encouragement of industry, the opening of markets, exploitation and trade following the flag, his idea of religion at best a pietistic formalism or the satisfaction of certain vitalistic emotions. He values education for its utility in fitting a man for success in a competitive or, it may be, a socialised industrial existence, science for the useful inventions and knowledge, the comforts, conveniences, machinery of production with which it arms him, its power for organisation, regulation, stimulus to production. The opulent plutocrat and the successful mammoth capitalist and organiser of industry are the supermen of the commercial age and the true, if often occult rulers of its society.
  The essential barbarism of all this is its pursuit of vital success, satisfaction, productiveness, accumulation, possession, enjoyment, comfort, convenience for their own sake. The vital part of the being is an element in the integral human existence as much as the physical part; it has its place but must not exceed its place. A full and well-appointed life is desirable for man living in society, but on condition that it is also a true and beautiful life. Neither the life nor the body exist for their own sake, but as vehicle and instrument of a good higher than their own. They must be subordinated to the superior needs of the mental being, chastened and purified by a greater law of truth, good and beauty before they can take their proper place in the integrality of human perfection. Therefore in a commercial age with its ideal, vulgar and barbarous, of success, vitalistic satisfaction, productiveness and possession the soul of man may linger a while for certain gains and experiences, but cannot permanently rest. If it persisted too long, Life would become clogged and perish of its own plethora or burst in its straining to a gross expansion. Like the too massive Titan it will collapse by its own mass, mole ruet sua.

1.08 - Psycho therapy Today, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  piactical utility to the collectives ends. The natural course of
  psychological development is succeeded, not by a spiritual direction which

1.09 - SKIRMISHES IN A WAY WITH THE AGE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  "free one from the Will"; and what he honoured as the great utility
  of tragedy, was that it "made people more resigned."--But this, as
  --
  they are regarded from the wretched standpoint of public utility. The
  fact that no advantage can be derived from them--_this in itself may

1.1.01 - Certitudes, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  To enter into relations with God is Yoga, the highest rapture & the noblest utility. There are relations within the compass of the humanity we have developed. These are called prayer, worship, adoration, sacrifice, thought, faith, science, philosophy. There are other relations beyond our developed capacity, but within the compass of the humanity we have yet to develop. Those are the relations that are attained by the various practices we usually call Yoga.
  We may not know him as God, we may know him as Nature, our Higher Self, Infinity, some ineffable goal. It was so that Buddha approached Him; so approaches him the rigid Adwaitin. He is accessible even to the Atheist. To the materialist He disguises Himself in matter. For the Nihilist he waits ambushed in the bosom of Annihilation.

1.1.05 - The Siddhis, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  I do not wish to argue the question of the existence or nonexistence of Yogic siddhis; for it is not with me a question of debate, or of belief and disbelief, since I know by daily experience that they exist. I am concerned rather with their exact nature and utility. And here one is met by the now fashionable habit, among people presuming to be Vedantic and spiritual, of a denunciation and holy horror of the Yogic siddhis. They are, it seems, Tantric, dangerous, immoral, delusive as conjuring tricks, a stumbling block in the path of the soul's liberation. Swami Vivekananda did much to encourage this attitude by his eagerness to avoid all mention of them at the outset of his mission in order not to
  The Siddhis

1.10 - The Absolute of the Being, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  It is this facility which permits, for example, some Indian schemes to distinguish three modes of being in the supreme manifestation, three divine worlds, those of pure existence, of the beings infinite conscious energy and of the beatitudes of its infinite consciousness. These three worlds or degrees of the absolute activity are for the intellectual thought only abstract symbols by which the mind attempts to translate the absolute Reality at the very limit indeed of its relative categories, but still by their aid. Yet the attempt has its utility, for if it cannot procure for the mind any direct vision of the Unknowable, it has at least this result that it gives it certain indirect perceptions of That by permitting it to descend in its own depths to its principles.
  ***

1.10 - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The history of the Veda is one of the most remarkable & paradoxical phenomena of human experience. In the belief of the ancient Indians the three Vedas, books believed to be inspired directly from the source of all Truth, books at any rate of an incalculable antiquity and of a time-honoured sanctity, were believed to be the repositories of a divine knowledge. The man who was a Veda knower, Vedavid, had access to the deepest knowledge about God and existence. He knew the one thing that was eternally true, the one thing thoroughly worth knowing. The right possession of the ancient hymns was not supposed to be possible by a superficial reading, not supposed to result directly even from a mastery of the scholastic aids to a right understanding,grammar, language, prosody, astronomy, ritual, pronunciation,but depended finally and essentially on explanation by a fit spiritual teacher who understood the inner sense that was couched in the linguistic forms & figures of the Scriptures. The Veda so understood was held to be the fountain, the bedrock, the master-volume of all true Hinduism; that which accepted not the Veda, was and must be instantly departure from the right path, the true truth. Even when the material & ritualistic sense of the Veda had so much dominated & hidden in mens ideas of it its higher parts that to go beyond it seemed imperative, the reverence for this ancient Scripture remained intact. At the time when the Gita in its modern form was composed, we find this double attitude dominant. There is a strong censure of the formalists, the ritualists, who constantly dispute about the Veda and hold it as a creed that there is no other truth and who apply it only for the acquisition of worldly mastery and enjoyments, but at the same time the great store of spiritual truth in the old sacred writings and their high value are never doubted or depreciated. There is in all the Vedas as much utility to the Brahma-knower as to one who would drink there is utility in a well flooded with water on all its sides. Krishna speaking as God Himself declares I alone am He who is to be known by all the Vedas; I am He who made Vedanta and who know the Veda. The sanctity and spiritual value of the Vedas could not receive a more solemn seal of confirmation. It is evident also from this last passage that the more modern distinction which grew upon the Hindu mind with the fading of Vedic knowledge, the distinction by which the old Rigveda and Sama and Yajur are put aside as ritualistic writings, possessing a value only for ceremonial of sacrifice, and all search for spiritual knowledge is confined to the Vedanta, was unrecognised & even unknown to the writer of the Gita. To him the Vedas are writings full of spiritual truth; the language of the line Vedaish cha sarvair aham eva vedyo, the significance of the double emphasis in the etymological sense of knowledge in Vedavid, the knower of the book of knowledge as well as in vedair vedyo are unmistakable. Other means of knowledge even more powerful than study of the Vedas the Gita recognises; but in its epoch the Veda even as apart from the Upanishads still held its place of honour as the repository of the high and divine knowledge; it still bore upon it the triple seal of the Brahmavidya.
  When was this traditional honour first lost or at least tarnished and the ancient Scripture relegated to the inferior position it occupies in the thought of Shankaracharya? I presume there can be little doubt that the chief agent in this work of destruction was the power of Buddhism. The preachings of Gautama and his followers worked against Vedic knowledge by a double process. First, by entirely denying the authority of the Veda, laying a violent stress on its ritualistic character and destroying the general practice of formal sacrifice, it brought the study of the Veda into disrepute as a means of attaining the highest good while at the same time it destroyed the necessity of that study for ritualistic purposes which had hitherto kept alive the old Vedic studies; secondly, in a less direct fashion, by substituting for a time at least the vernacular tongues for the old simple Sanscrit as the more common & popular means of religious propaganda and by giving them a literary position and repute, it made a general return to the old generality of the Vedic studies practically impossible. For the Vedas were written in an ancient form of the literary tongue the real secret of which had already been to a great extent lost even to the learned; such knowledge of it as remained, subsisted with difficulty by means of a laborious memorising and a traditional scholarship, conservative indeed but still slowly diminishing and replacing more & more real knowledge by uncertainty, disputed significance and the continuously increasing ingenuities of the ritualist, the grammarian and the sectarian polemical disputant. When after the fall of the Buddhistic Mauryas, feeble successors of the great Asoka, first under Pushyamitra and his son and afterwards under the Guptas, Hinduism revived, a return to the old forms of the creed and the old Vedic scholarship was no longer possible. The old pre-Buddhistic Sanscrit was, to all appearance, a simple, vigorous, living language understood though not spoken by the more intelligent of the common people just as the literary language of Bengal, the language of Bankim Chandra, is understood by every intelligent Bengali, although in speech more contracted forms and a very different vocabulary are in use. But the new Sanscrit of the revival tended to be more & more a learned, scholarly, polished and rhetorical tongue, certainly one of the most smooth, stately & grandiose ever used by human lips, but needing a special & difficult education to understand its grammar, its rhetoric, its rolling compounds and its long flowing sentences. The archaic language of the Vedas ceased to be the common study even of the learned and was only mastered, one is constrained to believe with less & less efficiency, by a small number of scholars. An education in which it took seven years to master the grammar of the language, became inevitably the grave of all true Vedic knowledge. Veda ceased to be the pivot of the Hindu religion, and its place was taken by the only religious compositions which were modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, Sanscrit as the more common & popular means of religious propaganda and by giving them a literary position and repute, it made a general return to the old generality of the Vedic studies practically impossible. For the Vedas were written in an ancient form of the literary tongue the real secret of which had already been to a great extent lost even to the learned; such knowledge of it as remained, subsisted with difficulty by means of a laborious memorising and a traditional scholarship, conservative indeed but still slowly diminishing and replacing more & more real knowledge by uncertainty, disputed significance and the continuously increasing ingenuities of the ritualist, the grammarian and the sectarian polemical disputant. When after the fall of the Buddhistic Mauryas, feeble successors of the great Asoka, first under Pushyamitra and his son and afterwards under the Guptas, Hinduism revived, a return to the old forms of the creed and the old Vedic scholarship was no longer possible. The old pre-Buddhistic Sanscrit was, to all appearance, a simple, vigorous, living language understood though not spoken by the more intelligent of the common people just as the literary language of Bengal, the language of Bankim Chandra, is understood by every intelligent Bengali, although in speech more contracted forms and a very different vocabulary are in use. But the new Sanscrit of the revival tended to be more & more a learned, scholarly, polished and rhetorical tongue, certainly one of the most smooth, stately & grandiose ever used by human lips, but needing a special & difficult education to understand its grammar, its rhetoric, its rolling compounds and its long flowing sentences. The archaic language of the Vedas ceased to be the common study even of the learned and was only mastered, one is constrained to believe with less & less efficiency, by a small number of scholars. An education in which it took seven years to master the grammar of the language, became inevitably the grave of all true Vedic knowledge. Veda ceased to be the pivot of the Hindu religion, and its place was taken by the only religious compositions which were modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, a Scripture of ritual and of animal sacrifice, persisted in the popular mind even after the decline of Buddhism and the revival of great philosophies ostensibly based on Vedic authority. It was under the dominance of this ritualistic conception that Sayana wrote his great commentary which has ever since been to the Indian Pundit the one decisive authority on the sense of Veda. The four Vedas have definitely taken a subordinate place as karmakanda, books of ritual; and to the Upanishads alone, in spite of occasional appeals to the text of the earlier Scriptures, is reserved that aspect of spiritual knowledge & teaching which alone justifies the application to any human composition of the great name of Veda.

1.10 - The Yoga of the Intelligent Will, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  I have declared to you the poise of a self-liberating intelligence in Sankhya, says the divine Teacher to Arjuna. I will now declare to you another poise in Yoga. You are shrinking from the results of your works, you desire other results and turn from your right path in life because it does not lead you to them. But this idea of works and their result, desire of result as the motive, the work as a means for the satisfaction of desire, is the bondage of the ignorant who know not what works are, nor their true source, nor their real operation, nor their high utility. My Yoga will free you from all bondage of the soul to its works, karmabandham prahasyasi. You are afraid of many things, afraid of sin, afraid of suffering, afraid of hell and punishment, afraid of God, afraid of this world, afraid of the hereafter, afraid of yourself. What is it that you are not afraid of at this moment, you the Aryan fighter, the world's chief hero? But this is the great fear which besieges humanity, its fear of sin and suffering now and hereafter, its fear in a world of whose true nature it is ignorant, of a God whose true being also it has not seen and
  The Yoga of the Intelligent Will

1.11 - Delight of Existence - The Problem, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  13:If, then, the ethical standpoint applies only to a temporary though all-important passage from one universality to another, we cannot apply it to the total solution of the problem of the universe, but can only admit it as one element in that solution. To do otherwise is to run into the peril of falsifying all the facts of the universe, all the meaning of the evolution behind and beyond us in order to suit a temporary outlook and a half-evolved view of the utility of things. The world has three layers, infra-ethical, ethical and supra-ethical. We have to find that which is common to all; for only so can we resolve the problem.
  14:That which is common to all is, we have seen, the satisfaction of conscious-force of existence developing itself into forms and seeking in that development its delight. From that satisfaction or delight of self-existence it evidently began; for it is that which is normal to it, to which it clings, which it makes its base; but it seeks new forms of itself and in the passage to higher forms there intervenes the phenomenon of pain and suffering which seems to contradict the fundamental nature of its being. This and this alone is the root-problem.

1.11 - GOOD AND EVIL, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  We see then that, for the Perennial Philosophy, good is the separate selfs conformity to, and finally annihilation in, the divine Ground which gives it being; evil, the intensification of separateness, the refusal to know that the Ground exists. This doctrine is, of course, perfectly compatible with the formulation of ethical principles as a series of negative and positive divine commandments, or even in terms of social utility. The crimes which are everywhere forbidden proceed from states of mind which are everywhere condemned as wrong; and these wrong states of mind are, as a matter of empirical fact, absolutely incompatible with that unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, which, according to the Perennial Philosophy, is the supreme good.
  next chapter: 1.12 - TIME AND ETERNITY

1.11 - The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and
  streng thening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in

1.11 - The Kalki Avatar, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  tion of human nature has no meaning and no utility and no
  value. What is the use of admitting Avatarhood if you take

1.11 - The Reason as Governor of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The highest power of reason, because its pure and characteristic power, is the disinterested seeking after true knowledge. When knowledge is pursued for its own sake, then alone are we likely to arrive at true knowledge. Afterwards we may utilise that knowledge for various ends; but if from the beginning we have only particular ends in view, then we limit our intellectual gain, limit our view of things, distort the truth because we cast it into the mould of some particular idea or utility and ignore or deny all that conflicts with that utility or that set idea. By so doing we may indeed make the reason act with great immediate power within the limits of the idea or the utility we have in view, just as instinct in the animal acts with great power within certain limits, for a certain end, yet finds itself helpless outside those limits. It is so indeed that the ordinary man uses his reasonas the animal uses his hereditary, transmitted instinctwith an absorbed devotion of it to the securing of some particular utility or with a useful but hardly luminous application of a customary and transmitted reasoning to the necessary practical interests of his life. Even the thinking man ordinarily limits his reason to the working out of certain preferred ideas; he ignores or denies all that is not useful to these or does not assist or justify or actually contradicts or seriously modifies them,except in so far as life itself compels or cautions him to accept modifications for the time being or ignore their necessity at his peril. It is in such limits that mans reason normally acts. He follows most commonly some interest or set of interests; he tramples down or through or ignores or pushes aside all truth of life and existence, truth of ethics, truth of beauty, truth of reason, truth of spirit which conflicts with his chosen opinions and interests; if he recognises these foreign elements, it is nominally, not in practice, or else with a distortion, a glossing which nullifies their consequences, perverts their spirit or whittles down their significance. It is this subjection to the interests, needs, instincts, passions, prejudices, traditional ideas and opinions of the ordinary mind1 which constitutes the irrationality of human existence.
  But even the man who is capable of governing his life by ideas, who recognises, that is to say, that it ought to express clearly conceived truths and principles of his being or of all being and tries to find out or to know from others what these are, is not often capable of the highest, the free and disinterested use of his rational mind. As others are subject to the tyranny of their interests, prejudices, instincts or passions, so he is subjected to the tyranny of ideas. Indeed, he turns these ideas into interests, obscures them with his prejudices and passions and is unable to think freely about them, unable to distinguish their limits or the relation to them of other, different and opposite ideas and the equal right of these also to existence. Thus, as we constantly see, individuals, masses of men, whole generations are carried away by certain ethical, religious, aesthetic, political ideas or a set of ideas, espouse them with passion, pursue them as interests, seek to make them a system and lasting rule of life and are swept away in the drive of their action and do not really use the free and disinterested reason for the right knowledge of existence and for its right and sane government. The ideas are to a certain extent fulfilled, they triumph for a time, but their very success brings disappointment and disillusionment. This happens, first, because they can only succeed by compromises and pacts with the inferior, irrational life of man which diminish their validity and tarnish their light and glory. Often indeed their triumph is convicted of unreality, and doubt and disillusionment fall on the faith and enthusiasm which brought victory to their side. But even were it not so, the ideas themselves are partial and insufficient; not only have they a very partial triumph, but if their success were complete, it would still disappoint, because they are not the whole truth of life and therefore cannot securely govern and perfect life. Life escapes from the formulas and systems which our reason labours to impose on it; it proclaims itself too complex, too full of infinite potentialities to be tyrannised over by the arbitrary intellect of man.

1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  an insistent utility of farther life in the mortal body which we
  do not overcome until we have passed beyond all types to the

1.12 - The Office and Limitations of the Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This view of human life and of the process of our development, to which subjectivism readily leads us, gives us a truer vision of the place of the intellect in the human movement. We have seen that the intellect has a double working, dispassionate and interested, self-centred or subservient to movements not its own. The one is a disinterested pursuit of truth for the sake of Truth and of knowledge for the sake of Knowledge without any ulterior motive, with every consideration put away except the rule of keeping the eye on the object, on the fact under enquiry and finding out its truth, its process, its law. The other is coloured by the passion for practice, the desire to govern life by the truth discovered or the fascination of an idea which we labour to establish as the sovereign law of our life and action. We have seen indeed that this is the superiority of reason over the other faculties of man that it is not confined to a separate absorbed action of its own, but plays upon all the others, discovers their law and truth, makes its discoveries serviceable to them and even in pursuing its own bent and end serves also their ends and arrives at a catholic utility. Man in fact does not live for knowledge alone; life in its widest sense is his principal preoccupation and he seeks knowledge for its utility to life much more than for the pure pleasure of acquiring knowledge. But it is precisely in this putting of knowledge at the service of life that the human intellect falls into that confusion and imperfection which pursues all human action. So long as we pursue knowledge for its own sake, there is nothing to be said: the reason is performing its natural function; it is exercising securely its highest right. In the work of the philosopher, the scientist, the savant labouring to add something to the stock of our ascertainable knowledge, there is as perfect a purity and satisfaction as in that of the poet and artist creating forms of beauty for the aesthetic delight of the race. Whatever individual error and limitation there may be, does not matter; for the collective and progressive knowledge of the race has gained the truth that has been discovered and may be trusted in time to get rid of the error. It is when it tries to apply ideas to life that the human intellect stumbles and finds itself at fault.
  Ordinarily, this is because in concerning itself with action the intelligence of man becomes at once partial and passionate and makes itself the servant of something other than the pure truth. But even if the intellect keeps itself as impartial and disinterested as possible, and altogether impartial, altogether disinterested the human intellect cannot be unless it is content to arrive at an entire divorce from practice or a sort of large but ineffective tolerantism, eclecticism or sceptical curiosity,still the truths it discovers or the ideas it promulgates become, the moment they are applied to life, the plaything of forces over which the reason has little control. Science pursuing its cold and even way has made discoveries which have served on one side a practical humanitarianism, on the other supplied monstrous weapons to egoism and mutual destruction; it has made possible a gigantic efficiency of organisation which has been used on one side for the economic and social amelioration of the nations and on the other for turning each into a colossal battering-ram of aggression, ruin and slaughter. It has given rise on the one side to a large rationalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, on the other it has justified a godless egoism, vitalism, vulgar will to power and success. It has drawn mankind together and given it a new hope and at the same time crushed it with the burden of a monstrous commercialism. Nor is this due, as is so often asserted, to its divorce from religion or to any lack of idealism. Idealistic philosophy has been equally at the service of the powers of good and evil and provided an intellectual conviction both for reaction and for progress. Organised religion itself has often enough in the past hounded men to crime and massacre and justified obscurantism and oppression.

1.12 - The Significance of Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  (done for the sake of the world, lokasangraha, as is made clear immediately afterward); for by doing work without attachment man attains to the highest. For it was even by works that Janaka and the rest attained to perfection." It is true that works and sacrifice are a means of arriving at the highest good, sreyah. param avapsyatha; but there are three kinds of works, that done without sacrifice for personal enjoyment which is entirely selfish and egoistic and misses the true law and aim and utility of life, mogham partha sa jvati, that done with desire, but with sacrifice and the enjoyment only as a result of sacrifice and therefore to that extent consecrated and sanctified, and that done without desire or attachment of any kind. It is the last which brings the soul of man to the highest, param apnoti purus.ah..
  The whole sense and drift of this teaching turns upon the interpretation we are to give to the important words, yajna, karma, brahma, sacrifice, work, Brahman. If the sacrifice is simply the Vedic sacrifice, if the work from which it is born is the Vedic rule of works and if the brahman from which the work itself is born is the sabdabrahman in the sense only of the
  --
  But he may be known in an inferior action through the devas, the gods, the powers of the divine Soul in Nature and in the eternal interaction of these powers and the soul of man, mutually giving and receiving, mutually helping, increasing, raising each other's workings and satisfaction, a commerce in which man rises towards a growing fitness for the supreme good. He recognises that his life is a part of this divine action in Nature and not a thing separate and to be held and pursued for its own sake. He regards his enjoyments and the satisfaction of his desires as the fruit of sacrifice and the gift of the gods in their divine universal workings and he ceases to pursue them in the false and evil spirit of sinful egoistic selfishness as if they were a good to be seized from life by his own unaided strength without return and without thankfulness. As this spirit increases in him, he subordinates his desires, becomes satisfied with sacrifice as the law of life and works and is content with whatever remains over from the sacrifice, giving up all the rest freely as an offering in the great and beneficent interchange between his life and the worldlife. Whoever goes contrary to this law of action and pursues works and enjoyment for his own isolated personal self-interest, lives in vain; he misses the true meaning and aim and utility of living and the upward growth of the soul; he is not on the path which leads to the highest good. But the highest only comes when the sacrifice is no longer to the gods, but to the one allpervading Divine established in the sacrifice, of whom the gods are inferior forms and powers, and when he puts away the lower self that desires and enjoys and gives up his personal sense of being the worker to the true executrix of all works, Prakriti, and his personal sense of being the enjoyer to the Divine Purusha, the higher and universal Self who is the real enjoyer of the works of Prakriti. In that Self and not in any personal enjoyment he finds now his sole satisfaction, complete content, pure delight; he has nothing to gain by action or inaction, depends neither on gods nor men for anything, seeks no profit from any, for the self-delight is all-sufficient to him, but does works for the sake of the Divine only, as a pure sacrifice, without attachment or desire. Thus he gains equality and becomes free from the
  The Significance of Sacrifice

1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Therefore, instead of swooning on top (or what he feels as the top), and assuming his ecstasy to be a sign of progress, the seeker must understand that it is a sign of unconsciousness and strive to uncover the actual life hidden beneath his bedazzlement: Strive to develop your inner individuality, said the Mother, and you will become able to enter those same regions fully conscious, to have the joy of communion with the highest regions without losing consciousness and returning with a zero instead of an experience. 180 And Sri Aurobindo insisted: It is in the waking state that this realization must come and endure in order to be a reality of life. . . . Experience and trance have their utility for opening the being and preparing it, but it is only when the realization is constant in the waking state that it is truly possessed.181 The goal we are seeking is a state of integral mastery, not that of spiritual escapism, and that mastery is possible only in a continuity of consciousness. When we fall into ecstasy, we lose the "someone" who could be the bridge between the powers above and the powerlessness below.
  After breaking through the carapace at the top of the head in Alipore jail, Sri Aurobindo began methodically to explore the planes of consciousness above the ordinary mind, just as in Baroda he had explored the planes of consciousness below. He resumed where he had left off the ascent of the great ladder of consciousness, which extends without gap or ecstatic interlude from Matter to that unknown point where he would truly discover something new. For the highest truth, the integral self-knowledge is not to be gained by this selfblinded leap into the Absolute but by a patient transit beyond the mind.182

1.13 - Reason and Religion, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Hellenic ideal was roughly expressed in the old Latin maxim, a sound mind in a sound body. And by a sound body the ancients meant a healthy and beautiful body well-fitted for the rational use and enjoyment of life. And by a sound mind they meant a clear and balanced reason and an enlightened and well-trained mentality,trained in the sense of ancient, not of modern education. It was not to be packed with all available information and ideas, cast in the mould of science and a rational utility and so prepared for the efficient performance of social and civic needs and duties, for a professional avocation or for an intellectual pursuit; rather it was to be cultured in all its human capacities intellectual, moral, aesthetic, trained to use them rightly and to range freely, intelligently and flexibly in all questions and in all practical matters of philosophy, science, art, politics and social living. The ancient Greek mind was philosophic, aesthetic and political; the modern mind has been scientific, economic and utilitarian. The ancient ideal laid stress on soundness and beauty and sought to build up a fine and rational human life; the modern lays very little or no stress on beauty, prefers rational and practical soundness, useful adaptation, just mechanism and seeks to build up a well-ordered, well-informed and efficient human life. Both take it that man is partly a mental, partly a physical being with the mentalised physical life for his field and reason for his highest attribute and his highest possibility. But if we follow to the end the new vistas opened by the most advanced tendencies of a subjective age, we shall be led back to a still more ancient truth and ideal that overtops both the Hellenic and the modern levels. For we shall then seize the truth that man is a developing spirit trying here to find and fulfil itself in the forms of mind, life and body; and we shall perceive luminously growing before us the greater ideal of a deeply conscious self-illumined, self-possessing, self-mastering soul in a pure and perfect mind and body. The wider field it seeks will be, not the mentalised physical life with which man has started, but a new spiritualised life inward and outward, by which the perfected internal figures itself in a perfected external living. Beyond mans long intelligent effort towards a perfected culture and a rational society there opens the old religious and spiritual ideal, the hope of the kingdom of heaven within us and the city of God upon earth.
  But if the soul is the true sovereign and if its spiritual self-finding, its progressive largest widest integral fulfilment by the power of the spirit are to be accepted as the ultimate secret of our evolution, then since certainly the instinctive being of man below reason is not the means of attaining that high end and since we find that reason also is an insufficient light and power, there must be a superior range of being with its own proper powers,liberated soul-faculties, a spiritual will and knowledge higher than the reason and intelligent will,by which alone an entire conscious self-fulfilment can become possible to the human being. We must remember that our aim of self-fulfilment is an integral unfolding of the Divine within us, a complete evolution of the hidden divinity in the individual soul and the collective life. Otherwise we may simply come back to an old idea of individual and social living which had its greatness, but did not provide all the conditions of our perfection. That was the idea of a spiritualised typal society. It proceeded upon the supposition that each man has his own peculiar nature which is born from and reflects one element of the divine nature. The character of each individual, his ethical type, his training, his social occupation, his spiritual possibility must be formed or developed within the conditions of that peculiar element; the perfection he seeks in this life must be according to its law. The theory of ancient Indian cultureits practice, as is the way of human practice, did not always correspond to the theoryworked upon this supposition. It divided man in society into the fourfold orderan at once spiritual, psychic, ethical and economic orderof the Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra,practically, the spiritual and intellectual man, the dynamic man of will, the vital, hedonistic and economic man, the material man; the whole society organised in these four constituent classes represented the complete image of the creative and active Godhead.
  --
  The unaided intellectual reason faced with the phenomena of the religious life is naturally apt to adopt one of two attitudes, both of them shallow in the extreme, hastily presumptuous and erroneous. Either it views the whole thing as a mass of superstition, a mystical nonsense, a farrago of ignorant barbaric survivals,that was the extreme spirit of the rationalist now happily, though not dead, yet much weakened and almost moribund,or it patronises religion, tries to explain its origins, to get rid of it by the process of explaining it away; or it labours gently or forcefully to reject or correct its superstitions, crudities, absurdities, to purify it into an abstract nothingness or persuade it to purify itself in the light of the reasoning intelligence; or it allows it a role, leaves it perhaps for the edification of the ignorant, admits its value as a moralising influence or its utility to the State for keeping the lower classes in order, even perhaps tries to invent that strange chimera, a rational religion.
  The former attitude has on its positive side played a powerful part in the history of human thought, has even been of a considerable utility in its own waywe shall have to note briefly hereafter how and whyto human progress and in the end even to religion; but its intolerant negations are an arrogant falsity, as the human mind has now sufficiently begun to perceive. Its mistake is like that of a foreigner who thinks everything in an alien country absurd and inferior because these things are not his own ways of acting and thinking and cannot be cut out by his own measures or suited to his own standards. So the thoroughgoing rationalist asks the religious spirit, if it is to stand, to satisfy the material reason and even to give physical proof of its truths, while the very essence of religion is the discovery of the immaterial Spirit and the play of a supraphysical consciousness. So too he tries to judge religion by his idea of its externalities, just as an ignorant and obstreperous foreigner might try to judge a civilisation by the dress, outward colour of life and some of the most external peculiarities in the social manners of the inhabitants. That in this he errs in company with certain of the so-called religious themselves, may be his excuse, but cannot be the justification of his ignorance. The more moderate attitude of the rational mind has also played its part in the history of human thought. Its attempts to explain religion have resulted in the compilation of an immense mass of amazingly ingenious perversions, such as certain pseudo-scientific attempts to form a comparative Science of Religion. It has built up in the approved modern style immense facades of theory with stray bricks of misunderstood facts for their material. Its mild condonations of religion have led to superficial phases of thought which have passed quickly away and left no trace behind them. Its efforts at the creation of a rational religion, perfectly well-intentioned, but helpless and unconvincing, have had no appreciable effect and have failed like a dispersing cloud, chinnbhram iva nayati.
  The deepest heart, the inmost essence of religion, apart from its outward machinery of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the search for God and the finding of God. Its aspiration is to discover the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, the Divine, who is all these things and yet no abstraction but a Being. Its work is a sincere living out of the true and intimate relations between man and God, relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and delight, an absolute surrender and service, a casting of every part of our existence out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the Divine and a descent of the Divine into man. All this has nothing to do with the realm of reason or its normal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational. The knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence: it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and experience. Nor does that experience proceed by anything like rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking. Even in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed the reason and its timid scope. Even in those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating faculties are not imagination, logic and rational judgment, but revelations, inspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane of suprarational light. The love of God is an infinite and absolute feeling which does not admit of any rational limitation and does not use a language of rational worship and adoration; the delight in God is that peace and bliss which passes all understanding. The surrender to God is the surrender of the whole being to a suprarational light, will, power and love and his service takes no account of the compromises with life which the practical reason of man uses as the best part of its method in the ordinary conduct of mundane existence. Wherever religion really finds itself, wherever it opens itself to its own spirit,there is plenty of that sort of religious practice which is halting, imperfect, half-sincere, only half-sure of itself and in which reason can get in a word,its way is absolute and its fruits are ineffable.

1.1.4 - The Physical Mind and Sadhana, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It [chasing sparrows out of a garden because they made it dirty] was I suppose an idea that came through the physical mind, suggesting the following of a physical utility only and ignoring all other perceptions and motives. You must be on your guard against the ideas and suggestions of this physical mind and accept none without discrimination and subjection to a higher light.
  ***

1.15 - Conclusion, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  we can improve in others is of doubtful utility as a rule, if,
  indeed, it has any effect at all.

1.15 - The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Krishna, a Buddha, but is only the general condition of a higher aim and a more supreme and divine utility. For there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhavam agatah.; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve. This double aspect in the Gita's doctrine of Avatarhood is apt to be missed by the cursory reader satisfied, as most are, with catching a superficial view of its profound teachings, and it is missed too by the formal commentator petrified in the rigidity of the schools. Yet it is necessary, surely, to the whole meaning of the doctrine. Otherwise the Avatar idea would be only a dogma, a popular superstition, or an imaginative or mystic deification of historical or legendary supermen, not what the Gita makes all its teaching, a deep philosophical and religious truth and an essential part of or step to the supreme mystery of all, rahasyam uttamam.
  If there were not this rising of man into the Godhead to be helped by the descent of God into humanity, Avatarhood for the sake of the Dharma would be an otiose phenomenon, since mere Right, mere justice or standards of virtue can always be upheld by the divine omnipotence through its ordinary means, by great men or great movements, by the life and work of sages and kings and religious teachers, without any actual incarnation.

1.15 - The Suprarational Good, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This truth comes most easily home to us in Religion and in Art, in the cult of the spiritual and in the cult of the beautiful, because there we get away most thoroughly from the unrestful pressure of the outward appearances of life, the urgent siege of its necessities, the deafening clamour of its utilities. There we are not compelled at every turn to make terms with some gross material claim, some vulgar but inevitable necessity of the hour and the moment. We have leisure and breathing-time to seek the Real behind the apparent: we are allowed to turn our eyes either away from the temporary and transient or through the temporal itself to the eternal; we can draw back from the limitations of the immediately practical and re-create our souls by the touch of the ideal and the universal. We begin to shake off our chains, we get rid of life in its aspect of a prison-house with Necessity for our jailer and utility for our constant taskmaster; we are admitted to the liberties of the soul; we enter Gods infinite kingdom of beauty and delight or we lay hands on the keys of our absolute self-finding and open ourselves to the possession or the adoration of the Eternal. There lies the immense value of Religion, the immense value of Art and Poetry to the human spirit; it lies in their immediate power for inner truth, for self-enlargement, for liberation.
  But in other spheres of life, in the spheres of what by an irony of our ignorance we call especially practical life,although, if the Divine be our true object of search and realisation, our normal conduct in them and our current idea of them is the very opposite of practical,we are less ready to recognise the universal truth. We take a long time to admit it even partially in theory, we are seldom ready at all to follow it in practice. And we find this difficulty because there especially, in all our practical life, we are content to be the slaves of an outward Necessity and think ourselves always excused when we admit as the law of our thought, will and action the yoke of immediate and temporary utilities. Yet even there we must arrive eventually at the highest truth. We shall find out in the end that our daily life and our social existence are not things apart, are not another field of existence with another law than the inner and ideal. On the contrary, we shall never find out their true meaning or resolve their harsh and often agonising problems until we learn to see in them a means towards the discovery and the individual and collective expression of our highest and, because our highest, therefore our truest and fullest self, our largest most imperative principle and power of existence. All life is only a lavish and manifold opportunity given us to discover, realise, express the Divine.
  It is in our ethical being that this truest truth of practical life, its real and highest practicality becomes most readily apparent. It is true that the rational man has tried to reduce the ethical life like all the rest to a matter of reason, to determine its nature, its law, its practical action by some principle of reason, by some law of reason. He has never really succeeded and he never can really succeed; his appearances of success are mere pretences of the intellect building elegant and empty constructions with words and ideas, mere conventions of logic and vamped-up syntheses, in sum, pretentious failures which break down at the first strenuous touch of reality. Such was that extraordinary system of utilitarian ethics discovered in the nineteenth century the great century of science and reason and utilityby one of its most positive and systematic minds and now deservedly discredited. Happily, we need now only smile at its shallow pretentious errors, its substitution of a practical, outward and occasional test for the inner, subjective and absolute motive of ethics, its reduction of ethical action to an impossibly scientific and quite impracticable jugglery of moral mathematics, attractive enough to the reasoning and logical mind, quite false and alien to the whole instinct and intuition of the ethical being. Equally false and impracticable are other attempts of the reason to account for and regulate its principle and phenomena,the hedonistic theory which refers all virtue to the pleasure and satisfaction of the mind in good or the sociological which supposes ethics to be no more than a system of formulas of conduct generated from the social sense and a ruled direction of the social impulses and would regulate its action by that insufficient standard. The ethical being escapes from all these formulas: it is a law to itself and finds its principle in its own eternal nature which is not in its essential character a growth of evolving mind, even though it may seem to be that in its earthly history, but a light from the ideal, a reflection in man of the Divine.
  Not that all these errors have not each of them a truth behind their false constructions; for all errors of the human reason are false representations, a wrong building, effective misconstructions of the truth or of a side or a part of the truth. utility is a fundamental principle of existence and all fundamental principles of existence are in the end one; therefore it is true that the highest good is also the highest utility. It is true also that, not any balance of the greatest good of the greatest number, but simply the good of others and most widely the good of all is one ideal aim of our outgoing ethical practice; it is that which the ethical man would like to effect, if he could only find the way and be always sure what is the real good of all. But this does not help to regulate our ethical practice, nor does it supply us with its inner principle whether of being or of action, but only produces one of the many considerations by which we can feel our way along the road which is so difficult to travel. Good, not utility, must be the principle and standard of good; otherwise we fall into the hands of that dangerous pretender expediency, whose whole method is alien to the ethical. Moreover, the standard of utility, the judgment of utility, its spirit, its form, its application must vary with the individual nature, the habit of mind, the outlook on the world. Here there can be no reliable general law to which all can subscribe, no set of large governing principles such as it is sought to supply to our conduct by a true ethics. Nor can ethics at all or ever be a matter of calculation. There is only one safe rule for the ethical man, to stick to his principle of good, his instinct for good, his vision of good, his intuition of good and to govern by that his conduct. He may err, but he will be on his right road in spite of all stumblings, because he will be faithful to the law of his nature. The saying of the Gita is always true; better is the law of ones own nature though ill-performed, dangerous is an alien law however speciously superior it may seem to our reason. But the law of nature of the ethical being is the pursuit of good; it can never be the pursuit of utility.
  Neither is its law the pursuit of pleasure high or base, nor self-satisfaction of any kind, however subtle or even spiritual. It is true, here too, that the highest good is both in its nature and inner effect the highest bliss. Ananda, delight of being, is the spring of all existence and that to which it tends and for which it seeks openly or covertly in all its activities. It is true too that in virtue growing, in good accomplished there is great pleasure and that the seeking for it may well be always there as a subconscient motive to the pursuit of virtue. But for practical purposes this is a side aspect of the matter; it does not constitute pleasure into a test or standard of virtue. On the contrary, virtue comes to the natural man by a struggle with his pleasure-seeking nature and is often a deliberate embracing of pain, an edification of strength by suffering. We do not embrace that pain and struggle for the pleasure of the pain and the pleasure of the struggle; for that higher strenuous delight, though it is felt by the secret spirit in us, is not usually or not at first conscious in the conscient normal part of our being which is the field of the struggle. The action of the ethical man is not motived by even an inner pleasure, but by a call of his being, the necessity of an ideal, the figure of an absolute standard, a law of the Divine.

1.15 - The Value of Philosophy, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
  This view of philosophy appears to result, partly from a wrong conception of the ends of life, partly from a wrong conception of the kind of goods which philosophy strives to achieve. Physical science, through the medium of inventions, is useful to innumerable people who are wholly ignorant of it; thus the study of physical science is to be recommended, not only, or primarily, because of the effect on the student, but rather because of the effect on mankind in general. Thus utility does not belong to philosophy. If the study of philosophy has any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must be only indirectly, through its effects upon the lives of those who study it.
  It is in these effects, therefore, if anywhere, that the value of philosophy must be primarily sought.
  --
  Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy has a value--perhaps its chief value--through the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation. The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests: family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleagured fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife.
  One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile camps--friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad--it views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects. This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien.

1.16 - The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But all this seems to be something above our normal and usual being; it is something into which we strive to grow, but it does not seem to be the normal stuff, the natural being or atmosphere of the individual and the society in their ordinary consciousness and their daily life. That life is practical and not idealistic; it is concerned not with good, beauty, spiritual experience, the higher truth, but with interests, physical needs, desires, vital necessities. This is real to it, all the rest is a little shadowy; this belongs to its ordinary labour, all the rest to its leisure; this to the stuff of which it is made, all the rest to its parts of ornament and dispensable improvement. To all that rest society gives a place, but its heart is not there. It accepts ethics as a bond and an influence, but it does not live for ethical good; its real gods are vital need and utility and the desires of the body. If it governs its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire, utility in seeking their own satisfaction through many egoistic individuals would clash among themselves and destroy their own aims, it does not feel called upon to make its life entirely ethical. It concerns itself still less with beauty; even if it admits things beautiful as an embellishment and an amusement, a satisfaction and pastime of the eye and ear and mind, nothing moves it imperatively to make its life a thing of beauty. It allows religion a fixed place and portion, on holy days, in the church or temple, at the end of life when age and the approach of death call the attention forcibly away from this life to other life, at fixed times in the week or the day when it thinks it right for a moment to pause in the affairs of the world and remember God: but to make the whole of life a religion, a remembering of God and a seeking after him, is a thing that is not really done even in societies which like the Indian erect spirituality as their aim and principle. It admits philosophy in a still more remote fashion; and if nowadays it eagerly seeks after science, that is because science helps prodigiously the satisfaction of its vital desires, needs and interests: but it does not turn to seek after an entirely scientific life any more than after an entirely ethical life. A more complete effort in any one of these directions it leaves to the individual, to the few, and to individuals of a special type, the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the man of religion; it gives them a place, does some homage to them, assigns some room to the things they represent, but for itself it is content to follow mainly after its own inherent principle of vital satisfaction, vital necessity and utility, vital efficiency.
  The reason is that here we get to another power of our being which is different from the ethical, aesthetic, rational and religious,one which, even if we recognise it as lower in the scale, still insists on its own reality and has not only the right to exist but the right to satisfy itself and be fulfilled. It is indeed the primary power, it is the base of our existence upon earth, it is that which the others take as their starting-point and their foundation. This is the life-power in us, the vitalistic, the dynamic nature. Its whole principle and aim is to be, to assert its existence, to increase, to expand, to possess and to enjoy: its native terms are growth of being, pleasure and power. Life itself here is Being at labour in Matter to express itself in terms of conscious force; human life is the human being at labour to impress himself on the material world with the greatest possible force and intensity and extension. His primary insistent aim must be to live and make for himself a place in the world, for himself and his species, secondly, having made it to possess, produce and enjoy with an ever-widening scope, and finally to spread himself over all the earth-life and dominate it; this is and must be his first practical business. That is what the Darwinians have tried to express by their notion of the struggle for life. But the struggle is not merely to last and live, but to increase, enjoy and possess: its method includes and uses not only a principle and instinct of egoism, but a concomitant principle and instinct of association. Human life is moved by two equally powerful impulses, one of individualistic self-assertion, the other of collective self-assertion; it works by strife, but also by mutual assistance and united effort: it uses two diverse convergent forms of action, two motives which seem to be contradictory but are in fact always coexistent, competitive endeavour and cooperative endeavour. It is from this character of the dynamism of life that the whole structure of human society has come into being, and it is upon the sustained and vigorous action of this dynamism that the continuance, energy and growth of all human societies depends. If this life-force in them fails and these motive-powers lose in vigour, then all begins to languish, stagnate and finally move towards disintegration.

1.17 - The Divine Birth and Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   in Duryodhana and his brothers became so great a burden to the earth that she had to call upon God to descend and lighten her load; accordingly Vishnu incarnated as Krishna, delivered the oppressed Pandavas and destroyed the unjust Kauravas. A similar account is given of the descent of the previous Vishnu avatars, of Rama to destroy the unrighteous oppression of Ravana, of Parashurama to destroy the unrighteous license of the military and princely caste, the Kshatriyas, of the dwarf Vamana to destroy the rule of the Titan Bali. But obviously the purely practical, ethical or social and political mission of the Avatar which is thus thrown into popular and mythical form, does not give a right account of the phenomenon of Avatarhood. It does not cover its spiritual sense, and if this outward utility were all, we should have to exclude Buddha and Christ whose mission was not at all to destroy evil-doers and deliver the good, but to bring to all men a new spiritual message and a new law of divine growth and spiritual realisation. On the other hand, if we give to the word dharma only its religious sense, in which it means a law of religious and spiritual life, we shall indeed get to the kernel of the matter, but we shall be in danger of excluding a most important part of the work done by the Avatar. Always we see in the history of the divine incarnations the double work, and inevitably, because the Avatar takes up the workings of God in human life, the way of the divine Will and Wisdom in the world, and that always fulfils itself externally as well as internally, by inner progress in the soul and by an outer change in the life.
  The Avatar may descend as a great spiritual teacher and saviour, the Christ, the Buddha, but always his work leads, after he has finished his earthly manifestation, to a profound and powerful change not only in the ethical, but in the social and outward life and ideals of the race. He may, on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of the divine life, the divine personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth. It is indeed curious to note that the

1.20 - Death, Desire and Incapacity, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  6:Death is imposed on the individual life both by the conditions of its own existence and by its relations to the All-Force which manifests itself in the universe. For the individual life is a particular play of energy specialised to constitute, maintain, energise and finally to dissolve, when its utility is over, one of myriad forms which all serve, each in its own place, time and scope, the whole play of the universe. The energy of life in the body has to support the attack of the energies external to it in the universe; it has to draw them in and feed upon them and is itself being constantly devoured by them. All Matter according to the Upanishad is food, and this is the formula of the material world that "the eater eating is himself eaten". The life organised in the body is constantly exposed to the possibility of being broken up by the attack of the life external to it or, its devouring capacity being insufficient or not properly served or there being no right balance between the capacity of devouring and the capacity or necessity of providing food for the life outside, it is unable to protect itself and is devoured or is unable to renew itself and therefore wasted away or broken; it has to go through the process of death for a new construction or renewal.
  7:Not only so but, again in the language of the Upanishad, the life-force is the food of the body and the body the food of the life-force; in other words, the life-energy in us both supplies the material by which the form is built up and constantly maintained and renewed and is at the same time constantly using up the substantial form of itself which it thus creates and keeps in existence. If the balance between these two operations is imperfect or is disturbed or if the ordered play of the different currents of life-force is thrown out of gear, then disease and decay intervene and commence the process of disintegration. And the very struggle for conscious mastery and even the growth of mind make the maintenance of the life more difficult. For there is an increasing demand of the life-energy on the form, a demand which is in excess of the original system of supply and disturbs the original balance of supply and demand, and before a new balance can be established, many disorders are introduced inimical to the harmony and to the length of maintenance of the life; in addition the attempt at mastery creates always a corresponding reaction in the environment which is full of forces that also desire fulfilment and are therefore intolerant of, revolt against and attack the existence which seeks to master them. There too a balance is disturbed, a more intense struggle is generated; however strong the mastering life, unless either it is unlimited or else succeeds in establishing a new harmony with its environment, it cannot always resist and triumph but must one day be overcome and disintegrated.

1.2.1 - Mental Development and Sadhana, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Reading good books can be of help in the early mental stagethey prepare the mind, put it in the right atmospherecan even if one is very sensitive bring some glimpses of realisation on the mental plane. Afterwards the utility diminishesyou have to find the right knowledge and experience in yourself.
  ***

1.21 - The Spiritual Aim and Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The same law holds good in Art; the aesthetic being of man rises similarly on its own curve towards its diviner possibilities. The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the doors of the spirit. But in order that it may come to do this greatest thing largely and sincerely, it must first endeavour to see and depict man and Nature and life for their own sake, in their own characteristic truth and beauty; for behind these first characters lies always the beauty of the Divine in life and man and Nature and it is through their just transformation that what was at first veiled by them has to be revealed. The dogma that Art must be religious or not be at all, is a false dogma, just as is the claim that it must be subservient to ethics or utility or scientific truth or philosophic ideas. Art may make use of these things as elements, but it has its own svadharma, essential law, and it will rise to the widest spirituality by following out its own natural lines with no other yoke than the intimate law of its own being.
  Even with the lower nature of man, though here we are naturally led to suppose that compulsion is the only remedy, the spiritual aim will seek for a free self-rule and development from within rather than a repression of his dynamic and vital being from without. All experience shows that man must be given a certain freedom to stumble in action as well as to err in knowledge so long as he does not get from within himself his freedom from wrong movement and error; otherwise he cannot grow. Society for its own sake has to coerce the dynamic and vital man, but coercion only chains up the devil and alters at best his form of action into more mitigated and civilised movements; it does not and cannot eliminate him. The real virtue of the dynamic and vital being, the Life Purusha, can only come by his finding a higher law and spirit for his activity within himself; to give him that, to illuminate and transform and not to destroy his impulse is the true spiritual means of regeneration.
  --
  The spiritual aim will seek to fulfil itself therefore in a fullness of life and mans being in the individual and the race which will be the base for the heights of the spirit,the base becoming in the end of one substance with the peaks. It will not proceed by a scornful neglect of the body, nor by an ascetic starving of the vital being and an utmost bareness or even squalor as the rule of spiritual living, nor by a puritanic denial of art and beauty and the aesthetic joy of life, nor by a neglect of science and philosophy as poor, negligible or misleading intellectual pursuits,though the temporary utility even of these exaggerations as against the opposite excesses need not be denied; it will be all things to all, but in all it will be at once their highest aim and meaning and the most all-embracing expression of themselves in which all they are and seek for will be fulfilled. It will aim at establishing in society the true inner theocracy, not the false theocracy of a dominant Church or priesthood, but that of the inner Priest, Prophet and King. It will reveal to man the divinity in himself as the Light, Strength, Beauty, Good, Delight, Immortality that dwells within and build up in his outer life also the kingdom of God which is first discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for the Divine in every way of his being, sarvabhvena,1 and so find it and live in it, that howevereven in all kinds of wayshe lives and acts, he shall live and act in that,2 in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being.
    Gita.

1.2.4 - Speech and Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  There is not much utility in complete outer silence or absolute retirement. Unless one is very strong spiritually, these things often end by creating a moribund condition of the consciousness.
  ***

1.26 - PERSEVERANCE AND REGULARITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  next chapter: 1.27 - CONTEMPLATION, ACTION AND SOCIAL utility

1.27 - CONTEMPLATION, ACTION AND SOCIAL UTILITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  object:1.27 - CONTEMPLATION, ACTION AND SOCIAL utility
  class:chapter
  --
  Contemplation, Action and Social utility
  IN ALL the historic formulations of the Perennial Philosophy it is axiomatic that the end of human life is contemplation, or the direct and intuitive awareness of God; that action is the means to that end; that a society is good to the extent that it renders contemplation possible for its members; and that the existence of at least a minority of contemplatives is necessary for the well-being of any society. In the popular philosophy of our own time it goes without saying that the end of human life is action; that contemplation (above all in its lower forms of discursive thought) is the means to that end; that a society is good to the extent that the actions of its members make for progress in technology and organization (a progress which is assumed to be causally related to ethical and cultural advance); and that a minority of contemplatives is perfectly useless and perhaps even harmful to the community which tolerates it. To expatiate further on the modern Weltanschauung is unnecessary; explicitly or by implication it is set forth on every page of the advertising sections of every newspaper and magazine. The extracts that follow have been chosen in order to illustrate the older, truer, less familiar theses of the Perennial Philosophy.

1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  9:If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. As with the One Existence, so with its Consciousness and Force. The One Consciousness is separated into many independent forms of consciousness and knowledge; each follows out its own line of truth which it has to realise. The one total and manysided Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself. The one Consciousness-Force is liberated into its million forces, and each of these forces has the right to fulfil itself or to assume, if needed, a hegemony and take up for its own utility the other forces. So too the Delight of Existence is loosed out into all manner of delights and each can carry in itself its independent fullness or sovereign extreme. Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the character of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the endlessly variable outcome of their play is the determinant of the creation, of its process, its course and its consequence.
  10:Since the Consciousness-Force of the eternal Existence is the universal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Overmind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision. Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites: it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are fictions of the Ignorance or temporary constructions; or, on the contrary, it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal consciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordinated to it as a mode of expression; but, equally, Person can be the reality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of manifestation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present themselves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence complementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or material Energy, exist by it, go back into it; it concludes that Matter is the eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality, Brahman. Or it sees all as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual worldformula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its selfexpression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the multicoloured warp and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a complex universe.

1.29 - Continues to describe methods for achieving this Prayer of Recollection. Says what little account we should make of being favoured by our superiors., #The Way of Perfection, #Saint Teresa of Avila, #Christianity
  have within my soul for as much as a moment, that is of great utility. But as I am speaking only
  about the way to recite vocal prayers well, there is no need for me to say as much as this. All I want

1.49 - Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  regard to its utility in agriculture; for, according to him, when
  the Nile had subsided, herds of swine were turned loose over the

1917 01 05p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Love is nothing but the tie that binds and holds together all the flowers of Thy divine bouquet. It is an unobtrusive role, modest, unrecognised, a role essentially impersonal, which can find all its utility only in this very impersonality.
   Because I am becoming more and more this tie, this link of union gathering the scattered fragments of Thy consciousness and enabling them, by grouping them together, to reconstitute better and better Thy consciousness, at once single and multiple, it was possible for me to see clearly what love is in the play of universal forces, what its place and mission; it is not an end in itself but it is Thy supreme means. Active, everywhere, between all things, everywhere it is veiled by the very things it unites, which, though feeling its effect, are sometimes not even aware of its presence.

1929-04-28 - Offering, general and detailed - Integral Yoga - Remembrance of the Divine - Reading and Yoga - Necessity, predetermination - Freedom - Miracles - Aim of creation, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Obviously, what has happened had to happen; it would not have been, if it had not been intended. Even the mistakes that we have committed and the adversities that fell upon us had to be, because there was some necessity in them, some utility for our lives. But in truth these things cannot be explained mentally and should not be. For all that happened was necessary, not for any mental reason, but to lead us to something beyond what the mind imagines. But is there any need to explain after all? The whole universe explains everything at every moment and a particular thing happens because the whole universe is what it is. But this does not mean that we are bound over to a blind acquiescence in Natures inexorable law. You can accept the past as a settled fact and perceive the necessity in it, and still you can use the experience it gave you to build up the power consciously to guide and shape your present and your future.
  Is the time also of an occurrence arranged in the Divine Plan of things?

1929-05-26 - Individual, illusion of separateness - Hostile forces and the mental plane - Psychic world, psychic being - Spiritual and psychic - Words, understanding speech and reading - Hostile forces, their utility - Illusion of action, true action, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  object:1929-05-26 - Individual, illusion of separateness - Hostile forces and the mental plane - Psychic world, psychic being - Spiritual and psychic - Words, understanding speech and reading - Hostile forces, their utility - Illusion of action, true action
  class:chapter

1951-02-26 - On reading books - gossip - Discipline and realisation - Imaginary stories- value of - Private lives of big men - relaxation - Understanding others - gnostic consciousness, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Obviously, what has happened had to happen; it would not have been, if it had not been intended. Even the mistakes that we have committed and the adversities that fell upon us had to be, because there was some necessity in them, some utility for our lives. But in truth these things cannot be explained mentally and should not be. For all that happened was necessary, not for any mental reason, but to lead us to something beyond what the mind imagines. But is there any need to explain after all? The whole universe explains everything at every moment and a particular thing happens because the whole universe is what it is.
   Questions and Answers 1929 (28 April)

1951-03-01 - Universe and the Divine - Freedom and determinism - Grace - Time and Creation- in the Supermind - Work and its results - The psychic being - beauty and love - Flowers- beauty and significance - Choice of reincarnating psychic being, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   If you undertake a work and are told beforeh and that all will be useless and you will not be able to do what you want, would you do it? No, surely not! Well, it is something like that which happens. Ninety times out of a hundred, what you do does not give the expected result. Not one person in a million would do his work if he were told: Do this, but the result will not be at all what you want. But in the play of forces many must work for the aggregate of forces, for the totality of forces, although individually this work has no personal utility for the one who does it. So, if the individual had the knowledge that the part he plays in the whole is infinitesimal, he would not play it. But the moment you go above that, when you do things, not with a fixed end in view, but because you know within yourself that this is the thing to be done, whatever the result, then with this kind of detachment you know and see in the higher Consciousness that all action is done exclusively because it has to be done whatever may be the result; and generally you are sufficiently clear-sighted to know, at least vaguely, what will be the result of this action. For knowing it will not change in the least your way of doing it.
   Instead of an explanation which goes from below upward, it would be wiser to look for an explanation which comes from above downward and rather to conceive that little by little the Consciousness comes down and as it comes down is obscured, and one no longer understands by what mechanism things are done that is what is called a state of ignorance.

1951-03-03 - Hostile forces - difficulties - Individuality and form - creation, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   It is purposely, mind you, that I have not mentioned the ego as one of the causes of the sense of individuality. For the ego being a falsehood and an illusion, the sense of individuality would itself be false and illusory (as Buddha and Shankara affirm), whereas the origin of individualisation being in the Supreme Himself, the ego is only a passing deformation, necessary for the moment, which will disappear when its utility is over, when the Truth-Consciousness will be established.
   ***

1951-03-08 - Silencing the mind - changing the nature - Reincarnation- choice - Psychic, higher beings gods incarnating - Incarnation of vital beings - the Lord of Falsehood - Hitler - Possession and madness, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   As long as they are necessary for the universal evolution they will exist. The day they lose their utility, they will be converted or will disappear.
   Besides, they know that they are nearing their last hour and that is why they are doing as much damage as they can.

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
   Yes, it is for this reason that in all countries and in all religions, it is recommended that for a period of at least seven days after someones death, people should gather and think of him. Because when you think of him with affection (without any inner disorder, without weeping, without any of those distraught passions), if you can be calm, your atmosphere becomes a kind of beacon for him, and when he is attacked by hostile forces (I am speaking of the vital being of course, not the psychic being which goes to take rest), he may feel altogether lost, not know what to do and find himself in great distress; then he sees through affinity the light of those who are thinking of him with affection and he rushes there. It happens almost constantly that a vital formation, a part of the vital being of the dead person (or at times the whole vital if it is well organised) takes shelter in the aura, the atmosphere of the people or the person who loved him. There are people who always carry with them a part of the vital of the person who is gone. That is the real utility of these so-called ceremonies, which otherwise have no sense.
   It is preferable to do this without ceremonies. Ceremonies are, if anything, rather harmful, for a very simple reason: When you are busy with a ceremony, you think more about that than about the person. When you are busy with gestures, movements, with the following of a ritual, you think much more of all that than of the person who is dead. Moreover, people perform these ceremonies most of the time for that very reason, for they are almost always in the habit of trying to forget. The fact is that one of the two principal occupations of man is to try to forget what is painful to him, and the other is to try to seek amusement in order to escape boredom. These are the two principal occupations of humanity, that is, humanity spends half of its time in doing nothing true.

1953-05-27, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Obviously, what has happened had to happen; it would not have happened, if it had not been intended. Even the mistakes that we have committed and the adversities that fell upon us had to be, because there was some necessity in them, some utility for our lives. But in truth these things cannot be explained mentally and should not be. For all that happened was necessary, not for any mental reason, but to lead us to something beyond what the mind imagines. But is there any need to explain after all? The whole universe explains everything at every moment and a particular thing happens because the whole universe is what it is.
   Questions and Answers 1929-1931 28 April 1929.

1953-06-24, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I am going to explain it to you: when you have understood, it forms a little crystal in you, like a little shining point. And when you have put in many, many, many of these, then you will begin to be intelligent. That is the utility of work, not simply to stuff the head with a heap of things that take you nowhere.
   How is it that in people occupied with scientific studies artistic imagination is lacking? Are these two things opposed to each other?

1953-10-28, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I dont know, I thought I went into great detail. But I have said enough about it for those who know. In the old days, I mean in the artistic ages, as for instance in Greece or even during the Italian renaissance (but much more in Greece and Egypt), buildings were made for public utility. Mostly too, in Greece and Egypt, a kind of sanctuary was built to house their gods. Well, what they tried to do was something total, beautiful in itself, complete. And in that they used architecture, that is to say, the sense of harmony of lines, and sculpture to add to architecture the detail of expression, and painting to complete this expression, but all this was held in a coordinated unity which was the created monument. The sculpture formed a part of the building, the painting was a part of the building. These were not things apart, just put there one knew not whythey belonged to the general plan. And so, when these people made a temple, for example, it was a whole wherein were found almost all the manifestations of art, united in a single will to express the beauty they wished to express, that is, a garment for the god they wished to adore. All the beautiful periods of art were of this kind. But precisely, these days, though not quite recentlyat the end of the last century, art became commercial, mercenary, and pictures were made to be sold; they were painted on canvas, a frame was put and then, without any definite reason, a picture was put here or another there, or else some sculpture was made representing one thing or another, and it was put no matter where. It had nothing to do with the house in which it was placed. It did not fit in. Things could be beautiful in themselves but they had no meaning. It was not a whole having cohesion and attempting to express something: it was an exhibition of talent, cleverness, the ability to make a picture or a statue. So too the architecture of those days, it had no precise meaning. One did not build with the idea of expressing the force one wanted to incarnate in that building; the architecture was not the expression of an aspiration or of something that uplifts your spirit or the expression of the magnificence of the godhead one wanted to house. They were nothing else but mushrooms. They put up a house here, a house there, made this and that, pictures, statues, objects of all kinds. So, on entering a house one saw, as I have just told you, a bit of sculpture here, a bit of painting there, show-cases with a heap of bizarre objects having no connection with one another. And wherefore all this? To make a sort of exhibition, a show of art-objects which had nothing to do with art and beauty! But thatone must understand the deep meaning of art to feel to what an extent this was shocking. Otherwise, when one is accustomed to it, when one has lived in that period and that milieu, it seems quite natural but it is not natural. It is a commercial deformation.
   There is only one justification, that is to make it a means of education. Then it becomes a museum. If you make a museum, it is a historical sampling of all that has been done. It serves to give you a historical knowledge of things. But a museum is not something beautiful in itself, far from it! For an artist it is something quite shocking. From the point of view of education it is very good, for specimens of all kinds of things have been collected there in a single place; and in this way you may learn, acquire erudition. But from the point of view of beauty, it is frightful.

1955-02-16 - Losing something given by Mother - Using things well - Sadhak collecting soap-pieces - What things are truly indispensable - Natures harmonious arrangement - Riches a curse, philanthropy - Misuse of things creates misery, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Ah, this is First, to use things with an understanding of their true utility, the knowledge of their real use, with the utmost care so that they do not get spoilt and with the least confusion.
  I am going to give you an example: you have a pair of scissors. There are scissors of all kinds, there are scissors for cutting paper, and there are scissors for cutting thread Now if you have the pair of scissors which you need, use it for the thing it is made for. But I know people who, when they have a pair of scissors, use it without any discernment to cut anything at all, to cut small silk threads, and they try to cut a wire also with it or else they use it as a tool to open tins, you see; for anything whatever, where they need an instrument they get hold of their scissors and use them. So naturally, after quite a short while they come to me again and say, Oh, my pair of scissors is spoilt, I would like to have another. And they are very much surprised when I tell them, No, you wont have another, because you have spoilt this one, because you have used it badly. This is just one example. I could give many others.

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
  But this is a pragmatic point of view, for action, for the movement in material lifebecause one has not yet reached the consciousness which goes beyond all that; because one has not attained that inner perfection, having which one has no longer to struggle, for one has gone beyond the zone of struggle or the time of struggle or the utility of struggle. But before that, before attaining that state in ones consciousness and action, necessarily there is struggle, and if there is struggle there is choice and for the choice discernment is necessary.
  And the surest means to discernment is a conscious and willing surrender, as complete as possible, to the divine Will and Guidance. Then there is no risk of making a mistake and of taking false lights for true ones.

1956-09-26 - Soul of desire - Openness, harmony with Nature - Communion with divine Presence - Individuality, difficulties, soul of desire - personal contact with the Mother - Inner receptivity - Bad thoughts before the Mother, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Not I, Mother. Somebody has asked a question: In the present state of the sadhana, what is the utility of a personal contact with you? To what extent does a personal contact with you help us?
  What is meant by a personal contact? To see me, speak to me, what? Individually, collectively, how?

1956-11-14 - Conquering the desire to appear good - Self-control and control of the life around - Power of mastery - Be a great yogi to be a good teacher - Organisation of the Ashram school - Elementary discipline of regularity, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  First, the best way is to ask oneself why one values others approval. For what particular reason, because there are many reasons. If you have a career and your career depends on the good opinion others have of you, then thats a utilitarian reason. If you have a little, or much, vanity and like compliments, thats another reason. If you attach great value to others opinion of you because you feel they are wiser or more enlightened or have more knowledge, thats yet another reason. There are many others still, but these are the three chief reasons: utility, vanityusually this is the strongestand progress.
  Naturally, when it is a reason of progress, the attitude is not quite the same, for instead of trying to make a good impression, one must first endeavour to know the impression one is actually making, in all humility, in order to profit by the lesson this gives. That is quite rare, and in fact, if one isnt too nave, one usually attaches importance only to the opinion of those who have more experience, more knowledge and more wisdom than oneself. And so that leads us straight to one of the best methods of cure. It is precisely to come to understand that the opinion of those who are as ignorant and blind as ourselves cannot have a very great value for us from the point of view of the deeper reality and the will to progress, and so one stops attaching much importance to that.
  Finally, if one is sincere one desires no other approval except that of ones teacher or ones guru or of the Divine Himself. And thats the first step towards a total cure of this little weakness of wishing to make a good impression on people. Now, if the movement comes from a motive of utility, the one I spoke of first, the question does not arise here, for here we do not depend upon the opinion others have of us, either for living or for our development. So there remains the most frequent instance, the one most difficult to cure: that kind of small, very foolish vanity which makes you like to be complimented and dislike being criticised. So the best way is to look at yourself, to see how very ridiculous you are, how petty, paltry, stupid and all that, to laugh a little at yourself and resolve to do without the compliments of others.
  That is all I have to offer.

1957-01-09 - God is essentially Delight - God and Nature play at hide-and-seek - Why, and when, are you grave?, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  It might have been useful, perhaps, at a particular time, for everything is useful in the worlds history, but this utility has passed, it is outworn, and it is time for this conception to be superseded and for us to return to a more essential and higher Truth, to go back to the Delight of existence, the Joy of union and manifestation of the Divine.
  This new orientation I mean new in its terrestrial realisationmust replace all the former spiritual orientations and8@ open the way to the new realisation which will be a supramental realisation. That is why I told you last week that only Delight, the true divine Delight can bring about the Victory.

1957-10-02 - The Mind of Light - Statues of the Buddha - Burden of the past, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  (After a silence) The forms of Divine Power which have incarnated in different beings, have incarnated with a specific aim, for a specific action, at a specific moment of universal development, but essentially they are only differentiated aspects of the One Being; therefore, it is in the particular purpose of the action that the difference lies. Otherwise it is always the same Truth, the same Power, the same eternal Life which manifests in these forms and creates these forms at a given moment for a specific reason and a specific aim; this is preserved in history, but eternally they are new forms which are used for new progress. Old forms can endure as a vibration lasts, but their purpose historically, it could be said, was momentary, and one form is replaced by another in order that a new step forward may be taken. The mistake humanity makes is that it always hangs on to what is behind it and wants to perpetuate the past indefinitely. These things must be used at the time when they are useful. For there is a history of each individual development; you may pass through stages in which these disciplines have their momentary utility, but when you have gone beyond that moment you ought to enter into something else and see that historically it was useful but now is so no longer. Certainly, to those who have reached, for instance, a certain state of development and mental control, I wont say, Read the Dhammapada and meditate on it; it would be a waste of time. I give it to those who have not gone beyond the stage where it is necessary. But always man takes upon his shoulders an interminable burden. He does not want to drop anything of the past and he stoops more and more under the weight of a useless accumulation.
  You have a guide for a part of the way but when you have travelled this part leave the road and the guide and go farther! This is something men find difficult to do. When they get hold of something which helps them, they cling to it, they do not want to move any more. Those who have progressed with the help of Christianity do not want to give it up and they carry it on their shoulders; those who have progressed with the help of Buddhism do not want to leave it and they carry it on their shoulders, and so this hampers the advance and you are indefinitely delayed.

1958-07-16 - Is religion a necessity?, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    Religions real business is to prepare mans mind, life and bodily existence for the spiritual consciousness to take it up; it has to lead him to that point where the inner spiritual light begins fully to emerge. It is at this point that religion must learn to subordinate itself, not to insist on its outer characters, but give full scope to the inner spirit itself to develop its own truth and reality. In the meanwhile it has to take up as much of mans mentality, vitality, physicality as it can and give all his activities a turn towards the spiritual direction, the revelation of a spiritual meaning in them, the imprint of a spiritual refinement, the beginning of a spiritual character. It is in this attempt that the errors of religion come in, for they are caused by the very nature of the matter with which it is dealing,that inferior stuff invades the very forms that are meant to serve as intermediaries between the spiritual and the mental, vital or physical consciousness, and often it this attempt that lies religions greatest utility as an intercessor between spirit and nature. Truth and error live always together in the human evolution and the truth is not to be rejected because of its accompanying errors, though these have to be eliminated,often a difficult business and, if crudely done, resulting in surgical harm inflicted on the body of religion; for what we see as error is very frequently the symbol or a disguise or a corruption or malformation of a truth which is lost in the brutal radicality of the operation,the truth is cut out along with the error. Nature herself very commonly permits the good corn and the tares and weeds to grow together for a long time, because only so is her own growth, her free evolution possible.
    The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 864-65

2.02 - The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  men in the workshop of utility, on the forge of Charvaka or
  grow them in the garden of Epicurus. So is it with the lover of
  --
  above selfishness and gross utility. For what is selfishness? it
  is mistaking the body & the vital impulses for your true self
  --
  in utility. But what utility? I, this perfected animal, with desires,
  thoughts, sensations and a pressing need for their gratification,
  can very well understand what is personal utility; utility for this
  vital, sensational, conceptual me. My utility is to get as much
  sensual, emotional & intellectual gratification as I may out of
  life consistent with my own ease & safety; if utility is to be my
  standard of ethics, that is my ethics. But when you ask me in the
  name of utility & rationalism to sacrifice these things for some
  higher or wider utility, for others, for the greater number, for society, I no longer follow you. So much as is necessary to keep up
  government, law & order and a good police, I can understand,

2.02 - The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  HE GITA is not a treatise of metaphysical philosophy, in spite of the great mass of metaphysical ideas which arise incidentally in its pages; for here no metaphysical truth is brought into expression solely for its own sake. It seeks the highest truth for the highest practical utility, not for intellectual or even for spiritual satisfaction, but as the truth that saves and opens to us the passage from our present mortal imperfection to an immortal perfection. Therefore after giving us in the first fourteen verses of this chapter a leading philosophical truth of which we stand in need, it hastens in the next sixteen verses to make an immediate application of it. It turns it into a first starting-point for the unification of works, knowledge and devotion, - for the preliminary synthesis of works and knowledge by themselves has already been accomplished.
  We have before us three powers, the Purushottama as the supreme truth of that into which we have to grow, the Self and the Jiva. Or, as we may put it, there is the Supreme, there is the impersonal spirit, and there is the multiple soul, timeless foundation of our spiritual personality, the true and eternal individual, mamaivamsah. sanatanah.. All these three are divine, all three are the Divine. The supreme spiritual nature of being, the Para Prakriti free from any limitation by the conditioning

2.03 - Karmayogin A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  could enforce its decrees, is of any ultimate utility against the
  victorious advance of the individual life pressing forward in

2.03 - On Medicine, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Sri Aurobindo: Activity is not incompatible with our Yoga. The action to be done should proceed on the basis of peace and knowledge. It must be deliberate and calm. One can take up action in which many men are not concerned which depends upon ones own self for its performance. For instance, intellectual work and physical work can be done in this Yoga. There may come a time when all action has to be abandoned such a stage has a temporary utility. In that period one has to do intensive concentrated Sadhana.
   Secondly, when one rises to another plane of consciousness, one finds the whole viewpoint about things completely changed. In that condition one cannot continue the same intellectual activity as before. One has to wait till the Higher Consciousness begins to act. Of course, when the entire being is transformed then one has to accept all the planes of life and manifest the Higher Consciousness in life.
  --
   Sri Aurobindo: Yes. Yogis can go into Samadhi and put an end to the sensations. But it is not necessary to have a disease in order to go into Samadhi. Besides, when one decides to bear it, it seems to me a way of accepting the disease. But I don't understand the utility of going into Samadhi to escape from pain.
   Ramakrishna once said to Keshav Chandra Sen, when the former was seriously ill, that his body was breaking up under the stress of his spiritual development. But there is no necessity of having a disease for the sake of spiritual development.

2.03 - The Eternal and the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But in the end we have to see that our individualisation is only a superficial formation, a practical selection and limited conscious synthesis for the temporary utility of life in a particular body, or else it is a constantly changing and developing synthesis pursued through successive lives in successive bodies. Behind it there is a consciousness, a Purusha, who is not determined or limited by his individualisation or by this synthesis but on the contrary determines, supports and yet exceeds it. That which he selects from in order to construct this synthesis, is his total experience of the world-being. Therefore our individualisation exists by virtue of the world-being, but also by virtue of a consciousness which uses the world-being for experience of its possibilities of individuality. These two powers, Person and his world-material, are both necessary for our present experience of individuality. If the Purusha with his individualising synthesis of consciousness were to disappear, to merge, to annul himself in any way, our constructed individuality would cease because the Reality that supported it would no longer be in presence; if, on the other hand, the world-being were to dissolve, merge, disappear, then also our individualisation would cease, for the material of experience by which it effectuates itself would be wanting. We have then to recognise these two terms of our existence, a world-being and an individualising consciousness which is the cause of all our self-experience and world-experience.
  But we see farther that in the end this Purusha, this cause and self of our individuality, comes to embrace the whole world and all other beings in a sort of conscious extension of itself and to perceive itself as one with the world-being. In its conscious extension of itself it exceeds the primary experience and abolishes the barriers of its active self-limitation and individualisation; by its perception of its own infinite universality it goes beyond all consciousness of separative individuality or limited soul-being. By that very fact the individual ceases to be the selflimiting ego; in other words, our false consciousness of existing only by self-limitation, by rigid distinction of ourselves from the rest of being and becoming is transcended; our identification of ourselves with our personal and temporal individualisation in a particular mind and body is abolished. But is all truth of individuality and individualisation abolished? does the Purusha cease to exist or does he become the world-Purusha and live intimately in innumerable minds and bodies? We do not find it to be so.

2.04 - The Divine and the Undivine, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Nothing but this All-Delight could dare or bear to impose such experiences on itself or on us; nothing else could turn them thus to its own utility and our spiritual profit. So too nothing but an inalienable harmony of being inherent in an inalienable unity of being would throw out so many harshest apparent discords and yet force them to its purpose so that in the end they are unable to do anything else but to serve and secure, and even themselves change into elements that constitute, a growing universal rhythm and ultimate harmony. At every turn it is the divine Reality which we can discover behind that which we are yet compelled by the nature of the superficial consciousness in which we dwell to call undivine and in a sense are right in using that appellation; for these appearances are a veil over the Divine Perfection, a veil necessary for the present, but not at all the true and complete figure.
  But even when we thus regard the universe, we cannot and ought not to dismiss as entirely and radically false and unreal the values that are given to it by our own limited human consciousness. For grief, pain, suffering, error, falsehood, ignorance, weakness, wickedness, incapacity, non-doing of what should be done and wrong-doing, deviation of will and denial of will, egoism, limitation, division from other beings with whom we should be one, all that makes up the effective figure of what we call evil, are facts of the world-consciousness, not fictions and unrealities, although they are facts whose complete sense or true value is not that which we assign to them in our ignorance.
  Still our sense of them is part of a true sense, our values of them are necessary to their complete values. One side of the truth of these things we discover when we get into a deeper and larger consciousness; for we find then that there is a cosmic and individual utility in what presents itself to us as adverse and evil. For without experience of pain we would not get all the infinite value of the divine delight of which pain is in travail; all ignorance is a penumbra which environs an orb of knowledge, every error is significant of the possibility and the effort of a
  422

2.06 - On Beauty, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Disciple: What is the utility of aesthetic refinement in spiritual development?
   Sri Aurobindo: The aesthetic sense is easily purified and it can then open the path of approach to the Supreme through beauty. It is very difficult to purify a rough and gross being.
  --
   Sri Aurobindo: Why? The Romans conquered the world in their togas. Plenty of Indian women work with saris on. When this craze for utility that is the modern tendency comes, beauty dies; people now look at everything from the point of utility as if beauty were nothing.
   Disciple: But beauty and utility can be combined, I believe. I have found at any rate, that the European dress for men gives one a push for work and activity, while the Indian dhoti gives lethargy and a sense of ease.
   Sri Aurobindo: That does not prevent the European dress from being ugly. I have seen plenty of people leading an active life with the dhoti. The most utilitarian dress is shorts and a shirt.

2.08 - Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   man, - it is memory that constitutes our personality and holds cemented the foundation of our psychological being; for it links together our experiences and relates them to one and the same individual entity. This is an idea which takes its stand on our existence in the succession of Time and accepts process as the key to essential Truth, even when it does not regard the whole of existence as process or as cause and effect in the development of some kind of self-regulating Energy, as Karma. But process is merely a utility; it is a habitual adoption of certain effective relations which might in the infinite possibility of things have been arranged otherwise, for the production of effects which might equally have been quite different. The real truth of things lies not in their process, but behind it, in whatever determines, effects or governs the process; not in effectuation so much as in the Will or Power that effects, and not so much in Will or
  Power as in the Consciousness of which Will is the dynamic form and in the Being of which Power is the dynamic value. But memory is only a process of consciousness, a utility; it cannot be the substance of being or the whole of our personality: it is simply one of the workings of consciousness as radiation is one of the workings of Light. It is Self that is the man: or, if we regard only our normal surface existence, Mind is the man, - for man is the mental being. Memory is only one of the many powers and processes of the Mind, which is at present the chief action of Consciousness-Force in our dealings with self, world and Nature.
  Nevertheless, it is as well to begin with this phenomenon of memory when we consider the nature of the Ignorance in which we dwell; for it may give the key to certain important aspects of our conscious existence. We see that there are two applications which the mind makes of its faculty or process of memory, memory of self, memory of experience. First, radically, it applies memory to the fact of our conscious-being and relates that to Time. It says, "I am now, I was in the past, I shall therefore be in the future, it is the same I in all the three ever unstable divisions of Time." Thus it tries to render to itself in the terms of Time an account of that which it feels to be the fact, but

2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   To combine the inner development with the outer would be ideal. Science, for instance, steadies reason and gives a firm grounding to the physical mind. Art I mean the appreciation of beauty pure and simple, without the sensual grasping at the object trains up the aesthetic side of the mind. The true artist has always the pure love of beauty free and impersonal. Philosophy cultivates the pure thinking power. And politics and such other departments of mental work train up the dynamic mind. All these should be duly trained with the full knowledge that they have their limited utility. Philosophy tends to become mere mental gymnastics and preference for one's own ideas and mental constructions. So also Reason becomes the tyrant and denies anything further. But if the training is given to these parts with an understanding of their limitations, then they may serve very usefully the object of this Yoga. As I say, they must all admit a higher working in them.
   A disciple related the yogic experience of a student.
  --
   Sri Aurobindo: Waste is waste. Throwing away money without any order, unorganised expenses without regard to the means of getting money or to the utility of spending. It is not that you have to hoard money. It is there for being spent. But we must spend it in the right way in a certain order and with an arrangement.
   Sometimes the Divine even follows man's caprices, as is typified in the case of men like Thakur Dayananda.
  --
   Disciple: Take the case of others from X's district. How much they try and yet they do not make any headway and still they persist in pursuing what they call Sadhana. I wonder why they do it. And has their doing it any utility?
   Sri Aurobindo: Evidently, because something in them wants the Yoga but the Adhar, the material instrumentation, is unfit. And about utility, how can you know the utility? Something is working and these are, as it were, materials in the boiling pot. Some get prepared, others don't. You can't wait and start the spiritual life after all the conditions are secure. And what is fitness?
   Disciple: I don't know. I want you to tell me.

2.0 - THE ANTICHRIST, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  relates the utility, the reasons, the preliminary casuistry, of a
  law: for it would be precisely in this way that it would forfeit its

2.1.03 - Man and Superman, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   if Life had not appeared as the first index to some marvellous utility and an ultimate profound and moving significance. But life too by itself would be a movement without sequence to its purposeful initiation or any light to its own mystery if in
  Life there were not concealed an interpretative or at least a seeking power of consciousness that could turn upon its powers and try to grasp and direct them towards their own realised issue.

2.11 - The Boundaries of the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  We fasten only upon a very limited number of the mental sensations and perceptions of self and things which come up into our surface consciousness in our continual present: of these again memory saves up only a scanty part from the oblivious gulf of the past; of the storings of memory our intelligence utilises only a small portion for co-ordinated knowledge, will utilises a still smaller percentage for action. A narrow selection, a large rejection or reservation, a miserly-spendthrift system of waste of material and unemployment of resources and a scanty and disorderly modicum of useful spending and utilisable balance seems to be the method of Nature in our conscious becoming even as it is in the field of the material universe. But this is only in appearance, for it would be a wholly untrue account to say that all that is not thus saved up and utilised is destroyed, becomes null and has passed away ineffectually and in vain. A great part of it has been quietly used by Nature herself to form us and actuates that sufficiently large mass of our growth and becoming and action for which our conscious memory, will and intelligence are not responsible. A still greater part is used by her as a store from which she draws and which she utilises, while we ourselves have utterly forgotten the origin and provenance of this material which we find ourselves employing with a deceptive sense of creation; for we imagine we are creating this new material of our work, when we are only combining results out of that which we have forgotten but Nature in us has remembered. If we admit rebirth as part of her system, we shall realise that all experience has its use; for all experience counts in this prolonged building and nothing is rejected except what has exhausted its utility and would be a burden on the future.
  A judgment from what appears now in our conscious surface is fallacious: for when we study and understand, we perceive that

2.1.3.2 - Study, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  What is the utility of reason in our life?
  Without reason, human life would be incoherent and unregulated; we would be like impulsive animals or unbalanced madmen.

2.14 - The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  F IGNORANCE is in its nature a self-limiting knowledge oblivious of the integral self-awareness and confined to an exclusive concentration in a single field or upon a concealing surface of cosmic movement, what, in this view, are we to make of the problem which most poignantly preoccupies the mind of man when it is turned on the mystery of his own existence and of cosmic existence, the problem of evil? A limited knowledge supported by a secret All-Wisdom as an instrument for working out within the necessary limitations a restricted world-order may be admitted as an intelligible process of the universal Consciousness and Energy; but the necessity of falsehood and error, the necessity of wrong and evil or their utility in the workings of the omnipresent Divine Reality is less easily admissible. And yet if that Reality is what we have supposed it to be, there must be some necessity for the appearance of these contrary phenomena, some significance, some function that they had to serve in the economy of the universe. For in the complete and inalienable self-knowledge of the Brahman which is necessarily all-knowledge, since all this that is is the
  Brahman, such phenomena cannot have come in as a chance, an intervening accident, an involuntary forgetfulness or confusion of the Consciousness-Force of the All-Wise in the cosmos or an ugly contretemps for which the indwelling Spirit was not prepared and of which it is the prisoner erring in a labyrinth with the utmost difficulty of escape. Nor can it be an inexplicable mystery of being, original and eternal, of which the divine AllTeacher is incapable of giving an account to himself or to us.
  --
   out of all contacts and happenings their secret divine sense and essence, a divine use and purpose so that by experience our mind and life may grow out of the Inconscience towards a supreme consciousness, out of the divisions of the Ignorance towards an integralising consciousness and knowledge. It is there for that and it pursues from life to life its ever-increasing upward tendency and insistence; the growth of the soul is a growth out of darkness into light, out of falsehood into truth, out of suffering into its own supreme and universal Ananda. The soul's perception of good and evil may not coincide with the mind's artificial standards, but it has a deeper sense, a sure discrimination of what points to the higher Light and what points away from it. It is true that as the inferior light is below good and evil, so the superior spiritual light is beyond good and evil; but this is not in the sense of admitting all things with an impartial neutrality or of obeying equally the impulses of good and evil, but in the sense that a higher law of being intervenes in which there is no longer any place or utility for these values. There is a self-law of supreme Truth which is above all standards; there is a supreme and universal Good inherent, intrinsic, self-existent, self-aware, self-moved and determined, infinitely plastic with the pure plasticity of the luminous consciousness of the supreme
  Infinite.

2.1.5.2 - Languages, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  From the point of utility some of our students do not want to learn classical Hindi.
  Teach both, the true language and what it has become that will be very interesting indeed and more than anything else can cure them of the habit of speaking bad Hindi.

2.15 - Reality and the Integral Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  All insistence on the sole or the fundamental validity of the objective real takes its stand on the sense of the basic reality of Matter. But it is now evident that Matter is by no means fundamentally real; it is a structure of Energy: it is becoming even a little doubtful whether the acts and creations of this Energy itself are explicable except as the motions of power of a secret Mind or Consciousness of which its processes and steps of structure are the formulas. It is therefore no longer possible to take Matter as the sole reality. The material interpretation of existence was the result of an exclusive concentration, a preoccupation with one movement of Existence, and such an exclusive concentration has its utility and is therefore permissible; in recent times it has justified itself by the many immense and the innumerable minute discoveries of physical Science. But a solution of the whole problem of existence cannot be based on an exclusive one-sided knowledge; we must know not only what Matter is and what are its processes, but what mind and life are and what are their processes, and one must know also spirit and soul and all that is behind the material surface: only then can we have a knowledge sufficiently integral for a solution of the problem.
  For the same reason those views of existence which arise from an exclusive or predominant preoccupation with Mind or with Life and regard Mind or Life as the sole fundamental reality, have not a sufficiently wide basis for acceptance. Such a preoccupation of exclusive concentration may lead to a fruitful scrutiny which sheds much light on Mind and Life, but cannot result in a total solution of the problem. It may very well be that an exclusive or predominant concentration on the subliminal being, regarding the surface existence as a mere system of symbols for an expression of its sole reality, might throw a strong light on the subliminal and its processes and extend vastly the powers of the human being, but it would not be by itself an integral solution or lead us successfully to the integral knowledge of Reality. In our view the Spirit, the Self is the fundamental reality of existence; but an exclusive concentration on this fundamental reality to the exclusion of all reality of Mind, Life or Matter except as an imposition on the Self or unsubstantial shadows cast by the Spirit might help to an independent and radical spiritual realisation but not to an integral and valid solution of the truth of cosmic and individual existence.

2.16 - The 15th of August, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   And if you came to me in the morning, it should not have been in fulfilment of a customary ceremony but with your souls and minds prepared to receive. If you listen to me now and if it is merely something that touches your mental interest and satisfies a mental interest I would rather remain silent. But if it touches somewhere the inner being, the soul, then only has this day a utility or a purpose. And the meditation too ought to be done under such conditions that even if nothing decisive descends there would be a certain infiltration the results of which would come afterwards.
   That is the one meaning of the 15th of August from the point of view of our Yoga.

2.16 - The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Any view of our being which neglects, unduly belittles or intolerantly condemns them, is therefore by that very fact, whatever its other truth or merit or utility, or whatever its suitability to individuals of a certain temperament or in a certain stage of spiritual evolution, unfit to be the general and complete rule of human living. Nature takes good care that the race shall not neglect these aims which are a necessary part of her evolution; for they fall within the method and stages of the divine plan in us, and a vigilance for her first steps and for the maintenance of their mental and material ground is a preoccupation which she cannot allow to go into the background, since these things belong to the foundation and body of her structure.
  But also she has implanted in us a sense that there is something in our composition which goes beyond this first terrestrial nature of humanity. For this reason the race cannot accept or follow for a very long time any view of being which ignores this higher and subtler sense and labours to confine us entirely to a purely terrestrial way of living. The intuition of a beyond, the idea and feeling of a soul and spirit in us which is other than the mind, life and body or is greater, not limited by their formula, returns upon us and ends by resuming possession. The ordinary man satisfies this sense easily enough by devoting to it his exceptional moments or the latter part of his life when age shall have blunted the zest of his earthly nature, or by recognising it as something behind or above his normal action to which he can more or less imperfectly direct his natural being: the exceptional man turns to the supraterrestrial as the one aim and law of living and diminishes or mortifies as much as possible his earthly parts in the hope of developing his celestial nature.

2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Disciple: There are people who give a lot of money for such purposes of temporary utility, but curiously enough, we don't get any. One man actually told me that we didn't require money because we had buildings, etc.
   Sri Aurobindo: Yes, that is the impression. They think, like the American Lady B, that the Ashram is a work of genius and genius can do without money. (Laughter) It is only a minority among the rich who give money; mostly it is the poor that give, like Gracieuse who hardly earns enough to maintain her family yet whenever she finds an opportunity she sends us money. There is a rumour that we have a lot of money stored in Pavitra's cellar! (Laughter)

2.18 - The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But where is the limit of effectuation in the evolutionary being's self-becoming by self-exceeding? In mind itself there are grades of the series and each grade again is a series in itself; there are successive elevations which we may conveniently call planes and sub-planes of the mental consciousness and the mental being. The development of our mental self is largely an ascent of this stair; we can take our stand on any one of them, while yet maintaining a dependence on the lower stages and a power of occasional ascension to higher levels or of a response to influences from our being's superior strata. At present we still normally take our first secure stand on the lowest sub-plane of the intelligence, which we may call the physical-mental, because it depends for its evidence of fact and sense of reality on the physical brain, the physical sense-mind, the physical sense-organs; there we are the physical man who attaches most importance to objective things and to his outer life, has little intensity of the subjective or inner existence and subordinates whatever he has of it to the greater claims of exterior reality. The physical man has a vital part, but it is mainly made up of the smaller instinctive and impulsive formations of life-consciousness emerging from the subconscient, along with a customary crowd or round of sensations, desires, hopes, feelings, satisfactions which are dependent on external things and external contacts and concerned with the practical, the immediately realisable and possible, the habitual, the common and average. He has a mental part, but this too is customary, traditional, practical, objective, and respects what belongs to the domain of mind mostly for its utility for the support, comfort, use, satisfaction and entertainment of his physical and sensational existence. For the physical mind takes its stand on matter and the material world, on the body and the bodily life, on sense-experience and on a normal practical mentality and its experience. All that is not of this order, the physical mind builds up as a restricted superstructure dependent upon the external sense-mentality. Even so, it regards these higher contents of life as either helpful adjuncts or a superfluous but pleasant luxury of imaginations, feelings and thought-abstractions, not as inner realities; or, even if it receives them as realities, it does not feel them concretely and substantially in their own proper substance, subtler than the physical substance and its grosser concreteness, - it treats them as a subjective, less substantial extension from physical realities. It is inevitable that the human being should thus take his first stand on Matter and give the external fact and external existence its due importance; for this is Nature's first provision for our existence, on which she insists greatly: the physical man is emphasised in us and is multiplied abundantly in the world by her as her force for conservation of the secure, if somewhat inert, material basis on which she can maintain herself while she attempts her higher human developments; but in this mental formation there is no power for progress or only for a material progress. It is our first mental status, but the mental being cannot remain always at this lowest rung of the human evolutionary ladder.
  Above physical mind and deeper within than physical sensation, there is what we may call an intelligence of the life-mind, dynamic, vital, nervous, more open, though still obscurely, to the psychic, capable of a first soul-formation, though only of an obscurer life-soul, - not the psychic being, but a frontal formation of the vital Purusha. This life-soul concretely senses and contacts the things of the life-world, and tries to realise them here; it attaches immense importance to the satisfaction and fulfilment of the life-being, the life-force, the vital nature: it looks on physical existence as a field for the life-impulses' selffulfilment, for the play of ambition, power, strong character, love, passion, adventure, for the individual, the collective, the general human seeking and hazard and venture, for all kinds of life-experiment and new life-experience, and but for this saving element, this greater power, interest, significance, the physical existence would have for it no value. This life mentality is supported by our secret subliminal vital being and is in veiled contact with a life-world to which it can easily open and so feel the unseen dynamic forces and realities behind the material universe. There is an inner life-mind which does not need for its perceptions the evidence of the physical senses, is not limited by them; for on this level our inner life and the inner life of the world become real to us independent of the body and of the symbols of the physical world which alone we call natural phenomena, as if Nature had no greater phenomena and no greater realities than those of gross Matter. The vital man, moulded consciously or unconsciously by these influences, is the man of desire and sensation, the man of force and action, the man of passion and emotion, the kinetic individual: he may and does lay great stress on the material existence, but he gives it, even when most preoccupied with its present actualities, a push for life-experience, for force of realisation, for life-extension, for life-power, for lifeaffirmation and life-expansion which is Nature's first impetus towards enlargement of the being; at a highest intensity of this life impetus, he becomes the breaker of bonds, the seeker of new horizons, the disturber of the past and present in the interest of the future. He has a mental life which is often enslaved to the vital force and its desires and passions, and it is these he seeks to satisfy through the mind: but when he interests himself strongly in mental things, he can become the mental adventurer, the opener of the way to new mind-formations or the fighter for an idea, the sensitive type of artist, the dynamic poet of life or the prophet or champion of a cause. The vital mind is kinetic and therefore a great force in the working of evolutionary Nature.

2.18 - The Soul and Its Liberation, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The experience which we first arrive at by the sort of shortcut to liberation which we have described as the movement of withdrawal, assists this tendency. For it is a breaking of the ego and a rejection of the habits of the mentality we now possess; for that is subject to matter and the physical senses and conceives of things only as forms, objects, external phenomena and as names which we attach to those forms. We are not aware directly of the subjective life of other beings except by analogy from our own and by inference or derivative perception based upon their external signs of speech, action, etc., which our minds translate into the terms of our own subjectivity. When we break out from ego and physical mind into the infinity of the spirit, we still see the world and others as the mind has accustomed us to see them, as names and forms; only in our new experience of the direct and superior reality of spirit, they lose that direct objective reality and that indirect subjective reality of their own which they had to the mind. They seem to be quite the opposite of the truer reality we now experience; our mentality, stilled and indifferent, no longer strives to know and make real to itself those intermediate terms which exist in them as in us and the knowledge of which has for its utility to bridge over the gulf between the spiritual self and the objective phenomena of the world. We are satisfied with the blissful infinite impersonality of a pure spiritual existence; nothing else and nobody else any longer matters to us. What the physical senses show to us and what the mind perceives and conceives about them and so imperfectly and transiently delights in, seems now unreal and worthless; we are not and do not care to be in possession of the intermediate truths of being through which these things are enjoyed by the One and possess for Him that value of His being and delight which makes, as we might say, cosmic existence a thing beautiful to Him and worth manifesting. We can no longer share in God's delight in the world; on the contrary, it looks to us as if the Eternal had degraded itself by admitting into the purity of its being the gross nature of Matter or had falsified the truth of its being by imagining vain names and unreal forms. Or else if we perceive at all that delight, it is with a far-off detachment which prevents us from participating in it with any sense of intimate possession, or it is with an attraction to the superior delight of an absorbed and exclusive self-experience which does not allow us to stay any longer in these lower terms than we are compelled to stay by the continuance of our physical life and body.
  But if either in the course of our Yoga or as the result of a free return of our realised Self upon the world and a free repossession of its prakriti by the Purusha in us, we become conscious not only of the bodies and outward self-expression of others, but intimately of their inner being, their minds, their souls and that in them of which their own surface minds are not aware, then we see the real Being in them also and we see them as selves of our Self and not as mere names and forms. They become to us realities of the Eternal. Our minds are no longer subject to the delusion of trivial unworthiness or the illusion of unreality. The material life loses indeed for us its old absorbing value, but finds the greater value which it has for the divine Purusha; regarded no longer as the sole term of our becoming, but as merely having a subordinate value in relation to the higher terms of mind and spirit, it increases by that diminution instead of losing in value. We see that our material being, life, nature are only one poise of the Purusha in relation to its prakriti and that their true purpose and importance can only be appreciated when they are seen not as a thing in itself, but as dependent on higher poises by which they are supported; from those superior relations they derive their meaning and, therefore, by conscious union with them they can fulfil all their valid tendencies and aims. Life then becomes justified to us and no longer stultified by the possession of liberated self-knowledge.
  This larger integral knowledge and freedom liberates in the end and fulfils our whole existence. When we possess it, we see why our existence moves between these three terms of God, ourselves and the world; we no longer see them or any of them in opposition to each other, inconsistent, incompatible, nor do we on the other hand regard them as terms of our ignorance which all disappear at last into a pure impersonal unity. We perceive their necessity as terms rather of our self-fulfilment which preserve their value after liberation or rather find then only their real value. We have no longer the experience of our existence as exclusive of the other existences which make up by our relations with them our experience of the world; in this new consciousness they are all contained in ourselves and we in them. They and we are no longer so many mutually exclusive egos, each seeking its own independent fulfilment or self-transcendence and ultimately aiming at nothing else; they are all the Eternal and the self in each secretly embraces all in itself and seeks in various ways to make that higher truth of its unity apparent and effective in its terrestrial being. Not mutual exclusiveness, but mutual inclusiveness is the divine truth of our individuality, love the higher law and not an independent self-fulfilment. The Purusha who is our real being is always independent and master of prakriti and at this independence we are rightly seeking to arrive; that is the utility of the egoistic movement and its self-transcendence, but its right fulfilment is not in making absolute the ego's principle of independent existence, but in arriving at this other highest poise of the Purusha with regard to its prakriti. There is transcendence of Nature, but also possession of Nature, perfect fulfilment of our individuality, but also perfect fulfilment of our relations with the world and with others. Therefore an individual salvation in heavens beyond, careless of the earth, is not our highest objective; the liberation and self-fulfilment of others is as much our own concern, -- we might almost say, our divine self-interest, -- as our own liberation. Otherwise our unity with others would have no effective meaning. To conquer the lures of egoistic existence in this world is our first victory over ourselves; to conquer the lure of individual happiness in heavens beyond is our second victory; to conquer the highest lure of escape from life and a self-absorbed bliss in the impersonal infinity is the last and greatest victory. Then are we rid of all individual exclusiveness and possessed of our entire spiritual freedom.
  The state of the liberated soul is that of the Purusha who is for ever free. Its consciousness is a transcendence and an all-comprehending unity. Its self-knowledge does not get rid of all the terms of self-knowledge, but unifies and harmonises all things in God and in the divine nature. The intense religious ecstasy which knows only God and ourselves and shuts out all else, is only to it an intimate experience which prepares it for sharing in the embrace of the divine Love and Delight around all creatures. A heavenly bliss which unites God and ourselves and the blest, but enables us to look with a remote indifference on the unblest and their sufferings is not possible to the perfect soul; for these also are its selves; free individually from suffering and ignorance, it must naturally turn to draw them also towards its freedom. On the other hand, any absorption in the relations between self and others and the world to the exclusion of God and the Beyond is still more impossible, and therefore it cannot be limited by the earth or even by the highest and most altruistic relations of man with man. Its activity or its culmination is not to efface and utterly deny itself for the sake of others, but to fulfil itself in God-possession, freedom and divine bliss that in and by its fulfilment others too may be fulfilled. For it is in God alone, by the possession of the Divine only that all the discords of life can be resolved, and therefore the raising of men towards the Divine is in the end the one effective way of helping mankind. All the other activities and realisations of our self-experience have their use and power, but in the end these crowded side-tracks or these lonely paths must circle round to converge into the wideness of the integral way by which the liberated soul transcends all, embraces all and becomes the promise and the power of the fulfilment of all in their manifested being of the Divine.

2.19 - Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The part of us that we have characterised as intraconscient and circumconscient is a still more potent and much more valuable element in the constitution of our being. It includes the large action of an inner intelligence and inner sense-mind, of an inner vital, even of an inner subtle-physical being which upholds and embraces our waking consciousness, which is not brought to the front, which is subliminal, in the modern phrase. But when we can enter and explore this hidden self, we find that our waking sense and intelligence are for the most part a selection from what we secretly are or can be, an exteriorised and much mutilated and vulgarised edition of our real, our hidden being or an upthrow from its depths. Our surface being has been formed with this subliminal help by an evolution out of the Inconscient for the utility of our present mental and physical life on earth; this that is behind is a formation mediating between the Inconscient and the larger planes of Life and Mind which have been created by the involutionary descent and whose pressure has helped to bring about the evolution of mind and life in Matter.
  Our surface responses to physical existence have at their back the support of an activity in these veiled parts, are often responses from them modified by a surface mental rendering. But also that large part of our mentality and vitality which is not a response to the outside world but lives for itself or throws itself out on material existence to use and possess it, our personality, is the outcome, the amalgamated formulation of powers, influences, motives proceeding from this potent intraconscient secrecy.

2.19 - The Planes of Our Existence, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  3:The ancient knowledge in all countries was full of the search after the hidden truths of our being and it created that large field of practice and inquiry which goes in Europe by the name of occultism, -- we do not use any corresponding word in the East, because these things do not seem to us so remote, mysterious and abnormal as to the occidental mentality; they are nearer to us arid the veil between our normal material life and this larger life is much thinner. In India,428a Egypt, Chaldea, China, Greece, the Celtic countries they have formed part of various Yogic systems and disciplines which had once a great hold everywhere, but to the modern mind have seemed mere superstition and mysticism, although the facts and experiences on which they are founded are quite as real in their own field and as much governed by intelligible laws of their own as the facts and experiences of the material world. It is not our intention here to plunge into this vast and difficult field of psychical knowledge.428b But it becomes necessary now to deal with certain broad facts and principles which form its framework, for without them our Yoga of knowledge cannot be complete. We find that in the various systems the facts dealt with are always the same, but there are considerable differences of theoretic and practical arrangement, as is natural and inevitable in dealing with a subject so large and difficult. Certain things are here omitted, there made all-important, here understressed, there over-emphasised; certain fields of experience which are in one system held to be merely subordinate provinces, are in others treated as separate kingdoms. But I shall follow here consistently the Vedic and Vedantic arrangement of which we find the great lines in the Upanishads, first because it seems to me at once the simplest and most philosophical and more especially because it was from the beginning envisaged from the point of view of the utility of these various planes to the supreme object of our liberation. It takes as its basis the three principles of our ordinary being, mind, life and matter, the triune spiritual principle of Sachchidananda and the link principle of vijnana, supermind, the free or spiritual intelligence, and thus arranges all the large possible poises of our being in a tier of seven planes, -- sometimes regarded as five only, because, only the lower five are wholly accessible to us, -- through which the developing being can rise to its perfection.
  4:But first we must understand what we mean by planes of consciousness, planes of existence. We mean a general-settled poise or world of relations between Purusha and prakriti, between the Soul and Nature. For anything that we can call world is and can be nothing else than the working out of a general relation which an universal existence has created or established between itself, or let us say its eternal fact or potentiality and the powers of its becoming. That existence in its relations with and its experience of the becoming is what we call soul or Purusha, individual soul in the individual, universal soul in the cosmos; the principle and the powers of the becoming are what we call Nature or prakriti. But since being, conscious-force and delight of being are always the three constituent terms of existence, the nature of a world is really determined by the way in which prakriti is set to deal with these three primary things and the forms which it is allowed to give to them. For existence itself is and must always be the stuff of its own becoming; it must be shaped into the substance with which Force has to deal. Force again must be the power which works out that substance and works with it to whatever ends; Force is that which we ordinarily call Nature. Again the end, the object with which the worlds are created must be worked out by the consciousness inherent in all existence and all force and all their workings, and the object must be the possession of itself and of its delight of existence in the world. To that all the circumstances and aims of any world-existence must reduce themselves; it is existence developing its terms of being, its power of being, its conscious delight of being; if these are involved, their evolution; if they are veiled, their self-revelation.

2.2.01 - Work and Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The utility of Work
  To keep up work helps to keep up the balance between the internal experience and the external development; otherwise one-sidedness and want of measure and balance may develop. Moreover, it is necessary to keep the sadhana of work for the Divine, because in the end that enables the sadhak to bring out the inner progress into the external nature and life and helps the integrality of the sadhana.
  --
  It is not at all a question of usefulnessalthough your work is very useful when you put yourself into it. Work is part of the sadhana, and in sadhana the question of usefulness does not arise, that is an outward practical measure of things, though even in the outward ordinary life utility is not the only measure. The question is of aspiration to the Divine, whether that is your central aim in life, your inner need or not. Sadhana for oneself is another matterone can take it up or leave it. The real sadhana is for the Divineit is the souls need and one cannot give it up even if in moments of despondency one thinks one can.
  ***
  --
  Yes, obviously, that is one great utility of work that it tests the nature and puts the sadhak in front of the defects of his outer being which might otherwise escape him.
  ***

2.2.02 - The True Being and the True Consciousness, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  When the true being is discovered, the utility of the ego is over
  and this formation has to disappear - the true being is felt in its

2.2.03 - The Science of Consciousness, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is a knot indivisible in reality from universal Consciousness and Force and Substance but in a certain empirical utility of selective action separative rather than separate. Body, not really separate, is limited by subconscious instinct of separation and energetic tendency of separation, but not capable of effecting real separation. All its movements are a practical result of selective experience and selective action which is based on a phenomenon of separate physical being.
  Body is separated from other bodies by intervention of universal matter, but both of the separate bodies are one with the indivisible intervening matter, therefore not separate in reality, but indivisibly connected in energy, and one matter in fundamental reality.
  --
  The scientist may only regard scientific truth and not utility; but he can find only truth of the process of things, not truth of the nature of things. His discoveries bring about inevitably an utility for action; for all truth of process is an utility for action. Even when not the aim of science, process and utility are the soul and body of physical science. Matter itself is only an utility of Spirit or Being or Nature for physical process and action. Material energy is an instrumental dynamis for that utility or else an original dynamis which has no other sense of its operations.
  We get beyond to a higher sense only when [we] get beyond material to mental, psychical and spiritual energy, to mind, soul and spirit.
  --
  If this is in the first place a study of process and involves an utility for psychological action, yet what it leads to inevitably is not that action but an enquiry into the nature of mental consciousness.
  This necessity arises from the immediate perception by mind of something beyond and behind its operations, some energy of hidden consciousness greater than our apparent mentality. To know what that is, we have to resort to a metaphysical enquiry.
  --
  We find that one of these principles of being is energy. Energy is an eternal and inherent power of conscious being. Since all energy is convertible to action, this knowledge also contains a side of psychological and spiritual utility, - eventually perhaps even, since life and body are results of the energy of being and supports of its action, of vital and physical utility.
  Two great utilities open before psychology. We may acquire the possibility of a greater being, consciousness and energy. We may open up the possibility and discover the psychical means or process [of] becoming consciously one with our original selfexistent Being, with God, the Absolute, the Transcendence. To lead up to these possibilities is the aim of Vedantic psychology.

2.20 - Nov-Dec 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Disciple: Jawaharlal seems to have realised the utility of wooing the Muslims.
   Sri Aurobindo: That was the mistake of the Congress. They are instead trying to flirt with Jinnah. And Jinnah simply thinks that he has to obstinately stick to his terms to get them. The more they try the more he becomes intransigent.

2.21 - 1940, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Sri Aurobindo: The Divine foresees everything, lays down the lines of their development, and allows the play of forces to work them out, and in that play of forces it consents to certain things. There is not a fixed will for each individual event, and the result may not lead to a material utility but there are other utilities too.
   Disciple: Is the Divine limited?

2.21 - Towards the Supreme Secret, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This first pursuit of impersonality as enjoined by the Gita brings with it evidently a certain completest inner quietism and is identical in its inmost parts and principles of practice with the method of Sannyasa. And yet there is a point at which its tendency of withdrawal from the claims of dynamic Nature and the external world is checked and a limit imposed to prevent the inner quietism from deepening into refusal of action and a physical withdrawal. The renunciation of their objects by the senses, vis.ayams tyaktva, is to be of the nature of Tyaga; it must be a giving up of all sensuous attachment, rasa, not a refusal of the intrinsic necessary activity of the senses. One must move among surrounding things and act on the objects of the sense-field with a pure, true and intense, a simple and absolute operation of the senses for their utility to the spirit in divine action, kevalair indriyais caran, and not at all for the fulfilment of desire. There is to be vairagya, not in the common significance of disgust of life or distaste for the world action, but renunciation of raga, as also of its opposite, dves.a. There must be a withdrawal from all mental and vital liking as from all mental and vital disliking whatsoever. And this is asked not for extinction, but in order that there may be a perfect enabling equality in which the spirit can give an unhampered and unlimited assent to the integral and comprehensive divine vision of things and to the integral divine action in Nature. A continual resort to meditation, dhyana-yogaparo nityam, is the firm means by which the soul of man can realise its self of Power and its self of silence. And yet there must be no abandonment of the active life for a life of pure meditation; action must always be done as a sacrifice to the supreme Spirit.
  This movement of recoil in the path of Sannyasa prepares an absorbed disappearance of the individual in the Eternal, and renunciation of action and life in the world is an indispensable step in the process. But in the Gita's path of Tyaga it is a preparation rather for the turning of our whole life and existence and of all action into an integral oneness with the serene and immeasurable being, consciousness and will of the Divine, and it preludes and makes possible a vast and total passing upward of the soul out of the lower ego to the inexpressible perfection of the supreme spiritual nature, para prakr.ti.

2.22 - Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The necessity for an interregnum between birth and birth and a passage to other worlds arises from a double cause: there is an attraction of the other planes for the mental and the vital being in man's composite nature due to their affinity with these levels, and there is the utility or even the need of an interval for assimilation of the completed life-experience, a working out of what has to be discarded, a preparation for the new embodiment and the new terrestrial experience. But this need of a period of assimilation and this attraction of other worlds for kindred parts of our being may become effective only when the mental and vital individuality has been sufficiently developed in the halfanimal physical man; until then they might not exist or might not be active: the life experiences would be too simple and elementary to need assimilation and the natural being too crude to be capable of a complex assimilative process; the higher parts would not be sufficiently developed to lift themselves to higher planes of existence. There can be, then, in the absence of such connections with other worlds, a theory of rebirth which admits only of a constant transmigration; here the existence of other worlds and the sojourn of the soul in other planes are not an actual or at any stage a necessary part of the system. There can be another theory in which this passage is the obligatory rule for all and there is no immediate rebirth; the soul needs an interval of preparation for the new incarnation and new experience. A compromise between the two theories is also possible; the transmigration may be the first rule prevailing while the soul is yet unripe for a higher world-existence; the passage to other planes would be the subsequent law. There may even be a third stage, as is sometimes suggested, in which the soul is so powerfully developed, its natural parts so spiritually alive that it needs no interval, but can immediately resume birth for a more rapid evolution without the retardation of a period of intermittence.
  In the popular ideas which derive from the religions that admit reincarnation, there is an inconsistency which, after the manner of popular beliefs, they have been at no pains to reconcile. On the one hand, there is the belief, vague enough but fairly general, that death is followed immediately or with something like immediateness by the assumption of another body. On the other hand, there is the old religious dogma of a life after death in hells and heavens or, it may be, in other worlds or degrees of being, which the soul has acquired or incurred by its merits or demerits in this physical existence; the return to earth intervenes only when that merit and demerit are exhausted and the being is ready for another terrestrial life. This inconsistency would disappear if we admit a variable movement dependent on the stage of evolution which the soul has reached in its manifestation in Nature; all would then turn on the degree of its capacity for entering a higher status than the earthly life. But in the ordinary notion of reincarnation the idea of a spiritual evolution is not explicit, it is only implied in the fact that the soul has to reach the point at which it becomes capable of transcending the necessity of rebirth and returning to its eternal source; but if there is no gradual and graded evolution, this point can be as well reached by a chaotic zigzag movement of which the law is not easily determinable. The definitive solution of the question depends on psychic inquiry and experience; here we can only consider whether there is in the nature of things or in the logic of the evolutionary process any apparent or inherent necessity for either movement, for the immediate transition from body to body or for the retardation or interval before a new reincarnation of the self-embodying psychic principle.
  --
  This too simple and superficial idea of the soul and personality is born of the physical mind's inability to look beyond its own apparent self-formation in this single existence. In its conception, what returns in the reincarnation must be not only the same spiritual being, the same psychic entity, but the same formation of nature that inhabited the body of the last birth; the body changes, the circumstances are different, but the form of the being, the mind, the character, the disposition, temperament, tendencies are the same: John Smith in his new life is the same John Smith that he was in his last avatar. But if that were so, there would be no spiritual utility or meaning at all in rebirth; for there would be the repetition of the same little personality, the same small mental and vital formation to the end of Time.
  For the growth of the embodied being towards the full stature of its reality, not only a new experience, but a new personality is indispensable; to repeat the same personality would only be helpful if something had been incomplete in its formation of its experience which needed to be worked out in the same cadre of self, in the same building of mind and with the same formed capacity of energy. But normally this would be quite otiose: the soul that has been John Smith cannot gain anything or fulfil itself by remaining John Smith for ever; it cannot achieve growth or perfection by repeating the same character, interests, occupations, types of inner and outer movements for ever. Our life and rebirth would be always the same recurring decimal; it would be not an evolution but the meaningless continuity of an eternal repetition. Our attachment to our present personality demands such a continuity, such a repetition; John Smith wants to be John Smith for ever: but the demand is obviously ignorant and, if it were satisfied, that would be a frustration, not a fulfilment. It is only by a change of outer self, a constant progression of the nature, a growth in the spirit that we can justify our existence.

2.22 - The Supreme Secret, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  For Purusha veils himself in this round, veils his divine and immortal being in ignorance and is subject to the law of an insistent limiting Prakriti. That law is the compelling rule of the three gunas. It is a triple stair that stumbles upward towards the divine light but cannot reach it. At its base is the law or dharma of inertia: the tamasic man inertly obeys in a customary mechanical action the suggestions and impulses, the round of will of his material and his half-intellectualised vital and sensational nature. In the middle intervenes the kinetic law or dharma; the rajasic man, vital, dynamic, active, attempts to impose himself on his world and environment, but only increases the wounding weight and tyrant yoke of his turbulent passions, desires and egoisms, the burden of his restless self-will, the yoke of his rajasic nature. At the top presses down upon life the harmonic regulative law or dharma; the sattwic man attempts to erect and follow his limited personal standards of reasoning knowledge, enlightened utility or mechanised virtue, his religions and philosophies and ethical formulas, mental systems and constructions, fixed channels of idea and conduct which do not agree with the totality of the meaning of life and are constantly being broken in the movement of the wider universal purpose.
  The dharma of the sattwic man is the highest in the circle of the gunas; but that too is a limited view and a dwarfed standard.

2.22 - Vijnana or Gnosis, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But even the intuitive reason is not the gnosis; it is only an edge of light of the supermind finding its way by flashes of illumination into the mentality like lightnings in dim and cloudy places. Its inspirations, revelations, intuitions, self-luminous discernings are messages from a higher knowledge-plane that make their way opportunely into our lower level of consciousness. The very character of the intuitive mind sets a gulf of great difference between its action and the action of the self-contained gnosis. In the first place it acts by separate and limited illuminations and its truth is restricted to the often narrow reach or the one brief spot of knowledge lit up by that one lightning-flash with which its intervention begins and terminates. We see the action of the instinct in animals -- an automatic intuition in that vital or sense-mind which is the highest and surest instrument that the animal has to rely on, since it does not possess the human light of the reason, only a cruder and yet ill-formed intelligence. And we can observe at once that the marvellous truth of this instinct which seems so much surer than the reason, is limited in the bird, beast or insect to some particular and restricted utility it is admitted to serve. When the vital mind of the animal tries to act beyond that restricted limit, it blunders in a much blinder way than the reason of man and has to learn with difficulty by a succession of sense-experiences. The higher mental intuition of the human being is an inner visional, not a sense intuition; for it illumines the intelligence and not sense-mind, it is self-conscious and luminous, not a half subconscious blind light: it is freely self-acting, not mechanically automatic. But still, even when it is not marred by the imitative pseudo-intuition, it is restricted in man like tile instinct in the animal, restricted to a particular purpose of will or knowledge -- as is the instinct to a particular life utility or Nature purpose. And when the intelligence, as is its almost invariable habit, tries to make use of it, to apply it, to add to it, it builds round the intuitive nucleus in its own characteristic fashion a mass of mixed truth and error. More often than not, by foisting an element of sense-error and conceptual error into the very substance of the intuition or by coating it up in mental additions and deviations, it not merely deflects but deforms its truth and converts it into a falsehood. At the best therefore the intuition gives us only a limited, though an intense light; at the worst, through our misuse of it or false imitations of it, it may lead us into perplexities and confusions which the less ambitious intellectual reason avoids by remaining satisfied with its own safe and plodding method, -- safe for the inferior purposes of the reason, though never a satisfying guide to the inner truth of things.
  It is possible to cultivate and extend the use of the intuitive mind in proportion as we rely less predominantly upon the reasoning intelligence. We may train our mentality not to seize, as it does now, upon every separate flash of intuitive illumination for its own inferior purposes, not to precipitate our thought at once into a crystallising intellectual action around it; we can train it to think in a stream of successive and connected intuitions, to pour light upon light in a brilliant and triumphant series. We shall succeed in this difficult change in proportion as we purify the interfering intelligence, -if we can reduce in it the element of material thought enslaved to the external appearances of things, the element of vital thought enslaved to the wishes, desires, impulses of the lower nature, the element of intellectual thought enslaved to our preferred, already settled or congenial ideas, conceptions, opinions, fixed operations of intelligence, if, having reduced to a minimum those elements, we can replace them by an intuitive vision and sense of things, an intuitive insight into appearances, an intuitive will, and intuitive ideation. This is hard enough for our consciousness naturally bound by the triple tie of mentality, vitality, corporeality to its own imperfection and ignorance, the upper, middle and lower cord in the Vedic parable of the soul's bondage, cords of the mixed truth and falsehood of appearances by which sunahsepa was bound to the post of sacrifice.

2.23 - The Core of the Gita.s Meaning, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  HAT THEN is the message of the Gita and what its working value, its spiritual utility to the human mind of the present day after the long ages that have elapsed since it was written and the great subsequent transformations of thought and experience? The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly or visibly to alter their value. The vitality of an ancient doctrine consists in the extent to which it naturally lends itself to such a treatment; for that means that whatever may have been the limitations or the obsolescences of the form of its thought, the truth of substance, the truth of living vision and experience on which its system was built is still sound and retains a permanent validity and significance. The Gita is a book that has worn extraordinarily well and it is almost as fresh and still in its real substance quite as new, because always renewable in experience, as when it first appeared in or was written into the frame of the Mahabharata. It is still received in India as one of the great bodies of doctrine that most authoritatively govern religious thinking and its teaching acknowledged as of the highest value if not wholly accepted by almost all shades of religious belief and opinion. Its influence is not merely philosophic or academic but immediate and living, an influence both for thought and action, and its ideas are actually at work as a powerful shaping factor in the revival and renewal of a nation and a culture. It has even been said recently by a great voice that all we need of spiritual truth for the spiritual life is to be found in the Gita. It would be to encourage the superstition of the book to take too literally that utterance. The truth of the spirit is infinite and cannot be circumscribed in that manner. Still it
  The Core of the Gita's Meaning

WORDNET



--- Overview of noun utility

The noun utility has 6 senses (first 3 from tagged texts)
                    
1. (6) utility, public utility, public utility company, public-service corporation ::: (a company that performs a public service; subject to government regulation)
2. (1) utility, usefulness ::: (the quality of being of practical use)
3. (1) utility ::: (the service (electric power or water or transportation) provided by a public utility; "the cost of utilities never decreases"; "all the utilities were lost after the hurricane")
4. utility ::: ((economics) a measure that is to be maximized in any situation involving choice)
5. utility program, utility, service program ::: ((computer science) a program designed for general support of the processes of a computer; "a computer system provides utility programs to perform the tasks needed by most users")
6. utility ::: (a facility composed of one or more pieces of equipment connected to or part of a structure and designed to provide a service such as heat or electricity or water or sewage disposal; "the price of the house included all utilities")

--- Overview of adj utility

The adj utility has 2 senses (no senses from tagged texts)
                  
1. utility, utility-grade ::: (used of beef; usable but inferior)
2. utility, substitute ::: (capable of substituting in any of several positions on a team; "a utility infielder")


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

6 senses of utility                          

Sense 1
utility, public utility, public utility company, public-service corporation
   => service
     => company
       => institution, establishment
         => organization, organisation
           => social group
             => group, grouping
               => abstraction, abstract entity
                 => entity

Sense 2
utility, usefulness
   => quality
     => attribute
       => abstraction, abstract entity
         => entity

Sense 3
utility
   => service
     => work
       => activity
         => act, deed, human action, human activity
           => event
             => psychological feature
               => abstraction, abstract entity
                 => entity

Sense 4
utility
   => system of measurement, metric
     => measure, quantity, amount
       => abstraction, abstract entity
         => entity

Sense 5
utility program, utility, service program
   => program, programme, computer program, computer programme
     => software, software program, computer software, software system, software package, package
       => code, computer code
         => coding system
           => writing
             => written communication, written language, black and white
               => communication
                 => abstraction, abstract entity
                   => entity

Sense 6
utility
   => facility, installation
     => artifact, artefact
       => whole, unit
         => object, physical object
           => physical entity
             => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun utility

5 of 6 senses of utility                        

Sense 1
utility, public utility, public utility company, public-service corporation
   => telephone company, telephone service, phone company, phone service, telco
   => power company, power service, electric company, light company
   => water company, waterworks
   => gas company, gas service
   => bus company, bus service

Sense 2
utility, usefulness
   => detergency, detergence
   => function, purpose, role, use
   => helpfulness
   => use
   => serviceability, serviceableness, usableness, useableness, usability
   => instrumentality
   => practicality
   => practicability, practicableness

Sense 4
utility
   => marginal utility

Sense 5
utility program, utility, service program
   => driver, device driver
   => diagnostic program
   => input program
   => output program
   => sort program, sorting program
   => trace program

Sense 6
utility
   => electrical system, electrical plant
   => heating system, heating plant, heating, heat
   => plumbing, plumbing system


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

6 senses of utility                          

Sense 1
utility, public utility, public utility company, public-service corporation
   => service

Sense 2
utility, usefulness
   => quality

Sense 3
utility
   => service

Sense 4
utility
   => system of measurement, metric

Sense 5
utility program, utility, service program
   => program, programme, computer program, computer programme

Sense 6
utility
   => facility, installation


--- Similarity of adj utility

2 senses of utility                          

Sense 1
utility(prenominal), utility-grade
   => inferior (vs. superior)

Sense 2
utility(prenominal), substitute(prenominal)
   => secondary (vs. primary)


--- Antonyms of adj utility

2 senses of utility                          

Sense 1
utility(prenominal), utility-grade

INDIRECT (VIA inferior) -> superior

Sense 2
utility(prenominal), substitute(prenominal)

INDIRECT (VIA secondary) -> primary


--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun utility

6 senses of utility                          

Sense 1
utility, public utility, public utility company, public-service corporation
  -> service
   => utility, public utility, public utility company, public-service corporation

Sense 2
utility, usefulness
  -> quality
   => appearance, visual aspect
   => attraction, attractiveness
   => clearness, clarity, uncloudedness
   => opacity, opaqueness
   => divisibility
   => ease, easiness, simplicity, simpleness
   => difficulty, difficultness
   => combustibility, combustibleness, burnability
   => suitability, suitableness
   => arability
   => impressiveness
   => navigability
   => neediness
   => painfulness, distressingness
   => piquancy, piquance, piquantness
   => publicity
   => spinnability
   => unsuitability, unsuitableness, ineptness
   => protectiveness
   => nature
   => humanness, humanity, manhood
   => air, aura, atmosphere
   => excellence
   => ultimate
   => characteristic
   => salability, salableness
   => changeableness, changeability
   => changelessness, unchangeability, unchangeableness, unchangingness
   => sameness
   => difference
   => certainty, sure thing, foregone conclusion
   => probability
   => uncertainty, uncertainness, precariousness
   => factuality, factualness
   => counterfactuality
   => materiality, physicalness, corporeality, corporality
   => immateriality, incorporeality
   => particularity, specialness
   => generality
   => simplicity, simpleness
   => complexity, complexness
   => regularity
   => irregularity, unregularity
   => mobility
   => immobility
   => pleasantness, sweetness
   => unpleasantness
   => credibility, credibleness, believability
   => incredibility, incredibleness
   => logicality, logicalness
   => illogicality, illogicalness, illogic, inconsequence
   => naturalness
   => unnaturalness
   => virtu, vertu
   => wholesomeness
   => unwholesomeness, morbidness, morbidity
   => satisfactoriness
   => unsatisfactoriness
   => ordinariness, mundaneness, mundanity
   => extraordinariness
   => ethnicity
   => foreignness, strangeness, curiousness
   => nativeness
   => originality
   => unoriginality
   => correctness, rightness
   => incorrectness, wrongness
   => accuracy, truth
   => accuracy
   => inaccuracy
   => distinction
   => popularity
   => unpopularity
   => lawfulness
   => unlawfulness
   => elegance
   => elegance
   => inelegance
   => urbanity
   => comprehensibility, understandability
   => expressiveness
   => incomprehensibility
   => humaneness
   => inhumaneness, inhumanity
   => morality
   => immorality
   => amorality
   => divinity
   => holiness, sanctity, sanctitude
   => ideality
   => unholiness
   => parental quality
   => fidelity, faithfulness
   => infidelity, unfaithfulness
   => sophistication, worldliness, mundaneness, mundanity
   => naivete, naivety, naiveness
   => hardness
   => penetrability, perviousness
   => impenetrability, imperviousness
   => soapiness
   => fibrosity, fibrousness
   => directivity, directiveness
   => extremeness
   => stuffiness, closeness
   => sufficiency, adequacy
   => worth
   => worthlessness, ineptitude
   => good, goodness
   => bad, badness
   => fruitfulness, fecundity
   => fruitlessness, aridity, barrenness
   => utility, usefulness
   => inutility, uselessness, unusefulness
   => asset, plus
   => constructiveness
   => destructiveness
   => positivity, positiveness, positivism
   => negativity, negativeness, negativism
   => occidentalism
   => orientalism
   => power, powerfulness
   => ability
   => powerlessness, impotence, impotency
   => inability, unfitness
   => romanticism, romance
   => domesticity
   => infiniteness, infinitude, unboundedness, boundlessness, limitlessness
   => finiteness, finitude, boundedness
   => quantifiability, measurability
   => solubility
   => insolubility
   => stuff
   => hot stuff, voluptuousness
   => humor, humour
   => pathos, poignancy
   => tone
   => brachycephaly, brachycephalism
   => dolichocephaly, dolichocephalism
   => relativity
   => responsiveness
   => unresponsiveness, deadness
   => subjectivism
   => snootiness
   => ulteriority
   => memorability
   => woodiness, woodsiness
   => waxiness

Sense 3
utility
  -> service
   => consulting service
   => facility
   => national service
   => utility

Sense 4
utility
  -> system of measurement, metric
   => standard, criterion, measure, touchstone
   => system of weights and measures
   => point system
   => information measure
   => utility
   => Brix scale
   => circular measure
   => board measure
   => Beaufort scale
   => system of weights, weight
   => temperature scale

Sense 5
utility program, utility, service program
  -> program, programme, computer program, computer programme
   => anti-virus program
   => application, application program, applications programme
   => binary, binary program
   => loop
   => malevolent program
   => patch
   => assembler, assembly program
   => checking program
   => compiler, compiling program
   => debugger
   => interface, user interface
   => interpreter, interpretive program
   => job control
   => library program
   => monitor program, monitoring program
   => object program, target program
   => source program
   => parser
   => tagger, tagging program
   => relocatable program
   => reusable program
   => Web Map Service, Web Map Server
   => search engine
   => self-adapting program
   => spider, wanderer
   => spreadsheet
   => stored program
   => supervisory program, supervisor, executive program
   => syntax checker
   => system program, systems program, systems software
   => text-matching
   => translator, translating program
   => utility program, utility, service program
   => LISP program
   => FORTRAN program
   => C program

Sense 6
utility
  -> facility, installation
   => airfield, landing field, flying field, field
   => arboretum, botanical garden
   => athletic facility
   => backroom
   => cafeteria facility
   => communication system, communication equipment
   => course
   => depository, deposit, depositary, repository
   => drive-in
   => forum, assembly, meeting place
   => gas system
   => menagerie, zoo, zoological garden
   => military installation
   => power system, power grid, grid
   => range
   => recreational facility, recreation facility
   => sewage system, sewer system, sewage works
   => source
   => station
   => transportation system, transportation, transit
   => utility
   => water system, water supply, water


--- Pertainyms of adj utility

2 senses of utility                          

Sense 1
utility(prenominal), utility-grade

Sense 2
utility(prenominal), substitute(prenominal)


--- Derived Forms of adj utility
                                    


--- Grep of noun utility
futility
inutility
marginal utility
public utility
public utility company
sport utility
sport utility vehicle
utility
utility bond
utility man
utility program
utility revenue bond
utility routine



IN WEBGEN [10000/486]

Wikipedia - Acea (company) -- Italian utility company
Wikipedia - Aero Commander 500 family -- Family of utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - AgustaWestland AW119 Koala -- Single-engine, eight-seat utility helicopter manufactured by Leonardo
Wikipedia - AgustaWestland AW169 -- Twin-engine light utility helicopter
Wikipedia - AirPort Utility
Wikipedia - Alectra -- Canadian electric utility
Wikipedia - Algonquin Power & Utilities -- Renewable energy and utility conglomerate
Wikipedia - Allegheny Energy -- US electrical utility company
Wikipedia - Alliant Energy -- Public utility holding company based in Madison,WI, US
Wikipedia - American Electric Power -- United States utility company
Wikipedia - American Water Works -- American water utility company
Wikipedia - Antonov An-28 -- Utility transport aircraft by Antonov
Wikipedia - Antonov An-2 -- Utility transport biplane, longest-produced biplane in the world, most produced biplane since World War I
Wikipedia - Antonov An-3 -- 1990s utility transport aircraft by Antonov
Wikipedia - ArcFox M-NM-1-T -- Chinese sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Archive Utility
Wikipedia - Arizona Public Service -- Electric utility in Arizona, United States
Wikipedia - Austin Energy -- Publicly owned utility providing electrical power to the city of Austin, Texas and surrounding areas
Wikipedia - Automatic meter reading -- Transmitting consumption data from a utility meter to the utility provider
Wikipedia - Baltimore Gas and Electric -- Gas and electric utility
Wikipedia - BAW Luba -- Chinese mid-size sports utility vehicle
Wikipedia - BAW Yusheng -- Chinese compact sports utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Bay Super V -- Utility aircraft
Wikipedia - Beechcraft C-12 Huron -- Military staff and utility transport aircraft series of the King Air family
Wikipedia - Bell 206 -- Utility helicopter family by Bell
Wikipedia - Bell 222/230 -- Family of utility helicopters
Wikipedia - Bell 400 TwinRanger -- Utility helicopter prototype
Wikipedia - Bell 412 -- Utility transport helicopter family by Bell
Wikipedia - Bell 430 -- Light-medium utility helicopter
Wikipedia - Bell CH-146 Griffon -- Military utility helicopter
Wikipedia - Bell UH-1 Iroquois -- Family of military utility helicopters
Wikipedia - Bell UH-1N Twin Huey -- utility transport helicopter
Wikipedia - Bestune T77 -- Compact crossover sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Bestune T99 -- Mid-size crossover sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Boeing-Canada A-213 Totem -- 1930s Canadian patrol and utility flying boat
Wikipedia - Britten-Norman BN-2 Islander -- Utility transport aircraft series by Britten-Norman
Wikipedia - Britten-Norman Defender -- Military series of the BN-2 utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - Burlington Electric Department -- Electric utility in Vermont, US
Wikipedia - Butler Blackhawk -- American 1929 3-seat Utility Biplane
Wikipedia - Category:Utility software types
Wikipedia - Cessna 208 Caravan -- Family of utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - Cessna 408 SkyCourier -- Utility aircraft under development by Cessna
Wikipedia - Chery eQ5 -- Tesla electric compact crossover utility vehicle released in March 2020
Wikipedia - Chevrolet Tahoe -- American sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Chevrolet Trailblazer (SUV) -- American mid-size sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Chntpw -- Windows password editing utility on Linux
Wikipedia - Colorado Public Utilities Commission -- American state utility regulator
Wikipedia - Command-Aire 3C3 -- American 1928 three-seat utility biplane
Wikipedia - Computing utility
Wikipedia - Consumers Energy -- American public utility
Wikipedia - Cornwall Electric -- Electricity utility in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada
Wikipedia - CPS Energy -- Municipal electric utility in San Antonio, Texas, U.S.
Wikipedia - Cronosoft -- Video game and utility software company
Wikipedia - Curtiss-Wright CW-14 Osprey -- United States 1930s utility biplane
Wikipedia - Dassault Hirondelle -- French 1960s utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - Deep Freeze (software) -- Software utility
Wikipedia - De Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter -- Utility aircraft family
Wikipedia - De Havilland Canada DHC-5 Buffalo -- Short takeoff and landing utility transport turboprop aircraft
Wikipedia - De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter -- Utility transport aircraft family by de Havilland Canada
Wikipedia - De Havilland DH.60 Moth -- 1925 utility aircraft family
Wikipedia - Denver Water -- Water utility in Colorado
Wikipedia - Desaer ATL-100 -- Utility aircraft under development by Desaer
Wikipedia - DGRCN Tonatiuh MX-1 -- High-wing monoplane utility
Wikipedia - Directory Utility
Wikipedia - Disk First Aid -- Deprecated Apple utility software
Wikipedia - Disk Utility -- Software for Apple macOS
Wikipedia - Dodge -- American-based brand of automobiles, minivans, and sport utility vehicles.
Wikipedia - Doman LZ-5 -- Utility helicopter prototype
Wikipedia - Dominion Skytrader -- Utility aircraft prototype
Wikipedia - Dorcen G60s -- Chinese crossover utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Dornier Do 27 -- Utility/STOL aircraft
Wikipedia - Electric utility
Wikipedia - Energy Future Holdings -- American utility company
Wikipedia - Engie -- French multinational electric utility company
Wikipedia - ESB Group -- Irish electric utility
Wikipedia - Essential Energy -- Australian state-owned utility
Wikipedia - Essential Utilities -- American utility company
Wikipedia - Eurocopter AS565 Panther -- Series of military utility helicopters
Wikipedia - Eurocopter EC120 Colibri -- Utility helicopter
Wikipedia - Eurocopter EC135 -- Utility helicopter
Wikipedia - Eurocopter EC145 -- Twin-engine light utility helicopter
Wikipedia - Eurocopter UH-72 Lakota -- Light utility multipurpose helicopter
Wikipedia - Evektor EV-55 Outback -- Utility aircraft
Wikipedia - Evergy -- United States utility company
Wikipedia - Exa (command-line utility) -- Command-line utility for listing files
Wikipedia - Exelon -- American utility company
Wikipedia - Expected utility hypothesis
Wikipedia - Expected utility theory
Wikipedia - Fdisk -- Command line utility of DOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems
Wikipedia - Fiber art -- Artworks made of fiber and other textile materials, emphasizing aesthetic value over utility
Wikipedia - Firecatcher F-45 -- single-turboprop utility aircraft in development
Wikipedia - FirstEnergy -- American electric utility
Wikipedia - Flashrom -- Universal flash programming utility
Wikipedia - Flatpak -- Linux software deployment utility
Wikipedia - FlyBack -- Open-source backup utility for Linux
Wikipedia - Ford Bronco II -- Compact sport utility vehicle manufactured by Ford
Wikipedia - Ford Bronco -- American sport-utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Ford Escape -- Sport utility vehicle manufactured by Ford
Wikipedia - Ford Kuga -- Sport utility vehicle manufactured by Ford
Wikipedia - Fort Belknap Electric Cooperative -- Rural electric utility cooperative in Texas
Wikipedia - Fortis Inc. -- Canadian utility company
Wikipedia - Futility Closet
Wikipedia - Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft -- US Army program initiated in 2019 to o develop a successor to the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter
Wikipedia - GippsAero GA8 Airvan -- Single engine high-wing utility aircraft
Wikipedia - GMC (automobile) -- Division of General Motors focused on trucks and utility vehicles
Wikipedia - GMC Envoy -- American mid-size sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Gotha Go 146 -- Prototype utility aircraft by Gotha
Wikipedia - Gregory Hafen II -- American politician and utility executive
Wikipedia - Harbin Y-12 -- Utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - Hawaiian Electric Industries -- American utility company
Wikipedia - Hicksian demand function -- Demand of a consumer over a bundle of goods that minimizes their expenditure while delivering a fixed level of utility.
Wikipedia - Hydro Ottawa -- Municipal electrical utility in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Wikipedia - Hydro-Quebec -- Hydroelectric utility
Wikipedia - Hyundai Santa Fe -- sport utility vehicle produced by Hyundai
Wikipedia - IBM mainframe utility programs
Wikipedia - IBM Web-based System Manager -- Unix configuration utility
Wikipedia - Iconv -- Standard UNIX utility
Wikipedia - Imperial Irrigation District -- Imperial Valley, California, water and power public utility
Wikipedia - Incredible utility -- American patent law concept
Wikipedia - Indianapolis Power & Light -- American utility company providing electric service to the city of Indianapolis, IN
Wikipedia - Indonesian Aerospace N-219 -- Utility aircraft
Wikipedia - Indonesian Aerospace N-245 -- Utility aircraft under development
Wikipedia - IRobot R-Gator -- Unmanned robotic utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Jemez Mountains Electric Cooperative -- Rural utility cooperative in New Mexico, US
Wikipedia - Join (Unix utility)
Wikipedia - KAI KUH-1 Surion -- Transport utility helicopter
Wikipedia - Kalinin K-10 -- Soviet utility aircraft prototype
Wikipedia - Kamov Ka-60 -- Utility helicopter
Wikipedia - Kansai Electric Power Company -- Japanese electric utility company
Wikipedia - KeePass -- Computer password management utility
Wikipedia - KSU Gazal-1 -- First sport utility vehicle of Saudi Arabia
Wikipedia - Lada Niva II -- mini sport utility vehicle made by Lada
Wikipedia - Landing Craft Utility -- Type of boat designed for transporting amphibious forces and cargo to shore
Wikipedia - LCU-2001-class utility landing craft -- LCU-2001-class utility landing craft
Wikipedia - Liffey Service Tunnel -- Utility facility in Dublin, Ireland
Wikipedia - Lincoln Corsair -- Compact luxury crossover utility vehicle
Wikipedia - List of defunct utility companies in Victoria, Australia -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of sport utility vehicles -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of utility cooperatives -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - Locale (computer software) -- Standard UNIX utility
Wikipedia - Lockheed Vega -- Utility transport aircraft by Lockheed
Wikipedia - Los Angeles Department of Water and Power -- Largest American municipal utility
Wikipedia - Louisville Water Company -- American water utility company
Wikipedia - Lower Colorado River Authority -- Public utility in Texas that manages the lower Colorado River
Wikipedia - Maharashtra I Solar Power Plant -- Indian power utility
Wikipedia - Manitoba Hydro -- Electric power and natural gas utility company in Manitoba, Canada
Wikipedia - Marginal rate of substitution -- Rate at which a consumer can replace one good with another while maintaining the same utility
Wikipedia - Marginal utility
Wikipedia - McDonnell Douglas MD 500 Defender -- Light utility and scout helicopter
Wikipedia - MD Helicopters MD 500 -- Light utility helicopter family
Wikipedia - Mercedes-Benz G-Class -- Sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Migration Assistant (Apple) -- macOS software utility developed by Apple that transfers data from an existing computer or full drive backup to a new computer
Wikipedia - Mini Moke -- British small utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Mitsubishi MU-2 -- Utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - Mobile Gas -- American natural gas utility
Wikipedia - National Grid plc -- British electricity and gas utility company based in the United Kingdom
Wikipedia - Navy Working Uniform -- United States Navy utility uniforms
Wikipedia - Network Utility
Wikipedia - NextEra Energy -- American utility company
Wikipedia - Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation -- Electric utility company in New York State, U.S.
Wikipedia - NineStar Connect -- American utility company
Wikipedia - NIO EC6 -- Chinese sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - NIO ES6 -- Chinese sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - NiSource -- American utility company
Wikipedia - Noorduyn Norseman -- 1935 utility aircraft family by Noorduyn
Wikipedia - Northrop YC-125 Raider -- American utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - NSTAR (company) -- Former utility company in Massachusetts
Wikipedia - Oncor Electric Delivery -- Electric utility company in Dallas, United States
Wikipedia - OpenGL Utility Library
Wikipedia - OpenGL Utility Toolkit
Wikipedia - Orion New Zealand -- New Zealand electric utility
Wikipedia - Oshkosh L-ATV -- Military light utility/combat multi-role vehicle
Wikipedia - PAC P-750 XSTOL -- Utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - Pet -- Animal kept for companionship rather than utility
Wikipedia - Peugeot Hoggar (coupM-CM-) utility) -- Pickup truck
Wikipedia - Philosophy of futility
Wikipedia - Piaggio P.166 -- Twin-engine pusher-type utility aircraft
Wikipedia - Pilatus PC-12 -- |Executive and utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - Pilatus PC-6 Porter -- STOL utility transport aircraft
Wikipedia - Ping (networking utility) -- Computer network administration utility used to test the reachability of a host
Wikipedia - Pinnacle West Capital -- Utility holding company in Arizona, US
Wikipedia - Pitcairn Mailwing -- American 1920s three-seat mail and utility biplane
Wikipedia - Printf (Unix) -- Standard UNIX utility
Wikipedia - PSNH -- Former utility in the U.S. state of New Hampshire
Wikipedia - Public utility
Wikipedia - PZL-104 Wilga -- Utility aircraft family by PZL Warszawa-OkM-DM-^Ycie built 1962-2006
Wikipedia - PZL M28 Skytruck -- Utility aircraft
Wikipedia - Quasilinear utility -- Function linear in one argument, used in economics and consumer theory
Wikipedia - Quest Kodiak -- Utility aircraft
Wikipedia - Reims-Cessna F406 Caravan II -- Utility aircraft
Wikipedia - Saro P.531 -- Utility helicopter
Wikipedia - Saturn Vue -- Compact sport utility vehicle manufactured by Saturn
Wikipedia - Scottish Aviation Pioneer -- Utility aircraft family
Wikipedia - Sed -- Standard UNIX utility for editing streams of data
Wikipedia - Sempra Energy -- Natural gas utility holding company
Wikipedia - Service drop -- Overhead electrical line running from a utility pole
Wikipedia - Siebel Si 204 -- Utility transport aircraft by Siebel
Wikipedia - Sikorsky H-19 Chickasaw -- Family of utility helicopters
Wikipedia - Sikorsky S-70 -- Family of medium transport/utility military helicopters
Wikipedia - Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk -- Series of military utility transport helicopters
Wikipedia - Smart meter -- Online recorder of utility usage
Wikipedia - SMP/E -- Software management utility for mainframes
Wikipedia - Sompower -- Electric utility company in Somaliland
Wikipedia - Sort (Unix) -- Standard UNIX utility
Wikipedia - Southern California Edison -- Electrical utility in Southern California, United States
Wikipedia - Southern California Gas Company -- |American natural gas utility company in California
Wikipedia - Spartan C3 -- American 1920s three-seat utility biplane
Wikipedia - Sport utility vehicle -- Type of automobile
Wikipedia - State Grid Corporation of China -- State-owned electric utility monopoly of China
Wikipedia - Stinson Voyager -- 1940s American light utility monoplane
Wikipedia - Strace -- Diagnostic, debugging and instructional userspace utility for Linux
Wikipedia - Strip (Unix) -- Standard UNIX utility
Wikipedia - StuffIt Expander -- File decompressor software utility
Wikipedia - Subjective expected utility
Wikipedia - Talk (software) -- Standard Unix utility
Wikipedia - Tata Power -- Indian electric utility company
Wikipedia - Tc (Linux) -- Linux user-space utility program
Wikipedia - Technoavia Rysachok -- Utility aircraft
Wikipedia - Tecnam P2012 Traveller -- Utility aircraft
Wikipedia - Tee (command) -- Standard UNIX utility
Wikipedia - Tehachapi Energy Storage Project -- Utility-scale battery energy storage system in California, U.S.
Wikipedia - Telangana II Solar Power Plant -- Indian power utility
Wikipedia - Telangana I Solar Power Plant -- Indian power utility
Wikipedia - Tennessee Valley Authority -- American utility company
Wikipedia - Tesla Model X -- Full-size crossover utility vehicle developed by Tesla Motors
Wikipedia - Tesla Model Y -- Tesla electric compact crossover utility vehicle released in March 2020
Wikipedia - Test (Unix) -- Command-line utility
Wikipedia - The Unarchiver -- File decompression utility
Wikipedia - Tilly (vehicle) -- British utility vehicle of WW2.
Wikipedia - Time-utility function
Wikipedia - Tokyo Electric Power Company -- Japanese electric utility holding company
Wikipedia - Tomcar -- Brand of commercial off-road utility vehicle
Wikipedia - Toronto Hydro -- Electric utility company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Wikipedia - Toyota 4Runner -- Compact, later mid-size sport utility vehicle manufactured by Toyota
Wikipedia - Toyota Sequoia -- Full size sport utility vehicle
Wikipedia - True and false (commands) -- Standard Unix utility
Wikipedia - TrueCrypt -- discontinued source-available disk encryption utility
Wikipedia - Umask -- Standard UNIX utility
Wikipedia - Union Electric Company -- Former American electric power utility
Wikipedia - Uniq -- Standard UNIX utility
Wikipedia - USAV Malvern Hill (LCU 2025) -- Landing Craft Utility of the Runnymede class
Wikipedia - Utilitas (company) -- Utility and energy company in Tallinn, Estonia
Wikipedia - Utility clothing -- World War II clothing rationing in the UK
Wikipedia - Utility computing
Wikipedia - Utility (economics)
Wikipedia - Utility fog
Wikipedia - Utility frequency -- Frequency used on standard electricity grid in a given area
Wikipedia - Utility function
Wikipedia - Utility maximization problem
Wikipedia - Utility model
Wikipedia - Utility monster
Wikipedia - Utility (patent)
Wikipedia - Utility player -- Athlete who plays multiple different positions within the same sport
Wikipedia - Utility pole
Wikipedia - Utility software
Wikipedia - Utility sound technician -- Filmmaking occupation
Wikipedia - Utility station -- Radio station broadcasting signals not intended for the general public
Wikipedia - Utility submeter -- Tenant utility billing system
Wikipedia - Utility Warehouse -- British multi-utility brand of Telecom Plus
Wikipedia - Utility -- Concept in economics and game theory
Wikipedia - VCenter -- Centralized management utility for VMware
Wikipedia - VeraCrypt -- free and open-source disk encryption utility
Wikipedia - Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism -- A method of making choices that maximises utility
Wikipedia - VnStat -- Free network utility for the Linux operating system
Wikipedia - Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem -- Any individual whose preferences satisfy four axioms has a utility function
Wikipedia - West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company -- Indian utility company
Wikipedia - Westland Scout -- Military utility helicopter
Wikipedia - Willapa Electric Company -- Electric railway and utility company in Washington, United States
Wikipedia - Wisconsin Public Service Corporation -- Utility company in Green Bay, Wisconsin
Wikipedia - Xargs -- Standard UNIX utility
Wikipedia - Yum (software) -- Free and open-source command-line package management utility
Wikipedia - Zero-sum game -- Mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants
Wikipedia - Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority -- Zimbabwean utility company
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17239872-youtility
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18888050-futility-closet
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20559845-futility-closet
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23503725-futility-closet-2
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28205624-the-utility-of-boredom
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28219519-the-futility-of-loving-a-soldier
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3711825-the-koehler-method-of-utility-dog-training
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/750470.Futility
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/785360.Futility_or_the_Wreck_of_the_Titan
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8869441-picador-shots-a-mean-utility
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
Integral World - On Criticism, Integral Theory, and the Nature and Utility of Scholarly Discourse, by Sara Ross
selforum - utility of asuras for brahmans purpose
Psychology Wiki - Utility
Psychology Wiki - Utility_theory
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - epistemic-utility
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - rationality-normative-utility
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/AnExerciseInFutility
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InverseLawOfUtilityAndLethality
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MundaneUtility
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UtilityBelt
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UtilityMagic
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MundaneUtility/ComicBooks
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Utility
Rollerball(1975) - In a futuristic society where corporations have replaced countries, the violent game of Rollerball is used to control the populace by demonstrating the futility of individuality. However, one player, Jonathan E., rises to the top, and fights for his personal freedom and threatens the corporate contr...
Deep Red(1975) - What I like to call a classic. This film is pure geneous; It explores the futility of death to th
Arsenic and Old Lace (1942) ::: 8.0/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 58min | Comedy, Crime, Thriller | 6 October 1944 -- Arsenic and Old Lace Poster -- A writer of books on the futility of marriage risks his reputation when he decides to get married. Things get even more complicated when he learns on his wedding day that his beloved maiden aunts are habitual murderers. Director: Frank Capra
Testament of Youth (2014) ::: 7.3/10 -- PG-13 | 2h 9min | Biography, Drama, History | 16 January 2015 (UK) -- A British woman recalls coming of age during World War I - a story of young love, the futility of war, and how to make sense of the darkest times. Director: James Kent Writers:
https://android.fandom.com/wiki/Android_Utility_Apps
https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Joker's_Utility_Belt
https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Belt
https://braveandbold.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Belt
https://characters.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Belt_Buzz
https://citiesxl.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Center
https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Belt
https://conservation.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_&_Service_Lines
https://cycling.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Cycling
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Belt
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Power
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_power
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/On_the_Utility_of_Shock_Magic
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Mages
https://electrogirl.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Androids
https://expeditions-viking.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_skills
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Arlington_utility
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Franklin_Metro_utility
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Utility
https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Mobs
https://harrypotterwizardsunite.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_Items
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Spider-Man's_Utility_Belt
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/A_Mirror_for_Futility
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/A_Mirror_for_Futility
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Exercises_in_Futility
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_creature
https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_utility_items
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/0-LT_utility_droid
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/3C-series_utility_droid
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/A-LT_Utility_Droid
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Light_Infantry_Utility_Vehicle
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/T3-series_utility_droid
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_belt
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_belt/Legends
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/utility_droid
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Utility_vibroblade
https://talesofcrestoria.fandom.com/wiki/SR_Memoria_Utility_Guide
https://thegetaway.fandom.com/wiki/Utility
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Primal_Utility
Angel Beats!: Another Epilogue -- -- P.A. Works -- 1 ep -- Original -- Supernatural Drama School -- Angel Beats!: Another Epilogue Angel Beats!: Another Epilogue -- Disillusioned with the afterlife, a new student causes a scene during a classroom test and expresses his doubts about whether getting good grades can really lead to escaping the school and ascending to Heaven. Afterwards, he is confronted by the new student council president—a familiar face whose past experiences give him powerful insight into the true nature of the school and first-hand knowledge regarding the futility of rebellion. -- -- Special - Dec 22, 2010 -- 212,399 7.49
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Utility_poles_in_Virginia
41-foot Utility Boat, Large
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Kauai Island Utility Cooperative
Landing Craft Utility
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List of defunct utility companies in Victoria, Australia
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M274 -ton 44 utility platform truck
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National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners
National Utility Contractors Association
Network Utility
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Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder
Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board
OpenGL Utility Library
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Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission
Peugeot Hoggar (coup utility)
Ping (networking utility)
Prince Albert Rural Water Utility
Printer Setup Utility
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Public Utility Building, Bangalore
Public Utility Commission of Texas
Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935
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Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act
Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program
Quasilinear utility
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Rate base (utility)
Risk-utility test
Sacramento Municipal Utility District
Single-parameter utility
Social media as a public utility
Social utility efficiency
Sport utility vehicle
StoneGeary utility function
Subjective expected utility
Sustainable Energy Utility
Systemically important financial market utility
System Image Utility
Tennessee Public Utility Commission
The Utility of Force
The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility
Time-utility function
Tip (Unix utility)
Type 067 utility landing craft
Utility
Utility abstraction pattern
Utility aircraft
Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency
Utility bicycle
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Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
Utility (patent)
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Utilitypossibility frontier
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Utility room
Utility-scale solar
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Utility sound technician
Utility submeter
Utility system
Utility trailer
Utility tunnel
Utility vehicle
Utility Workers Union of America
Vermont Public Utility Commission
Vic Harris (utility player)
Von NeumannMorgenstern utility theorem
Windows Installer CleanUp Utility
Wireless connection management utility



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