The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind to new horizons. And for one brief moment, you did. For a fraction of a second, you were open to options you’d never considered. THAT is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.
TV: Star Trek
If guilt is to be healed, the victim must be reconciled to himself. Were his feeling mainly outgoing, there would be little problem: If he felt nothing but grief at the damage he had caused to others, reconciliation with them would follow easily. He would have no hesitation in saying “I am sorry.” But because his feelings are usually complicated by inner remorse and self-rejection, reconciliation becomes difficult, sometimes even impossible, to achieve. The forgiveness which others would give him is blocked by his inability to forgive himself. Therefore the problem of guilt is nothing other than one facet of the problem of self-hatred.
– Malcolm France, The Paradox of Guilt, PP. 19-20
– Malcolm France, The Paradox of Guilt, PP. 19-20
Book: Search for Silence, 1972
And indeed it is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow-side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a ragging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.
– C. G. Jung Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Vol. 7, Collected Works, p 30.
– C. G. Jung Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Vol. 7, Collected Works, p 30.
Book: Search for Silence, 1972
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
Book: Breakfast of Champions
You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
Book: Contact
We live in an age in which we know precisely what recycle bin our newsprint and soda bottles belong. But we have no idea what a human being is, what it’s supposed to do, or who or what it is permissible to sleep with. So, this is the lesson of our time: the “good” man is the one who treats his garbage with greater care than his own soul. This is why, for our cultural gatekeepers, Ms. Chambers is an icon and the Rev. Falwell did not die soon enough.
dansmind86 /
education, evolution, humanity, learning, life, mankind, religion, science, truth
#2997
All truth is one. In this light may science and religion endeavor here for the
steady evolution of mankind. From darkness to light, from narrowness to
broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance, it is the voice of life, which
calls us to come and learn.
steady evolution of mankind. From darkness to light, from narrowness to
broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance, it is the voice of life, which
calls us to come and learn.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
Book: The Portrait of Dorian Gray
But it seems to me that most of the human beings whose lives have stirred us and whom we admire are people who dedicated themselves not to the elementary pleasures, but to something noble, something fine, something that reaches beyond. Some encounter with necessity is the ground of taking one’s life seriously. It’s the ground of being sensitive to all of the really beautiful things in the world. It’s the ground of being open to the call of something higher in which we have a chance to participate, whether it be perpetuation of our young, whether it be the future of our country, whether it be the arts or philosophy or music. And it’s the ground, really, of transforming what is otherwise a mere necessity into an occasion of something really splendidly human.
Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. To me however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images—sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. Not my idea of God, but God. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbor but my neighbor. For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive—who are with us in the same room - talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture-almost the précis (thumbnail sketch)-we’ve made of him in our own minds?
Book: A Grief Observed (1962)
Apparently we humans have this Faustian thing built into us. Until we can hold the universe like a screaming marble in the palm of our hand, we will define ourselves as uncompleted.
Book: Tripping by Charles Hayes, page 445
Science will create new levels of meaning. The Internet already is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, 20 exabytes of memory. It is approaching the level of the human brain and is doubling every year, while the brain is not. It is all becoming effectively one machine. And we are the machine.
What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. They are but trifles, to be sure, but, scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.
If you were happy everyday of your life, you wouldn’t be human. You’d be
a game show host.
a game show host.
Movie: Heathers
Like a Dead Sea Scroll or long-vaulted Beatles outtake reel, By the Late John Brockman is destined to recontextualize the works of a century’s greatest thinkers. First published thirty years ago, this radical, seminal work emerges only now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, as a remarkably prescient topology of the landscape directly ahead. This sequence of plainspoken textual fractals are at once soothing and mind-blowing, disorienting yet familiar. Herein lie the navigational keys to the ever changing map of human consciousness.
Religion has, however, other appeals besides that of terror; it appeals specifically to our human self-esteem. If Christianity is true, mankind are not such pitiful worms as they seem to be; they are of interest to the Creator of the universe, who takes the trouble to be pleased with them when they behave well and displeased when they behave badly. This is a great compliment. We should not think of studying an ants’ nest to find out which of the ants performed their formicular duty, and we should certainly not think of picking out those individual ants who were remiss and putting them into a bonfire. If God does this for us, it is a compliment to our importance; and it is even a pleasanter compliment if he awards to the good among us everlasting happiness in heaven.
Book: “Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, 1957 (p. 42)
What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.
What I find worth exclaiming about right now is the continuing applicability to the human condition, years after free will has ceased to be a novelty, of what jazzed Dudley Prince back to life, of what is now known generally as Kilgore’s Creed: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
Book: Timequake
White culture is based on an economic system that encourages the production of surplus and has provided ways to store and distribute it.
Book: Man’s Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never knew why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even knew themselves. Nobody understands anybody. And yet somehow we live together, mostly in peace, and get things done with a high enough success rate that people keep trying. Human beings get married and a lot of the marriages work, and they have children and most of them grow up to be decent people, and they have schools and businesses and factories and farms that have results at some level of acceptability—all without having a clue what’s going on inside anybody’s head. Muddling through, that’s what human beings do. That was the part of being human that Bean hated the most.
Book: “Shadow of the Hegemon” by Orson Scott Card, pg 58