Willingness.................

 

Deliverance is out of time and into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things.  We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in the "state of grace."  All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality.  We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

-Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

And fairly rare, too.................

 

It’s easy to make any case, no matter how absurd, by misrepresenting reality and hoping that your audience won’t notice – that is, by resorting to unfair intellectual practices. It’s a bit more difficult, yet vastly more productive – and honorable – to actually consult and report the data even when they fail to tell the tale that you wish to be told.

-Donald J. Boudreaux, from this post

ought to be adjusted.................

 

Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific details with Olympian generalization.  Thus a discussion of imports from Jamica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that 'politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.'

-Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke: The First Conservative

a coven of initiates..............

 

I have attended too many seminars in some great universities which degenerated into a closed language game played by a coven of initiates who prized obscure self-referential congratulations over hones engagement with reality.

-Michael Ignatieff

ownership..................

 

     The root cause of our suffering is our own thinking. . . . Our experience of reality is created from the combination of the events we encounter and what we think about them.  To reiterate, our emotions come not from external events but from our thinking about them.

-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think:  Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering

Ah, recessions......................

 

Goodspeed has little patience with the moralising that claims recessions are a nation’s just deserts for periods of greed and moral decrepitude. He disapprovingly cites Alan Greenspan’s description of periods of “irrational exuberance” for which Greenspan suggested that downturns and recessions were just punishments. Goodspeed compares much of this sort of discussion to “the parables of Jesus or Aesop’s fables”: fine for moral instruction, but not really the prime causes of economic downturns.

-Joel Kotkin, from this substack post

filtering....................

 

     Reality is what is happening right now.  It is the objective circumstance that is occurring without any meaning or judgment attached to it.  And so what we experience is not reality itself but our perception of reality.  Any meaning or thinking we give something is self-created and our choice. . . . the meaning we give something is the filter through which we see life.

-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think:  Why Your Thinking Is the Beginning & End of Suffering

Incentives matter.............

 

Unsustainable things can last longer than you anticipate.  Incentives can keep crazy, unsustainable trends going longer than seems reasonable because there are social and financial reasons preventing people from accepting reality for as long as they can.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

untouched...............

 

"Why are you so wary of thought?" said the philosopher.  "Thought is the one tool we have for organizing the world."

"True.  But thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it."

To his disciples he later said, "A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality."

-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

On big, shiny ideas..............

 If you find yourself wondering how no one has thought of this before, that’s a warning sign. Chances are, there’s a quiet graveyard of leaders who learned something expensive that you haven’t yet uncovered. Go talk to them.

I’m pro-innovation. I believe in big ideas. But I’m skeptical of shiny ones—too clean, too theoretical, too detached from human realities. The best strategies are forged in constraint, humility, and patience. They’re honest about how many variables they’re trying to solve at once.

-Mike Sharrow, from here

via

the presence of the unforethinkable.....

 

Contingency, or the "presence of the unforethinkable," is at the heart of earthly reality, according to philosopher Albert Borgman.  Contingency doesn't make life random or meaningless, he says, adding that in ancient times contingency meant something like consummation.  Rather, it attests to the "unsurpassable eloquence" of a reality that often asks us to confront what we cannot control or even understand.  A face-to-face meeting, which demands a mutual reading of body language, emotion, and soul, is harder to fathom, and less predictable than a virtual encounter.  But by losing the will to face one another, we are turning away from the messy, unpredictable, and real in life.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

willingness........................

 

     A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.  The only way we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers. . . .

     The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature.  But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. . . . Another characteristic of human nature—perhaps the one that makes us most human—is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.

-M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Reading with a dictionary at hand.............

 

     Bear in mind that equivocity is true to being only as one way of attending to and speaking of being.  It is true to being as relative to being and as relative to the other senses of being.  Against ironic postmodern truth-refusal and metamodern oscillations between sincerity and indifference at the expense of truth, Chesterton guides his readers to notice how preconceptions can warp attention and prevent clear perception.  This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his detective fiction, which draws attention to puzzlement and indefiniteness, as well as the unexplained intractabilities of reality.  Fitting the metaxological mode of attention at the heart of Chesterton's journalistic metaphysics, his interest is in restoring the adventurous side of life where the comfort of the overly familiar has caused us to lose our primal astonishment and foundational perplexity.  How can we feel at home if we have lost a sense of wonder?  That would not be home but a prison for the soul.  And how can we truly wonder if we have no place of refuge?  Without a safe haven, wonder turns into terror.

      Chesteronian defamiliarization may be misunderstood as an attempt to restore passivity to the perceiver, given that univocity tends to put people in an active relationship with reality, albeit still unconscious and devoid of reflective reasoning.  This is only part of the truth.  As suggested, Chesterton wants to resist the "worship of law," especially the worship of arbitrary human laws, by restoring difference.  But the deeper aim of this strategy is to restore the possibility of genuine consciousness and real choice; that means recovering participation in reality.

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

"an atmosphere of persistent edginess".........

 

By nearly any material or technological measure, humanity has never been so prosperous, so capable, or so close to receiving the full blessings of science properly ordered to human need.

That does not mean everything is fine. It means despair is a distortion of reality. We are so accustomed to hearing what is broken that we forget to notice what is being built

-Jamie Wilson, advocating for some thoughtful perspective

On particulars and generalities......

 

     A hostile commentator might remark that Aristotle (like Nietzsche) criticizes Plato so keenly because he is conscious of having borrowed from him generously; no man is a hero to his debtors.  But Aristotle has a healthy attitude, nevertheless; he is a realist almost in the modern sense; he is resolved to concern himself with the objective present, while Plato is absorbed in the subjective future.  There was, in the Socratic-Platonic demand for definitions, a tendency away from things and facts to theories and ideas, from particulars to generalities, from science to scholasticism; at last Plato became so devoted to generalities that they began to determine his particulars, so devoted to ideas that they began to define or select his facts.  Aristotle preaches a return to things, to the "unwithered face of nature" and reality; he had a lusty preference for the concrete particular, for the flesh and blood individual.  But Plato so loved the general and universal that in The Republic he destroyed the individual to make a perfect state.

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

Uh-oh................

 

Cultures are built around claims and beliefs about the otherworld: about God or gods, about correct worship, about the nature of reality, about goodness and truth and the meaning of virtue.  These are also, inevitably, claims about what it means to be human.  Knock out the spiritual core of any culture, and however hard people fight, its fate is sealed.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

real....................

 

Today, people struggle to find what's real. Everything has become so synthetic that a lot of people, all they want is to grasp onto hope.

-Bob Marley

thanks Ray

Sorting out.............................

 

................................new realities.

making do.................

 

We want things to go perfectly, so we tell ourselves that we'll get started once the conditions are right, or once we have our bearings.  When, really, it'd be better to focus on making do with how things actually are.

-Ryan Holiday

raising the veil........................

 

Every so often I would raise my eyes from the book and look at the glittering sea: it seemed to me that I was actually seeing the curvature of space and time imagined by Einstein.  As if by magic: as if a friend were whispering into my ear an extraordinary hidden truth, suddenly raising the veil of reality to disclose a simpler, deeper order.  Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience.  Another veil has fallen.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics