One way or another, everyone alive today navigates in a world that grows denser with competing ideologies. The level of devotion solidifies to match the breadth of possible alignments. There are now more people who are more sure of the rightness of their increasingly opposing values. Conflict is inevitable. Clarity is essential.
Tag: knowledge
Suffering is a Symptom of Growth
For all your power, whether natural or acquired, you still can only function in a rather narrow band of comfortable experiences. Step outside this range, and the outcome is death. Approach your limit you will experience every trauma a human mind can. There is no way to expand this area except to march purposefully into trauma.
Seek Out New Ways to Arrange Reality
The value of a mind does not reside solely in the total information it stores. Indeed, knowledge can betray you if it prevents you seeing beyond its boundaries. Whatever you know is not the limit to what can be known. Think beyond the constraints of tradition to look upon all things with new eyes.
Some Realizations about the Similarities of Religion and the State
I simply do not acknowledge as “good” ideas that effectively force upon me violence if I deny their tenants, whether it comes from the state, or a clergyman. I just won’t.
Arbitrary Self-Importance Will Taint Your Identity
You often wish a thing were true, but this does not make it so. Reality only bends in its own way, never totally mastered or obeyed. A thought originating in your mind is no more real or important than any other. You alone are not the determiner. It takes practice and skill to align your mind with what is.
Embrace Your Intellect, Even if it Alienates You
The human race is divided by its diversity of traits. This is a natural and beautiful phenomenon. Given time, we steadily branch outward in every conceivable direction from the generic template of what it means to be human.
Greatness is Rightful Action in Trying Times
Nothing is ever stable. Without warning, life demands us to go beyond what we think we can do. These moments test us. We cower away from the strangeness of the new demands, or we prove our worth by acting. Whether we fail or succeed in these spontaneous exams is no matter. What matters is that we are elevated to something better than we were before.
Be Confident Above All Else
A person is more than the knowledge they hold and the body they control. A person is, fundamentally, awareness of themselves. The way you see yourself changes everything about you. Thinking and feeling exactly the way you are is the root of confidence. Anything that strays from the mark of reality will color all your actions.
Influences I
Whenever someone asks me which philosophers I follow, I very quickly branch off into persons who do not seem to be philosophers within the narrow meaning of the term, lover of knowledge. But how could Mark Twain possibly be not that? If asked who are the great wits, I will come up with a list from all over the place. In what universe would we think Lewis Carroll was not as witty as could be?
Be Free (Even When People Disagree)
Lots of people know how to be cool and confident as long as everyone is nodding their heads in agreement with them. It’s a lot harder to be cool and confident when someone listens to you and says “Sorry. I’m not buying anything you’re saying.”