Travels With Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 924-926 | Added on Wednesday, April 19, 2017 11:05:40 PM I’ve always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style. In ========== Travels With Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 1016-1016 | Added on Wednesday, April 19, 2017 11:14:48 PM I admire all nations and hate all governments, ========== Travels With Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1287-1291 | Added on Thursday, April 20, 2017 10:02:59 PM I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless. Localness is not gone but it is going. In the many years since I have listened to the land the change is very great. Traveling west along the northern routes I did not hear a truly local speech until I reached Montana. ========== Travels With Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 1484-1485 | Added on Sunday, April 23, 2017 10:26:29 PM Clinging to the sides of the dreamlike waterways was the litter of our times, the motels, the hot-dog stands, the merchants of the cheap and mediocre and tawdry so loved by summer tourists, but these incrustations were closed and ========== Travels With Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 105 | Location 1600-1601 | Added on Monday, April 24, 2017 10:45:43 PM Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of alone-ness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present. ========== Travels With Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 108 | Location 1644-1652 | Added on Tuesday, April 25, 2017 8:44:14 PM At the roadsides I never had a really good dinner or a really bad breakfast. The bacon or sausage was good and packaged at the factory, the eggs fresh or kept fresh by refrigeration, and refrigeration was universal.” I might even say roadside America is the paradise of breakfast except for one thing. Now and then I would see a sign that said “home-made sausage” or “home-smoked bacons and hams” or “newlaid eggs” and I would stop and lay in supplies. Then, cooking my own breakfast and making my own coffee, I found that the difference was instantly apparent. A freshly laid egg does not taste remotely like the pale, battery-produced refrigerated egg. The sausage would be sweet and sharp and pungent with spices, and my coffee a wine-dark happiness. Can I then say that the America I saw has put cleanliness first, at the expense of taste? And—since all our perceptive nerve trunks including that of taste are not only perfectible but also capable of trauma—that the sense of taste tends to disappear and that strong, pungent, or exotic flavors arouse suspicion and dislike and so are eliminated? ========== Travels With Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 122 | Location 1856-1857 | Added on Tuesday, April 25, 2017 11:08:32 PM Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans. ========== Apocalyptic Planet (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 348-350 | Added on Monday, May 1, 2017 8:14:37 PM Some people say they feel small in places like this, their lives seeming insignificant in the face of geographic immensity. That’s why I come, of course. But rather than feeling small, I think it’s more a total loss of any reference or scale. You are starting from scratch here, seeing the world as it is, not so much as you imagine it. ========== Apocalyptic Planet (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 418-419 | Added on Monday, May 1, 2017 8:44:35 PM “We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” ========== Apocalyptic Planet (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 259 | Location 3967-3970 | Added on Thursday, May 11, 2017 8:40:47 PM through earth like a snake whipping through tall grass. This is how mountains move. Not only do they rise, but at the same time they fall. Their fathomless weight is carried away one monsoon after the next, boulders turned to grains, grains to mud, and mud into fans of densely packed sediment off the coast of Thailand. Uplift and ensuing erosion turns the planet into a sort of perpetual motion device. When the climbers were done below, I sidestepped to ========== Apocalyptic Planet (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 259 | Location 3967-3970 | Added on Thursday, May 11, 2017 8:40:54 PM through earth like a snake whipping through tall grass. This is how mountains move. Not only do they rise, but at the same time they fall. Their fathomless weight is carried away one monsoon after the next, boulders turned to grains, grains to mud, and mud into fans of densely packed sediment off the coast of Thailand. Uplift and ensuing erosion turns the planet into a sort of perpetual motion device. When the climbers were done below, I sidestepped to ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 231-232 | Added on Thursday, May 18, 2017 9:16:44 PM No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 249-250 | Added on Thursday, May 18, 2017 9:18:47 PM the terror the ego feels in contemplating the dissolution of boundaries between self and world not only lies behind the suppression of altered states of consciousness but, more generally, explains the suppression of the feminine, the foreign and exotic, and transcendental experiences. ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 824-828 | Added on Sunday, May 21, 2017 9:17:16 PM I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe. ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2218-2219 | Added on Saturday, May 27, 2017 10:49:52 PM distilled alcohol changed the sacred art of the brewer and the vintner into a profane economic engine for the consumption of human hopes. ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2222-2223 | Added on Saturday, May 27, 2017 10:50:36 PM Birds, raccoons, horses, and even wasps and butterflies are aware of the fleeting virtues that attend eating fermented fruit: ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 165 | Location 2526-2531 | Added on Monday, May 29, 2017 9:55:41 PM In our culture, private drug taking is viewed as dubious; solitary drug use is viewed as positively morbid; and, indeed, all introspection is seen this way. The Archaic model for use of psychoactive plants, including cannabis, is quite the opposite. Ritual, isolation, and sensory deprivation are the techniques used by the Archaic shaman seeking to journey in the world of the spirits and ancestors. There is no doubt that cannabis is trivialized as a commodity and is degraded by the designation "recreational drug," but there is also no doubt that when used occasionally in a context of ritual and culturally reinforced expectation of a transformation of consciousness, cannabis is capable of nearly the full spectrum of psychedelic ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 165 | Location 2526-2531 | Added on Monday, May 29, 2017 9:55:50 PM In our culture, private drug taking is viewed as dubious; solitary drug use is viewed as positively morbid; and, indeed, all introspection is seen this way. The Archaic model for use of psychoactive plants, including cannabis, is quite the opposite. Ritual, isolation, and sensory deprivation are the techniques used by the Archaic shaman seeking to journey in the world of the spirits and ancestors. There is no doubt that cannabis is trivialized as a commodity and is degraded by the designation "recreational drug," but there is also no doubt that when used occasionally in a context of ritual and culturally reinforced expectation of a transformation of consciousness, cannabis is capable of nearly the full spectrum of psychedelic effects associated with hallucinogens. ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 165 | Location 2526-2531 | Added on Monday, May 29, 2017 9:55:54 PM In our culture, private drug taking is viewed as dubious; solitary drug use is viewed as positively morbid; and, indeed, all introspection is seen this way. The Archaic model for use of psychoactive plants, including cannabis, is quite the opposite. Ritual, isolation, and sensory deprivation are the techniques used by the Archaic shaman seeking to journey in the world of the spirits and ancestors. There is no doubt that cannabis is trivialized as a commodity and is degraded by the designation "recreational drug," but there is also no doubt that when used occasionally in a context of ritual and culturally reinforced expectation of a transformation of consciousness, cannabis is capable of nearly the full spectrum of psychedelic effects associated with hallucinogens. ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 221 | Location 3384-3385 | Added on Friday, June 2, 2017 8:48:30 PM mental illness among such populations is well ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 246 | Location 3762-3764 | Added on Friday, June 2, 2017 9:27:00 PM A drug is something that causes unexamined, obsessive, and habitual behavior. You don't examine obsessive behavior; you just do it. You let nothing get in the way of your gratification. This is the kind of life that we are being sold at every level. To watch, to consume, and to watch and consume yet more. The psychedelic option is off ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 246 | Location 3765-3767 | Added on Friday, June 2, 2017 9:27:15 PM in a tiny corner, never mentioned; yet it represents the only coun-terflow directed against a tendency to leave people in designer states of consciousness. Not their own designs, but the designs of Madison Avenue, of the Pentagon, of the Fortune 500 corporations. This isn't just metaphor; it is really happening to us. ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 254 | Location 3890-3894 | Added on Saturday, June 3, 2017 9:27:54 PM DMT intoxication is much more peculiar than anything anyone ever dreamed could be covered by the term "intoxication." When intoxicated by DMT, the mind finds itself in a convincingly real, apparently coexisting alien world. Not a world about our thoughts, our hopes, our fears; rather, a world about the tykes—their joys, their dreams, their poetry. Why? I have not the faintest idea. These are the facts of the matter; this is how it is with us. ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 257 | Location 3940-3944 | Added on Saturday, June 3, 2017 9:33:42 PM Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 258 | Location 3944-3944 | Added on Saturday, June 3, 2017 9:33:51 PM living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming. ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 261 | Location 3990-3991 | Added on Saturday, June 3, 2017 9:39:17 PM Establishment. This new interest in psychedelics should be anticipated ========== Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (Terence McKenna) - Your Highlight on page 267 | Location 4082-4084 | Added on Sunday, June 4, 2017 9:33:59 PM These great gifts that are ours alone and which come out of the evolutionary matrix of the planet are not for us—our convenience, our satisfaction, our greater ========== A Place in the Country (W. G. Sebald; Translated by Jo Catling) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 301-302 | Added on Wednesday, June 14, 2017 10:48:37 PM at home in the Black Forest and the Alps. The peace which has descended on Basel, though, is that of nature untouched by human hand, where abandoned ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 76 | Location 1165-1165 | Added on Tuesday, June 20, 2017 10:07:28 PM at the time was the writing and publishing of the local ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 502-503 | Added on Wednesday, June 21, 2017 10:00:54 PM creating an instant home. They are omnivores, the coyotes. Watermelons, beetles, deer, kangaroo rats, and flowers, ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 36 | Location 540-542 | Added on Thursday, June 22, 2017 9:16:34 PM Naïveté comes with believing that the world is built of words and numerals. Coyotes, which have no use for pronunciations of superiority, are intent on survival, reproduction, and life. There is no naïveté in knowing how to survive this well. Coyotes move within a landscape of attentiveness. ========== After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 726-730 | Added on Tuesday, July 4, 2017 8:04:09 PM Most people, most of the time, think and act as though the things that they experience with their senses and sort with their thoughts are objective realities “out there,” and pay no attention to the generations of careful research that’s shown that what we perceive is a cooperative project in which external stimuli, the biologically defined structures of our sense organs and nervous systems, and the culturally and individually defined contents of our minds all have roles to play. ========== What She Left Behind (Wiseman, Ellen Marie) - Your Highlight on page 232 | Location 3554-3554 | Added on Thursday, July 13, 2017 7:53:34 PM leg. Lately, due to the damp spring, she used ========== After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 122 | Location 1863-1864 | Added on Monday, July 24, 2017 9:40:07 PM said, “I have been a multitude of shapes,”6 this is what we believe he was talking about. ========== After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 175 | Location 2680-2680 | Added on Thursday, July 27, 2017 9:34:25 PM convenient new labels for fairyland. ========== After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 2742-2743 | Added on Thursday, July 27, 2017 9:40:31 PM theist religions and applied to the physical universe where they turned out to be woefully out of place. The difficulty here is as simple as it ========== Druidry Handbook_ Spiritual Practice Rooted in the Living Earth, The - John Michael Greer - Your Highlight on page xi-xi | Added on Friday, July 28, 2017 9:21:30 PM subsequently discovered to derive from manuscripts forged by Iolo himself. We reject aspects of our past, however, at our own peril.The search for an authentic Druidry that rejects Revival Druidry altogether makes a threefold error. First, it assumes that all of Iolo’s contributions were generated in his own mind, when the evidence suggests x ========== Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Scott Slovic) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 267-271 | Added on Saturday, July 29, 2017 8:54:56 PM Long-Legged House" (1969), emphasizes ''watchfulness" as a condition of profound alertness; and for Lopez, two complementary modes of "understanding" natural places, the "mathematical" and especially the "particularized" (or experiential)serve as keys to mental elevation.   ========== Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Scott Slovic) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1212-1214 | Added on Sunday, July 30, 2017 9:25:23 PM It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord; i.e. than I import into it. (9:43) ========== Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Scott Slovic) - Your Highlight on page 90 | Location 1369-1370 | Added on Sunday, July 30, 2017 9:33:14 PM "What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own" ========== After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 185 | Location 2836-2838 | Added on Sunday, July 30, 2017 9:46:31 PM represent a refusal of what Joseph Campbell called the “call to adventure,” the still small voice summoning each of us to rise up in an age of crisis and decay to become the seedbearers of an age not yet born. In this way, as well as the more abstract sense defined by their shared biophobia, ========== The Celtic Golden Dawn: An Original & Complete Curriculum of Druidical Study (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 159-159 | Added on Saturday, August 5, 2017 9:23:21 PM in the ninth century, when they tried and failed ========== Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 31 | Location 472-473 | Added on Friday, August 11, 2017 9:16:20 PM things, devoting one session of meditation to each subject. Thereafter, turn your attention to ========== Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 31 | Location 472-473 | Added on Friday, August 11, 2017 9:16:28 PM things, devoting one session of meditation to each subject. Thereafter, turn your attention to ========== Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth (John Michael Greer) - Your Bookmark on page 32 | Location 488 | Added on Saturday, August 12, 2017 8:34:12 AM ========== Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth (John Michael Greer) - Your Bookmark on page 23 | Location 342 | Added on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:36:09 PM ========== Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 507-508 | Added on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:39:25 PM Balance is not stillness, but a dance of constant adjustment around a common center. ========== Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth (John Michael Greer) - Your Bookmark on page 49 | Location 742 | Added on Saturday, August 12, 2017 7:57:32 PM ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 163-163 | Added on Monday, August 14, 2017 9:23:09 PM “The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.” ========== Barkskins: A Novel (Annie Proulx) - Your Highlight on page 89 | Location 1352-1353 | Added on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 9:47:08 PM inspections, to trade here. Moreover, all foreigners must stay in the special Factory ========== Barkskins: A Novel (Annie Proulx) - Your Highlight on page 278 | Location 4249-4250 | Added on Friday, August 18, 2017 10:21:09 PM entire life.” She could not, she explained to Dr. Mukhtar, express affection except by teaching, holding out books as tokens of love. When at last light ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 234-236 | Added on Thursday, August 24, 2017 9:33:56 PM Certain places, writes Jorge Luis Borges, “try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.” ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 248-251 | Added on Thursday, August 24, 2017 9:35:49 PM the hundred square miles of wrinkles and folds of land around me, on mineral-varnished faces of sandstone, ancient farmers chiseled spirals and horned flute players, handprints, the tears of women in childbirth, and the figure of a man, three feet tall, whose giant penis hangs down to a body-width hole in a massive wall. If you crawl through the hole beneath that imposing phallus you swear you have had some sort of sexual experience. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 255-260 | Added on Thursday, August 24, 2017 9:36:38 PM a traveler exploring the strange, there can be no better guide to a place than the weight of its air, the behavior of its light, the shape of its water, the textures of rock and feather, leaf and fur, and the ways that humans bless, mark, or obliterate them. Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 413-413 | Added on Friday, August 25, 2017 10:08:38 PM Sprinklers hissed veils of mist over chive-green lawns. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 454-456 | Added on Friday, August 25, 2017 10:13:21 PM DIESEL AND JASMINE, the aromatic essence of southern California, roamed into my olfactory nerves and pricked the sting of reflection. As a baby, I had lived poolless in southern California. As an adult, ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 576-578 | Added on Saturday, August 26, 2017 8:53:03 PM In ancient Rome women were inclined to wear nothing but pearls when they swam in the sea. Non recte recipit haec nos rerum natura nisi nudos, wrote Pliny, the Roman naturalist. The sea receives us in a proper way only when we are naked. ========== Ernest Wood Concentration An Approach to Meditation - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 25-25 | Added on Sunday, August 27, 2017 9:35:54 PM along that road from one to the other. If I suddenly say "pencil" and ask you for the first word that comes up you may give me the Contiguity "hand" or "paper," ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 778-779 | Added on Tuesday, August 29, 2017 8:41:57 PM a congenital allergy to Industrialized Fun. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 794-802 | Added on Tuesday, August 29, 2017 8:44:24 PM After a handful of visits over the years we now discovered that Las Vegas no longer amused us. We once forced it upon ourselves as a ritualistic counterpoint to our “wilderness” lives, an alarm bell to the outbacker's tendency to deny the Spectacle, an oblique means to understand water in the desert West and the telling juxtaposition of neighborhoods: “Father Knows Best” Utah and “Father Goes to Brothels” Nevada. Sin City and the Nevada Test Site, ground zero for decades of atomic testing. An hour's drive north of Las Vegas, the bombing range lay dormant under a test moratorium but never failed to inspire a lurking creepiness. It had left an ongoing dump-it-here legacy, making lab rats out of the citizens of Nevada and Utah. All of Vegas's revelry, the ephemeral shelf life of hotels that once struck a high note of absurdity, was now reduced to a pain in the butt. Crowds. Waiting lines. Spaces so choked with entertainment they were bone- and brain-dead. Noise. Pollution. Traffic. Gluttony. We were wracked with guilt about contributing to the gluttony. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 92 | Location 1402-1404 | Added on Monday, September 4, 2017 8:50:07 PM For postmodern empiricists, foggy indeterminacy won't do. Knowledge must be tidy with meaning, the mysteries solved, the experiences beneath the dust carefully measured. When we forage for stories, we may end up telling our own. When we cannot possess the thoughts of past cultures, we possess their things. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2124-2129 | Added on Wednesday, September 6, 2017 8:56:03 PM In an essay about language Earl Shorris describes the world's many dying tongues, most of them the tongues of indigenous peoples. Although the estimated 6 million descendants of the ancient Maya speak twenty-five languages, a number of them are destined to disappear with the deaths of the last speakers. The Maya have at least nine words for blue, all with certain attributes, most without translation. The absence of those words, Shorris says, is far deeper than silence. “It is not merely a writer's conceit to think that the human world is made of words and to remember that no two words in all the world's languages are alike,” he writes. “Of all the arts and sciences made by man, none equals a language, for only a language in its living entirety can describe a unique and irreplaceable world.” ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 180 | Location 2746-2747 | Added on Thursday, September 7, 2017 9:43:49 PM Genealogy is a forced march through stories. Yet everyone loves stories, and that is one reason we seek knowledge of our own blood kin. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 2839-2842 | Added on Thursday, September 7, 2017 9:52:32 PM that named children for their birth day or month. The ancestor's slaves Quamina and Cuffy, identified in his codicil, were likely named for a variation of Quaka, a male born on a Wednesday, and Cuffee, a male born on a Friday. Emancipation gave their descendants their surnames, and thus many blacks on this and ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 188 | Location 2881-2884 | Added on Thursday, September 7, 2017 9:57:27 PM So many accounts of long ago give a narrow way of seeing, a matter-of-factness, largely about social constructs, manners, and material goods, that verges on abstraction. Landscape is missing, what could be seen. How the green land and white lanes sloped to the blue-green sea, how the bush was full of surprises or the heron mirrored the scallop of the bay with its line of flight. The heron flies this same way two hundred years later, slate blue amid the unsettled colors of water and sky at midday. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 204 | Location 3115-3116 | Added on Friday, September 8, 2017 8:40:03 PM How our perceptions, as someone once said, are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 204 | Location 3123-3125 | Added on Friday, September 8, 2017 8:40:54 PM No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. CHARLES DARWIN The Voyage of the Beagle ========== The Celtic Golden Dawn: An Original & Complete Curriculum of Druidical Study (John Michael Greer) - Your Bookmark on page 50 | Location 753 | Added on Saturday, September 9, 2017 8:28:26 PM ========== The Celtic Golden Dawn: An Original & Complete Curriculum of Druidical Study (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 828-830 | Added on Saturday, September 9, 2017 8:36:08 PM A word exists on each of the three planes simultaneously. The spoken word as sound or the written word as an object of sight belongs to the material plane; the word as a representation in the mind belongs to the aetherial plane, and the word as ========== The Celtic Golden Dawn: An Original & Complete Curriculum of Druidical Study (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 828-830 | Added on Saturday, September 9, 2017 8:36:13 PM A word exists on each of the three planes simultaneously. The spoken word as sound or the written word as an object of sight belongs to the material plane; the word as a representation in the mind belongs to the aetherial plane, and the word as meaning belongs to the intellectual plane. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 211 | Location 3235-3236 | Added on Saturday, September 9, 2017 9:11:20 PM In solitude you strip yourself bare, you rest your mind on what is essential and true. The canyon's shadow engulfs camp. For a while tendrils of warm air from the day-baked cliffs stave off the shadow's cool. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 211 | Location 3235-3235 | Added on Saturday, September 9, 2017 9:11:36 PM solitude you strip yourself bare, you rest your mind on what is essential and true. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 211 | Location 3235-3235 | Added on Saturday, September 9, 2017 9:11:43 PM In solitude you strip yourself bare, you rest your mind on what is essential and true. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 215 | Location 3295-3295 | Added on Saturday, September 9, 2017 9:18:01 PM the orb has slipped. The Northern Hemisphere ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 219 | Location 3357-3360 | Added on Sunday, September 10, 2017 10:00:22 PM “How Flowers Changed the World,” Loren Eiseley compresses this event into the image of Earth, seen from outer space, emanating a subtle change in light. For several million years—the crashing reptile, lizard bird, wimpy mammal ancestor, swamp years—plant life held little in its palette beyond a “slowly growing green,” Eiseley writes. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 219 | Location 3357-3364 | Added on Sunday, September 10, 2017 10:00:53 PM “How Flowers Changed the World,” Loren Eiseley compresses this event into the image of Earth, seen from outer space, emanating a subtle change in light. For several million years—the crashing reptile, lizard bird, wimpy mammal ancestor, swamp years—plant life held little in its palette beyond a “slowly growing green,” Eiseley writes. Small naked sperm cells bound to dew and raindrops learned to be wind-borne pollen. Ancestral pines, firs, and other conifers joined spore producers to be gymnosperms, or plants with exposed seeds. About … million years ago, Eiseley continues, at the eclipse of the dinosaur age, “there occurred a soundless, violent explosion. It lasted millions of years, but it was an explosion nevertheless. It marked the emergence of the angiosperms—the flowering plants. Even the great evo lutionist, Charles Darwin, called them an ‘abominable mystery,’ because they appeared so suddenly and spread so fast.” ========== The Celtic Golden Dawn: An Original & Complete Curriculum of Druidical Study (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 706-707 | Added on Monday, September 11, 2017 8:27:58 PM Alchemy may be understood as the art by which material forms are rendered capable of expressing more fully the spiritual forces that create and sustain them. ========== Ernest Wood Concentration An Approach to Meditation - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 23-23 | Added on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 9:19:18 PM Thinking is intended for acquiring knowledge or applying knowledge. It is not essential living ========== Ernest Wood Concentration An Approach to Meditation - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 25-25 | Added on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 9:22:23 PM along that road from one to the other. If I suddenly say "pencil" and ask you for the first word that comes up you may give me the Contiguity "hand" or "paper," ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 277 | Location 4238-4240 | Added on Friday, September 15, 2017 9:22:13 PM The desert gives an unsettling sense of the largeness of the universe in relation to the self. The desert is a scary place for a human being if you do not want to feel puny and humbled—that is, like a human being in the desert. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 280 | Location 4280-4281 | Added on Friday, September 15, 2017 9:26:28 PM To want to be lost or alone, to want to shed, for a moment, the devices that engineer every facet of our lives—to want to be aware—is to be a whining anachronism. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 287 | Location 4400-4404 | Added on Friday, September 15, 2017 9:39:18 PM Without a bunch of Communists to kick around any longer, the current scapegoats of social upheaval, lumped into a nebulous category of faceless brutes, make easy targets of blame for hangnails, nasty divorces, broken transmissions, and the entire worldwide collapse of faith, morality, and the beef industry. Wariness of outsiders, fear of change and a sense of powerlessness in the face of it—fear, in fact, of the rest of the world—have bred a convenient duplicity of perpetrator and victim ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 287 | Location 4400-4404 | Added on Friday, September 15, 2017 9:39:27 PM Without a bunch of Communists to kick around any longer, the current scapegoats of social upheaval, lumped into a nebulous category of faceless brutes, make easy targets of blame for hangnails, nasty divorces, broken transmissions, and the entire worldwide collapse of faith, morality, and the beef industry. Wariness of outsiders, fear of change and a sense of powerlessness in the face of it—fear, in fact, of the rest of the world—have bred a convenient duplicity of perpetrator and victim and an unwholesome battery of revenge politics. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 288 | Location 4406-4408 | Added on Friday, September 15, 2017 9:40:09 PM In The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer wrote that “in the mind of a man who is filled with his own aims, the world appears as a beautiful landscape appears on a battlefield.” I wanted to round up all of the tired and angry ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 288 | Location 4406-4408 | Added on Friday, September 15, 2017 9:40:19 PM In The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer wrote that “in the mind of a man who is filled with his own aims, the world appears as a beautiful landscape appears on a battlefield.” I wanted to round up all of the tired and angry ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 288 | Location 4406-4408 | Added on Friday, September 15, 2017 9:40:33 PM In The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer wrote that “in the mind of a man who is filled with his own aims, the world appears as a beautiful landscape appears on a battlefield.” ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 293 | Location 4490-4492 | Added on Friday, September 15, 2017 9:48:41 PM As Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado wrote, “Every living person, no matter how miserable and dispossessed, how sad and lonely, has the right to a quota of joy; there's no destiny made entirely of bitterness.” ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 297 | Location 4550-4550 | Added on Saturday, September 16, 2017 8:33:48 PM Writer Peter Steinhart ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 307 | Location 4706-4709 | Added on Saturday, September 16, 2017 8:50:52 PM remain our only internally generated map of the world. We are blood-tied to landscape by the language of cells. Although we may be hell-bent for metaphysical starvation, trying with all our might to surrender our sensory intelligence to technology and massive artifice, it will take time for these million-years-old senses to atrophy, to go the way of our tail, devolved to a bony nub. In the meantime here we are staggering about the diminishing wilds, greedy to feed those ossifying lobes with light. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 308 | Location 4712-4712 | Added on Saturday, September 16, 2017 8:51:19 PM the imprint of Triassic winds. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 308 | Location 4718-4718 | Added on Saturday, September 16, 2017 8:52:20 PM There is sorrow in the light at this hour, a sorrow that can be comforting ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 308 | Location 4718-4718 | Added on Saturday, September 16, 2017 8:52:32 PM There is sorrow in the light at this hour, a sorrow that can be comforting when you are alone and let it come right into you. ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 180-181 | Added on Monday, September 18, 2017 9:09:39 PM the incredibly large majority of men are by nature quite incapable of any but material aims, indeed they can conceive no others. ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 173-174 | Added on Monday, September 18, 2017 9:10:02 PM Accordingly, as the whole history of literature proves, everything of real value required a long time to gain acceptance, especially ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 186-191 | Added on Monday, September 18, 2017 9:10:39 PM Thus some design or intention, not the desire of insight, is the guiding star of these disturbers of the peace, and truth is certainly the last thing that is thought of in the matter. It finds no partisans; rather, it may pursue its way as silently and unheeded through such a philosophical riot as through the winter night of the darkest century bound in the rigid faith of the church, when it was communicated only to a few alchemists as esoteric learning, or entrusted it may be only to the parchment. Indeed I might say that no time can be more unfavourable to philosophy than that in which it is shamefully misused, on the one hand to further political objects, on the other as a means of livelihood. ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 202-203 | Added on Monday, September 18, 2017 9:12:39 PM since throughout this world nothing is to be expected, can be demanded, or is to be had for gold but mediocrity, ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 447-449 | Added on Wednesday, September 20, 2017 8:48:19 PM “It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 447-449 | Added on Wednesday, September 20, 2017 8:48:28 PM “It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 447-449 | Added on Wednesday, September 20, 2017 8:48:35 PM “It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake.” ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 36 | Location 459-460 | Added on Wednesday, September 20, 2017 8:50:15 PM matter is nothing more than causation, as any one will see at once if he reflects. ========== Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (Ellen Meloy) - Your Bookmark on page 20 | Location 293 | Added on Friday, September 22, 2017 4:44:00 PM ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 478-483 | Added on Friday, September 22, 2017 9:16:48 PM But the law of causation receives its meaning and necessity only from this, that the essence of change does not consist simply in the mere variation of things, but rather in the fact that at the same part of space there is now one thing and then another, and at one and the same point of time there is here one thing and there another: only this reciprocal limitation of space and time by each other gives meaning, and at the same time necessity, to a law, according to which change must take place. What is determined by the law of causality ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 478-483 | Added on Friday, September 22, 2017 9:18:26 PM But the law of causation receives its meaning and necessity only from this, that the essence of change does not consist simply in the mere variation of things, but rather in the fact that at the same part of space there is now one thing and then another, and at one and the same point of time there is here one thing and there another: only this reciprocal limitation of space and time by each other gives meaning, and at the same time necessity, to a law, according to which change must take place. What is determined by the law of causality ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 478-483 | Added on Friday, September 22, 2017 9:18:31 PM But the law of causation receives its meaning and necessity only from this, that the essence of change does not consist simply in the mere variation of things, but rather in the fact that at the same part of space there is now one thing and then another, and at one and the same point of time there is here one thing and there another: only this reciprocal limitation of space and time by each other gives meaning, and at the same time necessity, to a law, according to which change must take place. What is determined by the law of causality ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 478-483 | Added on Friday, September 22, 2017 9:18:36 PM But the law of causation receives its meaning and necessity only from this, that the essence of change does not consist simply in the mere variation of things, but rather in the fact that at the same part of space there is now one thing and then another, and at one and the same point of time there is here one thing and there another: only this reciprocal limitation of space and time by each other gives meaning, and at the same time necessity, to a law, according to which change must take place. What is determined by the law of causality ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 478-483 | Added on Friday, September 22, 2017 9:18:41 PM But the law of causation receives its meaning and necessity only from this, that the essence of change does not consist simply in the mere variation of things, but rather in the fact that at the same part of space there is now one thing and then another, and at one and the same point of time there is here one thing and there another: only this reciprocal limitation of space and time by each other gives meaning, and at the same time necessity, to a law, according to which change must take place. What is determined by the law ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 478-482 | Added on Friday, September 22, 2017 9:18:48 PM But the law of causation receives its meaning and necessity only from this, that the essence of change does not consist simply in the mere variation of things, but rather in the fact that at the same part of space there is now one thing and then another, and at one and the same point of time there is here one thing and there another: only this reciprocal limitation of space and time by each other gives meaning, and at the same time necessity, to a law, according to which change must take place. ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 506-507 | Added on Friday, September 22, 2017 9:24:02 PM concept). The law of this action, however, always ========== The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) (Arthur Schopenhauer) - Your Highlight on page 41 | Location 532-534 | Added on Friday, September 22, 2017 9:28:20 PM By the understanding passing from the effect to the cause, the world first appears as perception extended in space, varying in respect of form, persistent through all time in respect of matter; for the understanding unites space and time in the idea of matter, that is, causal action. As the world as idea exists only through the understanding, so also it exists only for the understanding. ========== The Soul of Man under Socialism (Oscar Wilde) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 65-66 | Added on Saturday, September 23, 2017 9:23:14 PM Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. ========== The Soul of Man under Socialism (Oscar Wilde) - Your Highlight on page 6 | Location 76-77 | Added on Saturday, September 23, 2017 9:24:48 PM Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering.  They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. ========== The Soul of Man under Socialism (Oscar Wilde) - Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 105-107 | Added on Saturday, September 23, 2017 9:28:12 PM possesses.  It has led Individualism entirely astray.  It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.  The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. ========== The Soul of Man under Socialism (Oscar Wilde) - Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 122-123 | Added on Saturday, September 23, 2017 9:30:03 PM Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things.  One will live.  To live is the rarest thing in the world.  Most people exist, that is all. ========== The Soul of Man under Socialism (Oscar Wilde) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 134-135 | Added on Saturday, September 23, 2017 9:31:34 PM The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace. ========== The Soul of Man under Socialism (Oscar Wilde) - Your Highlight on page 12 | Location 167-171 | Added on Saturday, September 23, 2017 9:35:36 PM If people abuse them, they are not to answer back.  What does it signify?  The things people say of a man do not alter a man.  He is what he is.  Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.  Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn.  That would be to fall to the same low level.  After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free.  His soul can be free.  His personality can be untroubled.  He can be at peace.  And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. ========== Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 294-295 | Added on Saturday, September 23, 2017 9:46:44 PM When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything. ========== Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 307-309 | Added on Saturday, September 23, 2017 9:48:24 PM On this day, church has flying buttresses of upwarped sandstone and a ceiling of cornflower blue streaked with mare's tails. Vermilion mesas form transept walls. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 65-69 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 11:54:35 AM There was a reason, however, for making the physical journey, fruitless though it proved to be. I felt the need to effect a reconciliation with my native land. It was an urgent need because, unlike most prodigal sons, I was returning not with the intention of remaining in the bosom of the family but of wandering forth again, perhaps never to return. I wanted to have a last look at my country and leave it with a good taste in my mouth. I didn’t want to run away from it, as I had originally. I wanted to embrace it, to feel that the old wounds were really healed, and set out for the unknown with a blessing on my lips. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 162-166 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:01:45 PM Our world may have begun that way, but to-day it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky. I speak ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 162-166 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:01:52 PM Our world may have begun that way, but to-day it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 162-166 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:02:01 PM Our world may have begun that way, but to-day it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 203-207 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:06:26 PM We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people; we say that we are democratic, liberty-loving, free of prejudices and hatred. This is the melting-pot, the seat of a great human experiment. Beautiful words, full of noble, idealistic sentiment. Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment? ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 219-221 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:09:11 PM We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed. Actually there never is a status quo, except in the minds of political imbeciles. All is flux. Those who are on the defensive are fighting phantoms. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 232-238 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:11:18 PM There are experiments which are made with cunning and precision, because the outcome is divined beforehand. The scientist for example always sets himself soluble problems. But man’s experiment is not of this order. The answer to the grand experiment is in the heart; the search must be conducted inwardly. We are afraid to trust the heart. We inhabit a mental world, a labyrinth in whose dark recesses a monster waits to devour us. Thus far we have been moving in mythological dream sequence, finding no solutions because we are posing the wrong questions. We find only what we look for, and we are looking in the wrong place. We have to come out of the darkness, abandon these explorations which are only flights of fear. We have to cease groping on all fours. We have to come out in the open, erect, and fully exposed. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 242-245 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:12:03 PM The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don’t have to make it a Paradise—it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with the gun, the man with murder in his heart, cannot possibly recognize Paradise even when he is shown it. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 263-269 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:14:03 PM I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans—the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out. This world which is in the making fills me with dread. I have seen it germinate; I can read it like a blue-print. It is not a world I want to live in. It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress—but a false progiess, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 19 | Location 278-279 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:14:59 PM John Stuart Mill that “a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.” ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 379-390 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 10:04:05 PM In Europe, Asia, Africa the toiling masses of humanity look with watery eyes towards this Paradise where the worker rides to work in his own car. What a magnificent world of opportunity it must be, they think to themselves. (At least we like to think that they think that way! ) They never ask what one must do to have this great boon. They don’t realize that when the American worker steps out of his shining tin chariot he delivers himself body and soul to the most stultifying labor a man can perform. They have no idea that it is possible, even when one works under the best possible conditions, to forfeit all rights as a human being. They don’t know that the best possible conditions (in American lingo) mean the biggest profits for the boss, the utmost servitude for the worker, the greatest confusion and disillusionment for the public in general. They see a beautiful, shining car whicn purrs like a cat; they see endless concrete roads so smooth and flawless that the driver has difficulty keeping awake; they see cinemas which look like palaces; they see department stores with mannikins dressed like princesses. They see the glitter and paint, the baubles, the gadgets, the luxuries; they don’t see the bitterness in the heart, the skepticism, the cynicism, the emptiness, the sterility, the despair, the hopelessness which is eating up the American worker. They don’t want to see this—they are full of misery themselves. They want a way out: they want the lethal comforts, conveniences, luxuries. And they follow in our footsteps—blindly, heedlessly, recklessly. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 401-402 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 10:05:21 PM Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 557-560 | Added on Sunday, September 24, 2017 10:21:07 PM The South is full of eccentric characters; it still fosters individuality. And the most individualistic are of course from the land, from the out of the way places. When you go through a sparsely settled state like South Carolina you do meet men, interesting men—jovial, cantankerous, disputative, pleasure-loving, independent-thinking creatures who disagree with everything, on principle, but who make life charming and gracious. There ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 721-722 | Added on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 8:25:26 PM The Christian Church in all its freakish ramifications and efflorescences is as dead as a doornail; it will pass away utterly when the political and social systems in which it is now embedded collapse. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 735-736 | Added on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 8:27:11 PM The American park is a circumscribed vacuum filled with cataleptic nincompoops. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 735-736 | Added on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 8:27:16 PM The American park is a circumscribed vacuum filled with cataleptic nincompoops. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 735-737 | Added on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 8:27:22 PM The American park is a circumscribed vacuum filled with cataleptic nincompoops. Like the architecture of the American home, there is never an ounce of personality in the park. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 71 | Location 1087-1088 | Added on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 8:55:40 PM When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently. ========== The Soul of Man under Socialism (Oscar Wilde) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 263-271 | Added on Wednesday, September 27, 2017 8:14:17 PM The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up.  They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.  Now Art should never try to be popular.  The public should try to make itself artistic.  There is a very wide difference.  If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all—well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. ========== The Soul of Man under Socialism (Oscar Wilde) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 291-293 | Added on Wednesday, September 27, 2017 8:16:35 PM Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.  Therein lies its immense value.  For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. ========== The Soul of Man under Socialism (Oscar Wilde) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 299-306 | Added on Wednesday, September 27, 2017 8:18:02 PM The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art.  They degrade the classics into authorities.  They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.  They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.  A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.  What they mean by these words seems to me to be this.  When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. ========== Ernest Wood Concentration An Approach to Meditation - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 57-57 | Added on Wednesday, September 27, 2017 8:36:19 PM To dwell upon the result is to glorify something still very fleeting, or even to block the way to a higher attainment by aiming too low ========== Ernest Wood Concentration An Approach to Meditation - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 59-59 | Added on Thursday, September 28, 2017 8:47:35 PM rich man living among poor men is not really rich—that is an illusion. If in pride you hold and withhold power, in order to feel your supremacy over others, you are not obeying the true law of life, you are a slave to the base emotion of pride ========== Ernest Wood Concentration An Approach to Meditation - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 59-59 | Added on Thursday, September 28, 2017 8:48:16 PM And that pride, when thwarted by the accidents of life, will be turned into envy,jealousy,anger and fear, and you will be torn by the conflicting winds of circumstances, drowned in the ocean of wishes, and unable to say: "I will ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 218-221 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:38:53 PM The lands must have been bleak and hostile beyond the power of words to describe. Imagine a whole continent of naked rock, across which no covering mantle of green had been drawn—a continent without soil, for there were no land plants to aid in its formation and bind it to the rocks with their roots. Imagine a land of stone, a silent land, except for the sound of the rains and winds that swept across it. For there was no living voice, and no living ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 218-221 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:39:02 PM The lands must have been bleak and hostile beyond the power of words to describe. Imagine a whole continent of naked rock, across which no covering mantle of green had been drawn—a continent without soil, for there were no land plants to aid in its formation and bind it to the rocks with their roots. Imagine a land of stone, a silent land, except for the sound of the rains and winds that swept across it. For there was no living voice, and no ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 218-221 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:39:10 PM The lands must have been bleak and hostile beyond the power of words to describe. Imagine a whole continent of naked rock, across which no covering mantle of green had been drawn—a continent without soil, for there were no land plants to aid in its formation and bind it to the rocks with their roots. Imagine a land of stone, a silent land, except for the sound of the rains and winds that swept across it. For there was no living voice, and no living thing moved over the surface of the rocks. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 258-261 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:43:04 PM Life fared well and was exceedingly abundant in those shallow, sunlit seas. But with the later retreat of the ocean water into the deeper basins, many creatures must have been left stranded in shallow, landlocked bays. Some of these animals found means to survive on land. The lakes, the shores of the rivers, and the coastal swamps of those days were the testing grounds in which plants and animals either became adapted to the new conditions or perished. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 266-275 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:44:24 PM When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal—each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea. In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time. Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea. And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb, and in the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 19 | Location 288-298 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:47:01 PM He built boats to venture out on its surface. Later he found ways to descend to the shallow parts of its floor, carrying with him the air that, as a land mammal long unaccustomed to aquatic life, he needed to breathe. Moving in fascination over the deep sea he could not enter, he found ways to probe its depths, he let down nets to capture its life, he invented mechanical eyes and ears that could re-create for his senses a world long lost, but a world that, in the deepest part of his subconscious mind, he had never wholly forgotten. And yet he has returned to his mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents. In the artificial world of his cities and towns, he often forgets the true nature of his planet and the long vistas of its history, in which the existence of the race of men has occupied a mere moment of time. The sense of all these things comes to him most clearly in the course of a long ocean voyage, when he watches day after day the receding rim of the horizon, ridged and furrowed by waves; when at night he becomes aware of the earth’s rotation as the stars pass overhead; or when, alone in this world of water and sky, he feels the loneliness of his earth in space. And then, as never on land, he knows the truth that his world is a water world, a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of the all-encircling sea. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 322-326 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:50:26 PM these same creatures. And again you may glimpse not only the abundance but something of the fierce uncompromisingness of sea life when, as you look over the rail and down, down into water of a clear, deep green, suddenly there passes a silver shower of finger-long fishlets. The sun strikes a metallic gleam from their flanks as they streak by, driving deeper into the green depths with the desperate speed of the hunted. Perhaps you never see the hunters, but you sense their presence as you see the gulls hovering, with eager, mewing cries, waiting for the little fish to be driven to the surface. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 322-326 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:50:30 PM these same creatures. And again you may glimpse not only the abundance but something of the fierce uncompromisingness of sea life when, as you look over the rail and down, down into water of a clear, deep green, suddenly there passes a silver shower of finger-long fishlets. The sun strikes a metallic gleam from their flanks as they streak by, driving deeper into the green depths with the desperate speed of the hunted. Perhaps you never see the hunters, but you sense their presence as you see the gulls hovering, with eager, mewing cries, waiting for the little fish to be driven to the surface. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 322-326 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:50:36 PM trillions of these same creatures. And again you may glimpse not only the abundance but something of the fierce uncompromisingness of sea life when, as you look over the rail and down, down into water of a clear, deep green, suddenly there passes a silver shower of finger-long fishlets. The sun strikes a metallic gleam from their flanks as they streak by, driving deeper into the green depths with the desperate speed of the hunted. Perhaps you never see the hunters, but you sense their presence as you see the gulls hovering, with eager, mewing cries, waiting for the little fish to be driven to the surface. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 322-326 | Added on Friday, September 29, 2017 8:50:41 PM And again you may glimpse not only the abundance but something of the fierce uncompromisingness of sea life when, as you look over the rail and down, down into water of a clear, deep green, suddenly there passes a silver shower of finger-long fishlets. The sun strikes a metallic gleam from their flanks as they streak by, driving deeper into the green depths with the desperate speed of the hunted. Perhaps you never see the hunters, but you sense their presence as you see the gulls hovering, with eager, mewing cries, waiting for the little fish to be driven to the surface. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 255-260 | Added on Saturday, September 30, 2017 3:44:22 PM a traveler exploring the strange, there can be no better guide to a place than the weight of its air, the behavior of its light, the shape of its water, the textures of rock and feather, leaf and fur, and the ways that humans bless, mark, or obliterate them. Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 794-802 | Added on Sunday, October 1, 2017 4:42:35 PM After a handful of visits over the years we now discovered that Las Vegas no longer amused us. We once forced it upon ourselves as a ritualistic counterpoint to our “wilderness” lives, an alarm bell to the outbacker's tendency to deny the Spectacle, an oblique means to understand water in the desert West and the telling juxtaposition of neighborhoods: “Father Knows Best” Utah and “Father Goes to Brothels” Nevada. Sin City and the Nevada Test Site, ground zero for decades of atomic testing. An hour's drive north of Las Vegas, the bombing range lay dormant under a test moratorium but never failed to inspire a lurking creepiness. It had left an ongoing dump-it-here legacy, making lab rats out of the citizens of Nevada and Utah. All of Vegas's revelry, the ephemeral shelf life of hotels that once struck a high note of absurdity, was now reduced to a pain in the butt. Crowds. Waiting lines. Spaces so choked with entertainment they were bone- and brain-dead. Noise. Pollution. Traffic. Gluttony. We were wracked with guilt about contributing to the gluttony. ========== The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (Ellen Meloy) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 794-802 | Added on Sunday, October 1, 2017 4:42:41 PM After a handful of visits over the years we now discovered that Las Vegas no longer amused us. We once forced it upon ourselves as a ritualistic counterpoint to our “wilderness” lives, an alarm bell to the outbacker's tendency to deny the Spectacle, an oblique means to understand water in the desert West and the telling juxtaposition of neighborhoods: “Father Knows Best” Utah and “Father Goes to Brothels” Nevada. Sin City and the Nevada Test Site, ground zero for decades of atomic testing. An hour's drive north of Las Vegas, the bombing range lay dormant under a test moratorium but never failed to inspire a lurking creepiness. It had left an ongoing dump-it-here legacy, making lab rats out of the citizens of Nevada and Utah. All of Vegas's revelry, the ephemeral shelf life of hotels that once struck a high note of absurdity, was now reduced to a pain in the butt. Crowds. Waiting lines. Spaces so choked with entertainment they were bone- and brain-dead. Noise. Pollution. Traffic. Gluttony. We were wracked with guilt about contributing to the gluttony. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 162-166 | Added on Sunday, October 1, 2017 8:42:59 PM Our world may have begun that way, but to-day it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 91 | Location 1392-1400 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 7:49:41 PM suppose there is no region in America like the old South for good conversation. Here men talk rather than argue and dispute. Here there are more eccentric, bizarre characters, I imagine, than in any other part of the United States. The South breeds character, not sterile intellectualism. With certain individuals the fact that they are shut off from the world tends to bring about a forced bloom; they radiate power and magnetism, their talk is scintillating and stimulating. They live a rich, quiet life of their own, in harmony with their environment and free of the petty ambitions and rivalries of the man of the world. Usually they did not settle down without a struggle, for most of them possess talents and energies unsuspected by the curious invader. The real Southerner, in my opinion, is more gifted by nature, more far-seeing, more dynamic, more inventive and without a doubt more filled with the zest for life than the man of the North or West. When he elects to retire from the world it is not because of defeatism but because, as with the French and the Chinese, his very love of life instills him with a wisdom which expresses itself in renunciation. The most ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 91 | Location 1392-1401 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 7:49:48 PM suppose there is no region in America like the old South for good conversation. Here men talk rather than argue and dispute. Here there are more eccentric, bizarre characters, I imagine, than in any other part of the United States. The South breeds character, not sterile intellectualism. With certain individuals the fact that they are shut off from the world tends to bring about a forced bloom; they radiate power and magnetism, their talk is scintillating and stimulating. They live a rich, quiet life of their own, in harmony with their environment and free of the petty ambitions and rivalries of the man of the world. Usually they did not settle down without a struggle, for most of them possess talents and energies unsuspected by the curious invader. The real Southerner, in my opinion, is more gifted by nature, more far-seeing, more dynamic, more inventive and without a doubt more filled with the zest for life than the man of the North or West. When he elects to retire from the world it is not because of defeatism but because, as with the French and the Chinese, his very love of life instills him with a wisdom which expresses itself in renunciation. The most difficult adjustment an expatriate has ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 91 | Location 1392-1400 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 7:49:54 PM suppose there is no region in America like the old South for good conversation. Here men talk rather than argue and dispute. Here there are more eccentric, bizarre characters, I imagine, than in any other part of the United States. The South breeds character, not sterile intellectualism. With certain individuals the fact that they are shut off from the world tends to bring about a forced bloom; they radiate power and magnetism, their talk is scintillating and stimulating. They live a rich, quiet life of their own, in harmony with their environment and free of the petty ambitions and rivalries of the man of the world. Usually they did not settle down without a struggle, for most of them possess talents and energies unsuspected by the curious invader. The real Southerner, in my opinion, is more gifted by nature, more far-seeing, more dynamic, more inventive and without a doubt more filled with the zest for life than the man of the North or West. When he elects to retire from the world it is not because of defeatism but because, as with the French and the Chinese, his very love of life instills him with a wisdom which expresses itself in renunciation. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 93 | Location 1419-1420 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 7:52:03 PM Tibet seems to be the countersign for a world-wide community who have this much in common at least—they know that there is something more to life than is summed up in the empirical knowledge of the high priests of logic and science. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1516-1520 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 8:01:17 PM This subject, the relationship between wisdom and vitality, interests me because, contrary to the general opinion, I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen. The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 100 | Location 1528-1529 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 8:02:22 PM An artist is primarily one who has faith in himself. He does not respond to the normal stimuli: he is neither a drudge nor a parasite. He lives to express himself and in so doing enriches the world. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 1675-1687 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 8:16:52 PM In fact, I think I am safe in saying that the greatest periods of art have coincided with the periods of greatest misery and suffering on the part of the common people. If one quarter of the American people are to-day living on a level of subsistence far below the norm, there remain nevertheless a hundred million who enjoy comforts and advantages unknown to men in any period of the past. What is to hinder them from revealing their talents? Or is it that our talents lie in other directions? Is it that the great goal of American manhood is to become the successful business man? Or just a “success”, regardless of what form or shape, what purpose or significance, success manifests itself in and through? There is no doubt in my mind that art comes last in the things of life which preoccupy us. The young man who shows signs of becoming an artist is looked upon as a crackpot, or else as a lazy, worthless encumbrance. He has to follow his inspiration at the cost of starvation, humiliation and ridicule. He can earn a living at his calling only by producing the kind of art which he despises. If he is a painter the surest way for him to survive is to make stupid portraits of even more stupid people, or sell his services to the advertising monarchs who, in my opinion, have done more to ruin art than any other single factor I know of. Take the murals which adorn the walls of our public buildings—most of them belong in the realm of commercial art. Some of them, in technique and conception, are even below the aesthetic level of the Arrow collar artist. The great concern has been to please the public, a public whose taste has been vitiated by Maxfield Parrish chromos and posters conceived with only one idea, “to put it over”. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 112 | Location 1710-1716 | Added on Monday, October 2, 2017 8:19:46 PM continues. At the rate we are going, in another hundred years or so there will be scarcely a trace or evidence on this continent of the only culture we have been able to produce—the rich slave culture of the South. New Orleans worships the past, but it watches impassively as the barbarians of the future bury the past cynically and ruthlessly. When the beautiful French Quarter is no more, when every link with the past is destroyed, there will be the clean, sterile office buildings, the hideous monuments and public buildings, the oil wells, the smokestacks, the air ports, the jails, the lunatic asylums, the charity hospitals, the bread lines, the gray shacks of the colored people, the bright tin lizzies, the stream-lined trains, the tinned food products, the drug stores, the Neon-lit shop windows to inspire the artist to paint. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 411-412 | Added on Saturday, October 7, 2017 8:11:10 PM In a deciduous forest the contest between individuals is literally for a place in the sun. Where the saguaro grows there is enough of that for everybody. But every individual must protect his water rights in his own area. ========== The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood (William M. Brandon III) - Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 998-998 | Added on Monday, October 9, 2017 7:49:03 PM spring skies broke apart in great shattering mirrors. ========== The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood (William M. Brandon III) - Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 997-998 | Added on Monday, October 9, 2017 7:49:24 PM slowly died, kicking and screaming. ========== The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood (William M. Brandon III) - Your Highlight on page 101 | Location 1082-1082 | Added on Monday, October 9, 2017 7:56:33 PM myriad ========== The Exile The Matriarch and The Flood (William M. Brandon III) - Your Highlight on page 432 | Location 4841-4842 | Added on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 9:27:11 PM When they returned to the pub, Stasia had secured a bench and her friend Bennett had joined the group. Bennett was an ex-Los ========== Grounded: Indigenous Knowing in a Concrete Reality (Lynne Kelly) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 311-318 | Added on Wednesday, October 11, 2017 9:19:34 PM French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote half a century ago that the ‘thirst for objective knowledge is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call “primitive”’.44 I would argue that this situation has not much improved. Lévi-Strauss also observed that ‘animals and plants are not known as a result of their usefulness; they are deemed to be useful or interesting because they are first of all known’. This aspect of ‘native’ science, Lévi-Strauss argues, ‘meet intellectual requirements rather than or instead of satisfying needs’.45 That intellectual system, being entirely stored in memory, needs to be structured and consciously retained. A new person, a new technology or a newly identified plant or animal species must be named and linked into the existing system to ensure it is not forgotten. ========== Grounded: Indigenous Knowing in a Concrete Reality (Lynne Kelly) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 322-325 | Added on Wednesday, October 11, 2017 9:20:22 PM we have also dispensed with many aspects of orality which are natural to human learning and understanding. We segregate art and music from science and literature. We don’t let vivid characters tell the stories about the science and history, geography and politics. We don’t ground our curriculum in the physical environment, letting memory locations fix the information in logical sequences in touchable places that are infinitely expandable. We sit still when we could dance. ========== Grounded: Indigenous Knowing in a Concrete Reality (Lynne Kelly) - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 330-331 | Added on Wednesday, October 11, 2017 9:20:55 PM knowledge.46 It is only in larger societies that leadership is maintained through force and leaders amass ========== Grounded: Indigenous Knowing in a Concrete Reality (Lynne Kelly) - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 327-331 | Added on Wednesday, October 11, 2017 9:21:06 PM There are no truly egalitarian societies known. Those that appear to be egalitarian are so judged because there is no differentiation in material wealth. No society is egalitarian when it comes to knowledge. Cross-cultural ethnographic evidence is unequivocal. Power in small scale traditional societies, mobile and sedentary, is granted to those who control knowledge.46 It is only in larger societies that leadership is maintained through force and leaders amass personal wealth. ========== Grounded: Indigenous Knowing in a Concrete Reality (Lynne Kelly) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 444-445 | Added on Friday, October 13, 2017 9:25:47 PM Philosopher David Abram argues that anthropologists have tended to view the stories from oral tradition as ‘confused attempts at causal explanation by the primitive mind’.65 ========== Grounded: Indigenous Knowing in a Concrete Reality (Lynne Kelly) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 446-454 | Added on Friday, October 13, 2017 9:26:14 PM then that entity, such as a plant, stone or weather event, will often be cast, like all of the other characters, in a fully animate form. It will be capable of human-like adventures and experiences while being susceptible to the kinds of setbacks or difficulties that we know from our own lives. This makes the character and the encoded information about the plant easily remembered along with medicinal properties and risks of poisoning. The precise steps in its preparation will be clearly portrayed in the sequence of events in the legend chanted during its preparation.66 Abram concluded that stories from oral tradition ‘which we literates misconstrue as naïve attempt at causal explanation may be recognized as a sophisticated mnemonic method whereby precise knowledge is preserved and passed along from generation to generation’.67 Are oral cultures aware that they are using mythology in this way? ========== Grounded: Indigenous Knowing in a Concrete Reality (Lynne Kelly) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 779-782 | Added on Saturday, October 14, 2017 8:15:02 PM Rounded Globe is a publishing venture situated on the border between scholarly research and the reading public. Our goal is to disseminate accessible scholarship beyond the borders of the academic world. Accessibility has two sides: our ebooks are free from jargon and narrow disciplinary focus; and they are released ========== Learning Ritual Magic_ Fundamental Theory and Practice for the Solitary Apprentice - John Michael Greer & Earl, Jr. King & Clare Vaughn - Your Bookmark on page 34 | Added on Sunday, October 15, 2017 9:07:43 PM ========== Goethe's theory of colours (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) - Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 396-400 | Added on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 8:29:56 PM To accomplish this, only in a certain degree, in any department, requires an unremitting and close application; and we find, for this reason^ that men prefer substituting a general theore** tical view, or some system of explanation, for the facts themselves, instead of taking the trou^ ble to make themselves first acquainted with cases in detail and then constructing a whole. ========== Answer to Job (Hull, R. F.C., Jung, C. G., Shamdasani, Sonu) - Your Highlight on page 56 | Location 846-852 | Added on Saturday, October 21, 2017 7:52:25 PM Perfection is a masculine desideratum, while woman inclines by nature to completeness. And it is a fact that, even today, a man can stand a relative state of perfection much better and for a longer period than a woman, while as a rule it does not agree with women and may even be dangerous for them. If a woman strives for perfection she forgets the complementary role of completeness, which, though imperfect by itself, forms the necessary counterpart to perfection. For, just as completeness is always imperfect, so perfection is always incomplete, and therefore represents a final state which is hopelessly sterile. “Ex perfecto nihil fit,” say the old masters, whereas the imperfectum carries within it the seeds of its own improvement. Perfectionism always ends in a blind alley, while completeness by itself lacks selective values. ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 41-41 | Added on Monday, October 23, 2017 8:35:40 PM In spite of the countless illogical and malevolent events of our lives, the incredible sequences, by-ways, repetitious insanities of human history, both collective and individual, we will believe it t o be incumbent upon us t o go along with the world, for it is, after all, God's world, and thus it must have meaning and goodness con- cealed within its operations, no matter how difficult t o discern. Thus we must go on fulfilling our role within the system as best we can, being obedient children, diligent husbands, dutiful wives, well-behaved butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers, hop- ing against hope that a revelation of meaning will somehow emerge from this meaningless life of conformity. Not so, said the Gnostics. Money, power, governments, the raising of families, paying of taxes, the endless chain of entrap- ment in circumstances and obligations-none of these were ever rejected as totally and unequivocally in human history as they ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 42-42 | Added on Monday, October 23, 2017 8:35:51 PM by the Gnostics. The Gnostics never hoped that any political or economic revolution could, or even should, do away with all the iniquitous elements within the system wherein the human soul is entrapped. Their rejection was not of one govern- ment or form of ownership in favor of another; rather it con- cerned the entire prevailing systematization of life and experience. Thus the Gnostics were, in fact, knowers of a secret so deadly and terrible that the rulers of this world-i.e., the powers, secular and religious, who always profited from the established systems of society-could not afford to have this secret known and, even less, to have it publicly proclaimed in their domain. Indeed the Gnostics knew something, and it was this: that human life does not fulfill its promise within the struc- tures and establishments of society, for all of these are at best but shadowy projections of another and more fundamental reality. No one comes to his true selfhood by being what society wants him to be nor by doing what it wants him to do. Family, society, church, trade and profession, political and patriotic allegiances, as well as moral and ethical rules and command- ments are, in reality, not in the least conducive to the true spiritual welfare of the human soul. On the contrary, they are more often than not the ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 42-42 | Added on Monday, October 23, 2017 8:36:00 PM by the Gnostics. The Gnostics never hoped that any political or economic revolution could, or even should, do away with all the iniquitous elements within the system wherein the human soul is entrapped. Their rejection was not of one govern- ment or form of ownership in favor of another; rather it con- cerned the entire prevailing systematization of life and experience. Thus the Gnostics were, in fact, knowers of a secret so deadly and terrible that the rulers of this world-i.e., the powers, secular and religious, who always profited from the established systems of society-could not afford to have this secret known and, even less, to have it publicly proclaimed in their domain. Indeed the Gnostics knew something, and it was this: that human life does not fulfill its promise within the struc- tures and establishments of society, for all of these are at best but shadowy projections of another and more fundamental reality. No one comes to his true selfhood by being what society wants him to be nor by doing what it wants him to do. Family, society, church, trade and profession, political and patriotic allegiances, as well as moral and ethical rules and command- ments are, in ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 42-42 | Added on Monday, October 23, 2017 8:36:07 PM by the Gnostics. The Gnostics never hoped that any political or economic revolution could, or even should, do away with all the iniquitous elements within the system wherein the human soul is entrapped. Their rejection was not of one govern- ment or form of ownership in favor of another; rather it con- cerned the entire prevailing systematization of life and experience. Thus the Gnostics were, in fact, knowers of a secret so deadly and terrible that the rulers of this world-i.e., the powers, secular and religious, who always profited from the established systems of society-could not afford to have this secret known and, even less, to have it publicly proclaimed in their domain. Indeed the Gnostics knew something, and it was this: that human life does not fulfill its promise within the struc- tures and establishments of society, for all of these are at best but shadowy projections of another and more fundamental reality. No one comes to his true selfhood by being what society wants him to be nor by doing what it wants him to do. Family, society, church, trade and profession, political and patriotic allegiances, as well as moral and ethical rules and command- ments are, in reality, not in the least conducive to the true spiritual welfare of the human soul. On the contrary, they are more often than not the very shackles which keep us from our true spiritual destiny. This feature of Gnosticism ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 56-56 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:02:01 PM Christianity, which was ever incapable of appreciating either the transformational potentialities of matter o r the authentic, naturally inherent sanctity, and indeed divinity, of the human psyche. Instead of an appreciation of either o r both of these alchemical and Gnostic propositions, the church chose to languish in a psychological limbo compounded of Aristotelian logic and the Semitic obsession with moral laws and command- ments ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 57-57 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:02:21 PM Paracelsus, Pico de la Mirandola, Fichino ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 57-57 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:03:05 PM Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, as well as The Art of Memory, The Theatre of the World and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 57-57 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:03:20 PM Frances Yates, proves in her most convincing schol- arly works (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, as well as The Art of Memory, The Theatre of the World and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment) that Renaissance art, science, literature, and drama have an organic connection with and are, in a sense, part of the Pansophic effort. It is Hermetic and Gnostic magic, alchemy and heterodox mysticism that served as the well of the living waters from which the greatest lights of Western culture, from Galileo to Shakespeare, drew their inspiration and spiritual sustenance ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 57-57 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:05:02 PM When King Louis XVI was led to the scaffold, he is said to have exclaimed: "This is the revenge of Jaques de Molay!" But as thrones crumbled and altar lights were extinguished, the champions of the new dawn of the spirit came to recognize that the triumph of wisdom was still far off. New tyrants replaced ihe monarchs of old and churchly dogma gave way to the soul- killing materialism of an arrogant young science. The era of darkness set in. Semimoribund religion continued to battle science, while the grimy smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution reduced peasant to proletarian and elevated mer- chant and usurer to capitalist. Only the artist and poet remained to fan the flickering flame of the alternate spiritual tradition. William Blake, Shelley, Goethe, Holderlin, and later W.B ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 63-63 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:14:13 PM All systems must beware of assuming that they are making true statements about reality. When they come to rationalize their symbols and begin to look upon them as truths, they will soon be fossilizing their insights and thus soon destroy their empirical value as signposts on the way. At the portal of true Gnosis all "isms," even Gnosticism, must vanish. Similarly the psychologist must be willing to sacrifice his allegiance to a psychological system when he begins to deal with true individua- tion. ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 65-65 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:18:05 PM The third conclusion is that the symbols proceeding from the pneumatic component of the soul reveal a path of spiritual or psychological development, which can be traced, not only backward toward a cause in the past, but forward to a goal in the future. The Gnostics held that the existential condition of the human being is determined by two factors: the descent or fall of the human soul from the light-world in the past; and the soul's teleological destiny, which is its return to that light-world in glory and victory. We are not only driven by our murky past but also mightily drawn forward and upward by our splendid future. Mainstream Christianity holds the fall of man and the conse- quent state of original sin responsible for his present condition, even as Freudian psychology traces the present neurotic afflic- tions of the psyche back t o infantile conditions. In contradistinc- tion, Jung held that the psyche contains a n indwelling sense of its destiny of wholeness, and that this ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 67-67 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:23:27 PM A delightful story regarding a patient of Jung's points this up. She saw herself in a dream sinking into a dreadful mire. Overhead appeared the figure of Dr. Jung serenely floating in the aether and sternly addressing the distressed patient with the following words: "Not out, but through!" This anecdote illustrates a most important principle of Jung's and of his psychology, which is quite similar t o certain principles of Gnosticism. The psyche must allow itself the experience of darkness, terror and alienation, irrespective of the pain effected by the experience ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 68-68 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:25:18 PM The neurotic personality, resentful and fearful of the growing pains of the soul, tends to seek refuge in self-deception and thus frequently convinces itself that growth is really unnecessary, for things are quite satisfactory just as they are a t ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 68-68 | Added on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 8:25:27 PM pains of the soul, tends to seek refuge in self-deception and thus frequently convinces itself that growth is really unnecessary, for things are quite satisfactory just as they are a t present ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 125-125 | Added on Friday, October 27, 2017 8:22:29 PM The divine hybrid whom Jung calls Abraxas is the living and symbolic refutation of the philosophical attitude of the excluded middle, or as it may be colloquially called, the either-or philosophy. The unholy alliance of Semitic moralizing and Aristotelian logic which invaded and conquered Christendom by way of the works of Thomas Aquinas immersed Western humanity in the method of the absolute categorization of all things into an attitude t o be characterized as either this o r that. Light and dark are envisioned as being in conflict because our thinking has come to accept the idea that both cannot exist together. Life and death are imagined as polar opposites, and the human being is, of course, enjoined t o choose life. Hence suicide and other forms of self-destruction, or even the destruc- tion of a tiny foetus in the womb, appear as dreadful crimes to the Western religious mind. This sort of thinking is peculiar to the differentiated consciousness of the ego, inasmuch as the ego is dominated by only conscious motives and considerations. It is perfectly true that in the world of the conscious ego, dependent for its reality image on sense perception, things and beings are always either this or that: a chair is quite plainly not a dog, a ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 130-130 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:45:53 PM maturity of the individual as well as of culture should bring with it a reflectiveness and regard for the inner realities and mysteries of the soul-in short, it should be productive of wisdom. No wonder then that the God of differentiation is a fashioner or architect (demiurge), while the principal mythic figure of the individuational spirituality of the Gnosis is Sophia, who is wisdom embodied ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 130 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:45:59 PM embodied ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 129-129 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:46:32 PM one can recognize that the early, demiurgic phase of religiosity in the West was directed toward differentiation, the wrenching of consciousness from its aionial slumber in the unconscious. The Gnostic effort, on the other hand, is directed toward individuation, the reintegration of differentiated and alienated consciousness with the unconscious. Thus, conventional religion divides, while Gnosis unites. These two tendencies appear contradictory, and they most certainly are in conflict with each other, but they also represent separate developmental phases of the growth and development of the human psyche, both on the individual and the collective levels. Even as it is regarded normal for youth to be at least partially characterized by an extraverted and pas- sionate involvement in the external world, so it is understan ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 129-129 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:46:39 PM man's sin. If death is the result of sin, then it follows that death must be associated with evil, and life becomes the gift of God, even as death appears as His curse. Similarly, old age is represented as a condi- tion of labor and sorrow by Holy Writ, an affliction that is organically connected with death, the consequence of sin. It was religion and nothing else that began the great heresy of separa- tion, of the philosophy of the excluded middle! If one is to take a Jungian psycho-historical view of this fact, one can recognize that the early, demiurgic phase of religiosity in the West was directed toward differentiation, the wrenching of consciousness from its aionial slumber in the unconscious. The Gnostic effort, on the other hand, is directed toward individuation, the reintegration of differentiated and alienated consciousness with the unconscious. Thus, conventional religion divides, while Gnosis unites. These two tendencies appear contradictory, and they most certainly are in conflict with each other, but they also represent separate developmental phases of the growth and development of the human psyche, both on the individual and the collective levels. Even as it is regarded normal for youth to be at least partially characterized by an extraverted and pas- sionate involvement in the external world, so it is understan ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 129-129 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:46:44 PM heresy of separa- tion, of the philosophy of the excluded middle! If one is to take a Jungian psycho-historical view of this fact, one can recognize that the early, demiurgic phase of religiosity in the West was directed toward differentiation, the wrenching of consciousness from its aionial slumber in the unconscious. The Gnostic effort, on the other hand, is directed toward individuation, the reintegration of differentiated and alienated consciousness with the unconscious. Thus, conventional religion divides, while Gnosis unites. These two tendencies appear contradictory, and they most certainly are in conflict with each other, but they also represent separate developmental phases of the growth and development of the human psyche, both on the individual and the collective levels. Even as it is regarded normal for youth to be at least partially characterized by an extraverted and pas- sionate involvement in the external world, so it is understan ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 129-129 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:46:48 PM heresy of separa- tion, of the philosophy of the excluded middle! If one is to take a Jungian psycho-historical view of this fact, one can recognize that the early, demiurgic phase of religiosity in the West was directed toward differentiation, the wrenching of consciousness from its aionial slumber in the unconscious. The Gnostic effort, on the other hand, is directed toward individuation, the reintegration of differentiated and alienated consciousness with the unconscious. Thus, conventional religion divides, while Gnosis unites. These two tendencies appear contradictory, and they most certainly are in conflict with each other, but they also represent separate developmental phases of the growth and development of the human psyche, both on the individual and the collective levels. Even as it is regarded normal for youth to be at least partially characterized by an extraverted and pas- sionate involvement in the external world, so it is understan ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 129-129 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:46:55 PM heresy of separa- tion, of the philosophy of the excluded middle! If one is to take a Jungian psycho-historical view of this fact, one can recognize that the early, demiurgic phase of religiosity in the West was directed toward differentiation, the wrenching of consciousness from its aionial slumber in the unconscious. The Gnostic effort, on the other hand, is directed toward individuation, the reintegration of differentiated and alienated consciousness with the unconscious. Thus, conventional religion divides, while Gnosis unites. These two tendencies appear contradictory, and they most certainly are in conflict with each other, but they also represent separate developmental phases of the growth and development of the human psyche, both on the individual and the collective levels. Even as it is regarded normal for youth to be at least partially characterized by an extraverted and pas- sionate involvement in the external world, so it is understan ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 129-129 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:46:58 PM heresy of separa- tion, of the philosophy of the excluded middle! If one is to take a Jungian psycho-historical view of this fact, one can recognize that the early, demiurgic phase of religiosity in the West was directed toward differentiation, the wrenching of consciousness from its aionial slumber in the unconscious. The Gnostic effort, on the other hand, is directed toward individuation, the reintegration of differentiated and alienated consciousness with the unconscious. Thus, conventional religion divides, while Gnosis unites. These two tendencies appear contradictory, and they most certainly are in conflict with each other, but they also represent separate developmental phases of the growth and development of the human psyche, both on the individual and the collective levels. Even as it is regarded normal for youth to be at least partially characterized by an extraverted and pas- sionate involvement in the external world, so it is understan ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 129-129 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:47:06 PM one is to take a Jungian psycho-historical view of this fact, one can recognize that the early, demiurgic phase of religiosity in the West was directed toward differentiation, the wrenching of consciousness from its aionial slumber in the unconscious. The Gnostic effort, on the other hand, is directed toward individuation, the reintegration of differentiated and alienated consciousness with the unconscious. Thus, conventional religion divides, while Gnosis unites. These two tendencies appear contradictory, and they most certainly are in conflict with each other, but they also represent separate developmental phases of the growth and development of the human psyche, both on the individual and the collective levels. Even as it is regarded normal for youth to be at least partially characterized by an extraverted and pas- sionate involvement in the external world, so it is understan- dable that the religiosity of the adolescense of culture would be ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 130-130 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:47:15 PM of a differentiated and extraverted character. On the other hand, maturity of the individual as well as of culture should bring with it a reflectiveness and regard for the inner realities and mysteries of the soul-in short, it should be productive of wisdom. No wonder then that the God of differentiation is a fashioner or architect (demiurge), while the principal mythic figure of the individuational spirituality of the Gnosis is Sophia, who is wisdom embodied ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 131-131 | Added on Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:49:31 PM Human nature needs neither sanctification nor deification at our feeble hands; the sanctifying forces as well as the deity indwelling having been planted within it before the beginning of time and the fashioning of space ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 149-149 | Added on Sunday, October 29, 2017 8:29:31 PM discerned. This god, who is ever pre- sent even if not called, is the imprinter of the mark of destiny upon the ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 163-163 | Added on Monday, October 30, 2017 4:00:18 AM Monotheistic orthodoxy and atheistic rationalism are brothers under the skin. The all-spiritual God and the all-logical deity of reason are both blind, like Saclas, the blind and foolish demiurge of the Gnostics; neither can behold the desperate need to accept his polar opposite and to relate to it in creative conflict. Both have fostered a dreary and burdensome condition of mind which is characterized by Judeo ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 163-163 | Added on Monday, October 30, 2017 4:00:24 AM Monotheistic orthodoxy and atheistic rationalism are brothers under the skin. The all-spiritual God and the all-logical deity of reason are both blind, like Saclas, the blind and foolish demiurge of the Gnostics; neither can behold the desperate need to accept his polar opposite and to relate to it in creative conflict. Both have fostered a dreary and burdensome condition of mind which is characterized by Judeo ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 163-163 | Added on Monday, October 30, 2017 4:00:29 AM Monotheistic orthodoxy and atheistic rationalism are brothers under the skin. The all-spiritual God and the all-logical deity of reason are both blind, like Saclas, the blind and foolish demiurge of the Gnostics; neither can behold the desperate need to accept his polar opposite and to relate to it in creative conflict. Both have fostered a dreary and burdensome condition of mind which is characterized by Judeo-Christian guilt augmented by Freudian neurotic hopelessness ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 170-170 | Added on Monday, October 30, 2017 4:12:40 AM Thus men project their dark, erotic side onto women, whom they then fear and desire at the same time, precisely because they fear and desire their own unconscious Eros. Here is the true reason for the long-held distorted view of women as dangerous seductresses leading men astray, creatures filled with a dark, menacing sexuality, at once terrifying and alluring to the masculine psyche. The woman as witch, temptress, as Eve, the willing dupe of the evil serpent of the story of Genesis-these and similar figures all reveal themselves as the projections of the unconscious Eros of the masculine psyche ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 174-174 | Added on Monday, October 30, 2017 7:01:41 AM unisex but androgyny is the true goal of the transformation of the psyche, but this androgyny, rare and precious indeed, is to be found only in the highest flowering of the soul and consequently of humani- ty. Unisex is a distorted and unrealistic substitute for an- drogyny, rather like a misshapen goat with only one horn that is paraded as a unicorn. The way to androgyny. which in an earlier period was disguised under the ciphers of alchemy, has been ade- quately indicated by Jung in his classic commentaries on the alchemical work Rosarium Philosophorum, to which he gave the prosiac name The Psychology of the Transference.* Whether an androgynation of culture is a real possibility or not is a most dif- ficult question to answer. Such a process could not be produced by political or social fiat but could arise only as the result of the individuation and consequent androgynation of a sufficiently large number of persons within a given society, who then could make their mark, as it were, on their community and its con- sciousness. ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 179-179 | Added on Monday, October 30, 2017 8:15:06 PM This meaning is existential and experiential and is revealed in the spontaneously created and intensely lived mythic content of the soul. In prac- tical terms this might be said t o imply that the meaning of life cannot be discovered o r calculated, but rather that it must be lived ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 204-204 | Added on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 8:03:47 PM As above so below: as with good so with evil. The ancients rightly declared Homo homini lupus, man is a wolf unto man; the human being has no greater enemy than himself. Evil per- sons obviously d o exist in the world outside of us, but our rela- tionship with them is curiously and mysteriously interdependent with the sad failures and the woeful inadequacies concealed within ourselves. The villain without is the inseparable identical twin of all that is undesirable and villainous within ourselves. As we valiantly go about ridding the world of villains, failing t o first rid ourselves of the villain inside our crusades remain doomed t o failure. It is thus that wars waged t o make the world safe for freedom leave humanity in an increased state of slavery, and revolution brings fiercer tyrants t o the helm than those it brought to their fall. "Selten kommt etwas besseres nach" (seldom does anything better follow) is an old and tested popular saying in the German tongue, and it is not so much a product of cynicism as it is of wisdom derived from experience ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 204-204 | Added on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 8:04:42 PM In the course of history and of their individual lives, men have tended t o confuse change with transformation. This confusion brings disaster in its wake, for to change without being transformed is an exercise in futility. The alchemists, whom Jung regarded so highly, held that the natural world of the four elements does not transform itself, it merely changes. Following the hints given by the pre-Socratics, particularly Heraclitus, they said that the elements forever ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 204-204 | Added on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 8:04:48 PM In the course of history and of their individual lives, men have tended t o confuse change with transformation ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 204-204 | Added on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 8:04:58 PM In the course of history and of their individual lives, men have tended t o confuse change with transformation. This confusion brings disaster in its wake, for to change without being transformed is an exercise in futility ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 214-214 | Added on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 8:17:54 PM light". The idea of a personal God is a great stumbling block for many contemporary persons, who approach Jung. The one- sidedness of the overwhelming mass of Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion, with its rigid interpretation of the concept of the monotheistic deity ruling man and his world, has created an abiding suspicion in many minds against the very idea of "God." The disgust of numerous highly intelligent and creative persons in our culture with the Semitic god-concept has led these same people into a condition where they have become suspicious of and antagonistic toward religion in all its recognizable forms. As against these attitudes, Jung assumed a most unusual posi- tion. Jung held that there is no such thing as a really irreligious person, that the professed atheist is simply one who does not acknowledge an important realm of his or her unconscious. Those who are consciously irreligious have strong unconscious ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 215-215 | Added on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 8:18:20 PM concerns with religious matters, since the unconscious inevitably stands in a compensatory relationship to the conscious. The con- firmed doubter in his unconscious is more of a believer than he likes to admit; a conscious agnostic attitude evokes responses of a truly Gnostic character from the unconscious. Heresy hunters and fanatical fighters against evil are usually persons whose unconscious harbors great doubts and antagonisms against their accepted creed. Similarly, dreams and fantasies of the atheist usually reveal religious images and transcendental manifesta- tions. Yet with all of these views Jung combined once again an attitude which may be described as profoundly Gnostic in the classical sense ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 215-215 | Added on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 8:19:23 PM but that this need is not for religious belief but rather for religious experience ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 215-215 | Added on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 8:19:33 PM Jung said in essence that human beings have a religious need, but that this need is not for religious belief but rather for religious experience ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 219-219 | Added on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 8:30:31 PM A self-conscious creativity is not creativity a t all, while a creativity of self-surrender partakes of the spark of the ultimate fullness of all being. The arrogance of the alienated ego resents reliance on the God-image and continues to harp on its own so-called creativity and personal artistic or similar call- ing. Nevertheless, if the creative power is to manifest according to its eternally ordained patterns, the lesser must become a junior partner to the greater, and man must learn how to humble himself before that existence which has been called God. It is of the self-consciousness of the ego that it was written in the New Testament: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the liv- ing God ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 221-221 | Added on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 8:33:24 PM Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Transcendentalist philosopher, put it with unique directness when he wrote: "Man is weak to the ex- tent that he looks outside himself for help. It is only as he throws himself unhesitatingly upon the God within himself that he learns his own power and works miracles. It is only when he throws overboard all other props and leans solely upon the God in him that he uncovers his real powers and finds the springs of success." These statements embody a very important principle, namely that what one does not use one will lose. This adage is ========== (Quest Books) Stephan A. Hoeller-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead-Quest Books (1982) - Unknown - Your Highlight on page 221-221 | Added on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 8:33:54 PM well illustrated in the Gospels, in the parable of the talents. While the secularized contemporary person trusts only in his or her own conscious ego and the devout soul is praying to an out- side power for help, the creative energies resident within both are atrophying. The cultivation of the relation between the outer ego and the indwelling capabilities of the objective psyche con- stitute the true gnosis kardias, science of the soul. The yearning of the ego to awaken and to enjoy communion with this divine immanence is the real prayer that increases the luminosity of the God-image, poetically represented as a star in the Sermon ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 117 | Location 1792-1792 | Added on Friday, November 10, 2017 2:08:52 AM mother of monarchies and despotism. Selfishness ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 117 | Location 1791-1794 | Added on Friday, November 10, 2017 2:09:04 AM Individual selfishness crystallized into the laws of nations has destroyed democracies and republics and is the mother of monarchies and despotism. Selfishness uncontrolled is a consuming fire that eats like a cancer at the vitals of governments, bringing with it corruption, prejudices, vanity, a runted, ill fed, and an anaemic race. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 133 | Location 2030-2035 | Added on Saturday, November 11, 2017 9:35:35 PM But the American white man (not to speak of the Indian, the Negro, the Mexican) hasn’t a ghost of a chance. If he has any talent he’s doomed to have it crushed one way or another. The American way is to seduce a man by bribery and make a prostitute of him. Or else to ignore him, starve him into submission and make a hack of him. It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world—it’s the American way of looking at things. Nothing comes to fruition here except utilitarian projects. You can ride for thousands of miles and be utterly unaware of the existence of the world of art. You will learn all about beer, condensed milk, rubber goods, canned food, inflated mattresses, etc., but you will never see or hear anything concerning the masterpieces of art. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 133 | Location 2038-2041 | Added on Saturday, November 11, 2017 9:36:24 PM Most of the young men of talent whom I have met in this country give one the impression of being somewhat demented. Why shouldn’t they? They are living amidst spiritual gorillas, living with food and drink maniacs, success-mongers, gadget innovators, pub licity hounds. God, if I were a young man today, if I were faced with a world such as we have created, I would blow my brains out. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 134 | Location 2044-2045 | Added on Saturday, November 11, 2017 9:36:49 PM Go West, young man! they used to say. Today we have to say: Shoot yourself, young man, there is no hope for you! ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 141 | Location 2156-2159 | Added on Sunday, November 12, 2017 9:52:36 PM Aesthetically we are probably the most conservative people in the world. We have to have the blind staggers before we get a release. Then we break one another’s heads with glee and impunity. We have been educated to such a fine—or dull—point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it’s all about. We don’t trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 141 | Location 2156-2159 | Added on Sunday, November 12, 2017 9:52:44 PM Aesthetically we are probably the most conservative people in the world. We have to have the blind staggers before we get a release. Then we break one another’s heads with glee and impunity. We have been educated to such a fine—or dull—point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it’s all about. We don’t trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 144 | Location 2204-2205 | Added on Monday, November 13, 2017 8:24:29 PM The world isn’t kept running because it’s a paying proposition. (God doesn’t make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 177 | Location 2702-2706 | Added on Tuesday, November 14, 2017 7:39:46 AM Take it for gianted that nobody, not even a genius, can guarantee that your car won’t fall apart five minutes after he’s examined it. A car is even more delicate than a Swiss watch. And a lot more diabolical, if you know what I mean. If you don’t know much about cars it’s only natural to want to take it to a big service station when something goes wrong. A great mistake, of course, but it’s better to learn by experience than by hearsay. How are you to know that the little man who looks like a putterer may be a wizard? ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 2849-2849 | Added on Tuesday, November 14, 2017 7:50:36 AM The automobile was invented in order for us to learn how to be patient and gentle with one another. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 2849-2853 | Added on Tuesday, November 14, 2017 7:51:03 AM The automobile was invented in order for us to learn how to be patient and gentle with one another. It doesn’t matter about the parts, or even about the parts of parts, nor what model or what year it is, so long as you treat her right. What a car appreciates is responsiveness. A loose differential may or may not cause friction and no car, not even a Rolls Royce, will run without a universal, but everything else being equal it’s not the pressure or lack of pressure in the exhaust pipe which matters—it’s the way you handle her, the pleasant little word now and then, the spirit of forbearance and forgiveness. Do unto others as you would have them do by you is the basic principle of automotive engineering. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 196 | Location 2999-3004 | Added on Tuesday, November 14, 2017 9:51:51 PM Nowhere in America was there anything comparable to the cathedrals of Europe, the temples of Asia and Egypt—enduring monuments created out of faith and love and passion. No exaltation, no fervor, no zeal—except to increase business, facilitate transportation, enlarge the domain of ruthless exploitation. The result? A swiftly decaying people, almost a third of them pauperized, the more intelligent and affluent ones practising race suicide, the under-dogs becoming more and more unruly, more criminal-minded, more degenerate and degraded in every way. A handful of reckless, ambitious politicians trying to convince the mob that this is the last refuge of civilization, God save the mark! My friend from ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 212 | Location 3248-3249 | Added on Wednesday, November 15, 2017 8:56:45 PM stopped at a drug store and took a Bromo Seltzer—for “simple headaches”. The real California began to make itself felt. I wanted to puke. But you have to get a permit to vomit in public. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Bookmark on page 213 | Location 3254 | Added on Thursday, November 16, 2017 9:00:23 AM ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 222 | Location 3393-3395 | Added on Thursday, November 16, 2017 8:59:15 PM Imagine the Marquis de Sade looking at the city of Paris through the bars of his cell in the Bastille. Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang’s feeble imagination. ========== The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Henry Miller) - Your Highlight on page 229 | Location 3506-3507 | Added on Thursday, November 16, 2017 9:08:51 PM Beside this, the conditions of performance, from a social financial standpoint, are tragically absurd. Commercialism has completed the destruction of the spirit of devotion to Art, the spirit of real participation in the performance. ========== A Place in the Country (W. G. Sebald; Translated by Jo Catling) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 520-521 | Added on Tuesday, November 21, 2017 9:40:19 PM one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable. ========== A Place in the Country (W. G. Sebald; Translated by Jo Catling) - Your Highlight on page 36 | Location 547-549 | Added on Tuesday, November 21, 2017 9:43:38 PM The clarity of the sky arching over him out there on the lake is reminiscent of the description of the mountains of the Valais at the beginning of La Nouvelle Héloïse as a landscape freed from the veils of lower, denser atmosphere, which has something of a magical, transcendental quality about it and in which one forgets everything, even oneself, and no longer knows where one is. ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 12 | Location 175-176 | Added on Saturday, November 25, 2017 9:51:11 PM I shall embellish my home with roses, and, sure as I’m a modern man and understand my epoch, I shall stick a rose in my nose. ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 13 | Location 185-187 | Added on Saturday, November 25, 2017 9:53:27 PM There are now many things that I adore. All the same, one has to do one’s duty as a citizen, nobody should make a face, nobody think he has a right to pass the flower days off with a quiet smile. They are a fact of life; but one should respect facts. Should one really? 1911 ========== The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald (W.G. Sebald) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 383-383 | Added on Monday, November 27, 2017 8:55:07 PM an out-of-date phrase book while missing ========== The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald (W.G. Sebald) - Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 664-668 | Added on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 2:26:37 AM It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. Because we have created an environment for us which isn’t what it should be. And we’re out of our depth all the time. We’re living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we’re driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our physical and emotional makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub against each other is where the sources of pain are. ========== The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald (W.G. Sebald) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 975-975 | Added on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 2:50:23 AM Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker ========== The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald (W.G. Sebald) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1213-1214 | Added on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 3:09:53 AM speaking of, then you still know what silence is, you ========== The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald (W.G. Sebald) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1212-1217 | Added on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 11:05:12 PM But I think if you have grown up as I have done, in a village in the postwar years of the Alps where there weren’t any cars or indeed any other machines worth speaking of, then you still know what silence is, you live in a house where the sounds are made by the house itself as it expands or contracts in the heat or the cold. You’re not listening to the fridge going on and off all the time or the television in the other room or the central heating doing its thing. If you took a kind of closed-circuit camera film of, I don’t know, a house here in Queens, you might well be excused if you got the idea that the people in it are only there to service the machines. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 701-705 | Added on Sunday, December 3, 2017 9:08:12 PM daring to do what our intelligence recognizes as dangerous constitutes "courage," then the animal who similarly rejects the imperatives of its instinct is exhibiting a virtue at least analogous, and so, in some still dimmer fashion, is the simplest creature, animal or even vegetable, which refuses to obey its long established reflexes. The whole course of evolution is directed by just such courageous acts. It must have its countless unremembered heroes who created diversity by daring to do what no member of its species had ever done before. ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 665-665 | Added on Thursday, December 7, 2017 9:13:46 PM every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls. ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 894-895 | Added on Friday, December 8, 2017 8:07:12 PM my wrath will seduce me to coarse expressions, with which it is well known nothing much ever gets done.” ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 894-894 | Added on Friday, December 8, 2017 8:07:25 PM run over by such a clumsy triumphal car, I dare not think it, ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 894-894 | Added on Friday, December 8, 2017 8:07:30 PM be run over by such ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 894-895 | Added on Friday, December 8, 2017 8:07:40 PM I dare not think it, otherwise my wrath will seduce me to coarse expressions, with which it is well known nothing much ever gets done.” ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 898-900 | Added on Friday, December 8, 2017 8:08:21 PM way personally, but purely on principle; for I do not understand, and I never shall understand, how it can be a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of misery and despair. ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 898-900 | Added on Friday, December 8, 2017 8:08:32 PM way personally, but purely on principle; for I do not understand, and I never shall understand, how it can be a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of misery and despair. ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 898-901 | Added on Friday, December 8, 2017 8:08:44 PM I do not understand, and I never shall understand, how it can be a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of misery and despair. In fact, I love repose and all that reposes. I love thrift and moderation and am in my inmost self, in God’s name, unfriendly toward any agitation and haste. ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 1020-1020 | Added on Monday, December 11, 2017 8:57:53 PM attractive, and coaxing one, an inn situated near the ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 1020-1020 | Added on Monday, December 11, 2017 8:57:57 PM attractive, and coaxing one, an inn situated near the ========== The Walk (Robert Walser) - Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 1020-1020 | Added on Monday, December 11, 2017 8:58:18 PM Now there should come, as it emerges here, an inn, and, that is, a very fine, attractive, and coaxing one, an inn situated ========== The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate Discoveries From a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben) - Your Highlight on page 66 | Location 1000-1006 | Added on Friday, December 15, 2017 9:41:20 PM Without soil there would be no forests, because trees must have somewhere to put down roots. Naked rock doesn’t work, and loosely packed stones, even though they offer roots some support, cannot store sufficient quantities of water or food. Geological processes—such as those active in the ice ages with their sub-zero temperatures—cracked open rocks, and glaciers ground the fragments down into sand and dust until, finally, what was left was a loosely packed substrate. After the ice retreated, water washed this material into depressions and valleys, or storms carried it away and laid it down in layers many tens of feet thick. Life came along later in the form of bacteria, fungi, and plants, all of which decomposed after death to form humus. Over the course of thousands of years, trees moved into this soil—which only at this stage can be recognized as such—and their presence made it even more precious. ========== The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate Discoveries From a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben) - Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1275-1280 | Added on Saturday, December 16, 2017 8:42:47 PM Every being has its niche and its function, which contribute to the well-being of all. Nature is often described like that, or something along those lines; however, that is, unfortunately, false. For out there under the trees, the law of the jungle rules. Every species wants to survive, and each takes from the others what it needs. All are basically ruthless, and the only reason everything doesn’t collapse is because there are safeguards against those who demand more than their due. And one final limitation is an organism’s own genetics: an organism that is too greedy and takes too much without giving anything in return destroys what it needs for life and dies out. ========== The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 187 | Location 2866-2866 | Added on Friday, December 22, 2017 8:57:08 PM herself out to be as agreeable to him as she knew ========== The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 187 | Location 2866-2866 | Added on Friday, December 22, 2017 8:57:15 PM herself out to be as agreeable to him as she knew ========== The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 300 | Location 4596-4597 | Added on Wednesday, December 27, 2017 9:18:48 PM Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. ========== The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 300 | Location 4599-4600 | Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 8:12:33 PM We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too. ========== The Moon and Sixpence (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 24 | Location 363-369 | Added on Friday, December 29, 2017 8:53:53 PM That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it is only by a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great majority, something amiss. I recognized its social value. I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change – change and the excitement of the unforeseen. ========== The Moon and Sixpence (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 598-598 | Added on Friday, December 29, 2017 9:12:52 PM I told him my name. I tried my best to ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 689-692 | Added on Wednesday, January 3, 2018 9:38:35 PM of Sion. Though AMORC’s overseas expansion drew on the same methods that had made it successful in the American market, connections with existing European secret societies also played a part. Lewis built on his links with OTO lodges in Germany, headed by Heinrich Tränker (1880–1956) after Theodor Reuss’s death in 1921, and ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 93 | Location 1411-1411 | Added on Friday, January 5, 2018 8:46:34 PM claimed as earlier expressions of the ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 829-832 | Added on Saturday, January 6, 2018 4:22:02 PM motli's wings beat faster when light falls upon his eyes, and when it falls more strongly on one eye than on the other, the wings on one side beat faster than those on the other. Irresistibly his flight curves toward the source and if he reaches it, he dies-—a victim of one of the mistakes which nature sometimes makes because even she cannot foresee every eventuahty. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 829-832 | Added on Saturday, January 6, 2018 4:22:09 PM motli's wings beat faster when light falls upon his eyes, and when it falls more strongly on one eye than on the other, the wings on one side beat faster than those on the other. Irresistibly his flight curves toward the source and if he reaches it, he dies-—a victim of one of the mistakes which nature sometimes makes because even she cannot foresee every eventuahty. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 829-832 | Added on Saturday, January 6, 2018 4:22:11 PM motli's wings beat faster when light falls upon his eyes, and when it falls more strongly on one eye than on the other, the wings on one side beat faster than those on the other. Irresistibly his flight curves toward the source and if he reaches it, he dies-—a victim of one of the mistakes which nature sometimes makes because even she cannot foresee every eventuahty. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 829-832 | Added on Saturday, January 6, 2018 4:22:14 PM 80 A motli's wings beat faster when light falls upon his eyes, and when it falls more strongly on one eye than on the other, the wings on one side beat faster than those on the other. Irresistibly his flight curves toward the source and if he reaches it, he dies-—a victim of one of the mistakes which nature sometimes makes because even she cannot foresee every eventuahty. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 829-832 | Added on Saturday, January 6, 2018 4:22:20 PM 80 A motli's wings beat faster when light falls upon his eyes, and when it falls more strongly on one eye than on the other, the wings on one side beat faster than those on the other. Irresistibly his flight curves toward the source and if he reaches it, he dies-—a victim of one of the mistakes which nature sometimes makes because even she cannot foresee every eventuahty. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 89 | Location 1358-1361 | Added on Sunday, January 7, 2018 3:12:21 PM know of no evidence that it once grew much more widely, but it is certainly not reproducing itself at a rate which will maintain its dominance in many of the areas which it now does dominate. And in any event there are other plants which are obviously only lingering in one or more spots isolated by many miles from the only other communities of their kind. In many cases it is, for a change, not man but nature herself who is gradually making it impossible for them to live where they once flourished. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 95 | Location 1455-1458 | Added on Sunday, January 7, 2018 3:25:34 PM "The buckeye," as Thoreau once oracularly declaimed, "does not grow in New England." But who knows? Some day it may. It was Thoreau also who confessed that, "I had no idea there was so much going on in Heywood's meadow.'' So there was and so there is in every meadow, and plain and mountain: things accomplished in a day, and others which require thousands of years before even their intention becomes apparent. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 96 | Location 1470-1474 | Added on Sunday, January 7, 2018 3:27:03 PM In every case the central problem remains the same: How to get water, how to keep it when you have got it, and how to get along with the minimum gettable and THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 134 keepable. It has been demonstrated that only one animal has the ability to get along without water. None of the plants can manage without any external source whatsoever. But the plants have been most ingenious in the variety of the less radical solutions which they have worked out. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2223-2227 | Added on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 8:13:04 PM Yet, knowing all this and much more, their dream is still the dream that an earth for man's use only can be created if only we learn more and scheme more effectively. They still hope that nature's scheme of checks and balances which provides for a varied population, which stubbornly refuses to scheme only from man s point of view and cherishes the weeds and "vermin" as persistently as she cherishes him, can be replaced by a scheme of his own devising. Ultimately they hope they can beat the game. But the more the ecologist learns, the less likely it seems that ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2223-2228 | Added on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 8:13:09 PM Yet, knowing all this and much more, their dream is still the dream that an earth for man's use only can be created if only we learn more and scheme more effectively. They still hope that nature's scheme of checks and balances which provides for a varied population, which stubbornly refuses to scheme only from man s point of view and cherishes the weeds and "vermin" as persistently as she cherishes him, can be replaced by a scheme of his own devising. Ultimately they hope they can beat the game. But the more the ecologist learns, the less likely it seems that man can in the long run do anything of the sort. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 147 | Location 2241-2245 | Added on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 8:15:22 PM A partridge covey or a deer herd which is not thinned by predators soon eats itself into starvation and suffers also from less obvious maladjustments. The overaged and the weaklings, who would have fallen first victims to their carnivorous enemies, survive to weaken the stock, and as overpopulation increases, the whole community becomes affected by some sort of nervous tension THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 198 —"shock" the ecologists call it—analogous to that which afflicts human beings crowded into congested areas. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 148 | Location 2258-2261 | Added on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 8:17:26 PM The objection to this method is much the same as it would be to a proposal that we should attack the problem of human population by declaring an annual open season on all between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. That is, of course, precisely what we do when a war is declared, and there are those who believe that the ultimate cause of wars is actually, though we are not aware of the fact, the overgrazing of our own range and the competition for what remains. ========== The voice of the desert : a naturalist's interpretation (Krutch, Joseph Wood) - Your Highlight on page 164 | Location 2506-2518 | Added on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 8:44:17 PM Perhaps no fact about the American people is more important than the fact that the continent upon which they live is large enough and varied enough to speak with many different voices—of the mountains, of the plains, of the valleys and of the seashore—all clear voices that are distinct and strong. Because Americans listened to all these voices, the national character has had many aspects and developed in many different directions. But the voice of the desert is the one which has been least often heard. We came to it last, and when we did come, we came principally to exploit rather than to hsten. To those who do listen, the desert speaks of things with an emphasis quite different from that of the shore, the mountains, the valleys or the plains. Whereas they invite action and suggest limitless opportunity, exliaustless re- sources, the implications and the mood of the desert are something different. For one thing the desert is conservative, not radical. It is more likely to provoke aw^e than to invite conquest. It does not, like the plains, say, "Only turn the sod and uncountable riches v^ill spring up." The heroism which it encourages is the heroism of endurance, not that of conquest. Precisely v^hat other things it says depends in part upon the person listening. To the biologist it speaks first of the remarkable flexibility of living things, of the processes of adaptation v^hich are nowhere more remarkable than in the strange devices by which plants and animals have learned to conquer heat and dryness. To the practical-minded conservationist it speaks sternly of other things, because in the desert the problems created by erosion and overexploitation are plainer and more acute than anywhere else. But to the merely contemplative it speaks of courage and endurance of a special kind. ========== The Moon and Sixpence (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 169 | Location 2590-2596 | Added on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 9:09:34 PM I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest. ========== The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham - II - The World Over (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 817-818 | Added on Friday, January 19, 2018 8:05:39 PM mirrors. We have always been respectable and we have paid our taxes with regularity. It is hard now that the fruits of our labours should ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 622 | Location 9529-9530 | Added on Thursday, February 15, 2018 2:27:58 AM industrialization and urban life on youth, Seton launched ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 631 | Location 9664-9664 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 7:16:34 PM (1972), Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 631 | Location 9669-9670 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 7:17:09 PM The Druid Way ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 633 | Location 9700-9700 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 7:18:35 PM The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 635 | Location 9735-9735 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 7:20:36 PM The World of the Druids ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 642 | Location 9832-9833 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 7:25:29 PM Jewish Alchemists (Princeton: Princeton University Press) Pennick, Nigel (1979), The Ancient Science of ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 641 | Location 9825-9825 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 7:25:36 PM Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 648 | Location 9923-9925 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 7:30:22 PM Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) — (1966), The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) — (1972), The Rosicrucian ========== The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (John Michael Greer) - Your Highlight on page 648 | Location 9923-9925 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 7:30:32 PM Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) — (1966), The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) ========== Greek Religion (Walter Burkert) - Your Highlight on page 86 | Location 1308-1309 | Added on Friday, February 16, 2018 8:05:41 PM namely, gold vessels and men or women, to a whole series of sanctuaries and gods: for ========== Epictetus_ A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life - A. A. Long - Your Highlight on page 39-39 | Added on Saturday, February 24, 2018 8:05:00 PM Why do we c omp l a i n? For t h is we were born. Lt*t n a t u re deal, as it wishes, with its own bodies. We should be cheerful and brave in relation to eve rything, r e f l e c t ing t h at nothing be longing to us is pe r i shing. What is a good ma n 's rol e? To offer h i m s e lf to fate. It is a great consolation to be moved along with the universe. Whatever it is that ordered us so to live and so to die, it binds the divine beings by the same necessity. An i n e v i t a b le course conveys the h uman and the d i v i ne a l ike. It was the a u t h or and r u l er of the world who wrote the decrees of fate, but he follows them himself ========== Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse) - Your Highlight on page 24 | Location 362-367 | Added on Monday, February 26, 2018 8:31:08 PM Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men! How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures? I cannot remain for long in either theater or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper, seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. ========== Shikasta (Doris May Lessing(Little Dorrit)) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 296-298 | Added on Friday, March 2, 2018 8:20:58 PM development. Of course, a species has to be of a certain mental set even to consider such conditions: let us say that they must be adventurers! While the main outlines of a probable development are known, it is never possible to forecast exactly what will happen when two species ========== Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse) - Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 766-769 | Added on Saturday, March 3, 2018 12:32:15 PM The breast and the body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen. ========== Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse) - Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 817-818 | Added on Saturday, March 3, 2018 1:56:07 PM Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 498-505 | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 8:52:19 PM The face of the sea is always changing. Crossed by colors, lights, and moving shadows, sparkling in the sun, mysterious in the twilight, its aspects and its moods vary hour by hour. The surface waters move with the tides, stir to the breath of the winds, and rise and fall to the endless, hurrying forms of the waves. Most of all, they change with the advance of the seasons. Spring moves over the temperate lands of our Northern Hemisphere in a tide of new life, of pushing green shoots and unfolding buds, all its mysteries and meanings symbolized in the northward migration of the birds, the awakening of sluggish amphibian life as the chorus of frogs rises again from the wet lands, the different sound of the wind stirs the young leaves where a month ago it rattled the bare branches. These things we associate with the land, and it is easy to suppose that at sea there could be no such feeling of advancing spring. But the signs are there, and seen with understanding eye, they bring the same magical sense of awakening. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 498-501 | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2018 8:52:35 PM The face of the sea is always changing. Crossed by colors, lights, and moving shadows, sparkling in the sun, mysterious in the twilight, its aspects and its moods vary hour by hour. The surface waters move with the tides, stir to the breath of the winds, and rise and fall to the endless, hurrying forms of the waves. Most of all, they change with the advance of the seasons. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1113-1113 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 8:15:51 PM But the summits of the sea mounts are anywhere ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1111-1115 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 8:16:05 PM Time after time, as the moving pen of the fathometer traced the depth contours it would abruptly begin to rise in an outline of a steep-sided sea mount, standing solitarily on the bed of the sea. Unlike a typical volcanic cone, all of the mounts have broad, flat tops, as though the peaks had been cut off and planed down by waves. But the summits of the sea mounts are anywhere from half a mile to a mile or more below the surface of the sea. How they acquired their flat-topped contours is a mystery perhaps as great as that of the submarine canyons. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 83 | Location 1268-1269 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 8:34:21 PM EVERY PART OF EARTH or air or sea has an atmosphere peculiarly its own, a quality or characteristic that sets it apart from all others. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1284-1285 | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2018 8:36:32 PM The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. When we are wise enough, perhaps we can read in them all of past history. For all is written here. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1510-1516 | Added on Friday, March 16, 2018 8:43:27 PM We can only guess how long after its emergence from the sea an oceanic island may lie uninhabited. Certainly in its original state it is a land bare, harsh, and repelling beyond human experience. No living thing moves over the slopes of its volcanic hills; no plants cover its naked lava fields. But little by little, riding on the winds, drifting on the currents, or rafting in on logs, floating brush, or trees, the plants and animals that are to colonize it arrive from the distant continents. So deliberate, so unhurried, so inexorable are the ways of nature that the stocking of an island may require thousands or millions of years. It may be that no more than half a dozen times in all these eons does a particular form, such as a tortoise, make a successful landing upon its shores. To wonder impatiently why man is not a constant witness of such arrivals is to fail to understand the majestic pace of the process. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 103 | Location 1573-1575 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 11:40:19 AM British ornithologist David Lack visited the Galapagos Islands, a century after Darwin, he found that the hawks allowed themselves to be touched, and the flycatchers tried to remove hair from the heads of the men for nesting material. ‘It is a curious pleasure,’ he wrote, ‘to have the birds of the wilderness settling upon one’s shoulders, and the pleasure could be much less rare were man less destructive.’ ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 106 | Location 1625-1628 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 12:05:56 PM The tragedy of the oceanic islands lies in the uniqueness, the irreplaceability of the species they have developed by the slow processes of the ages. In a reasonable world men would have treated these islands as precious possessions, as natural museums filled with beautiful and curious works of creation, valuable beyond price because nowhere in the world are they duplicated. W. H. Hudson’s lament for the birds of the Argentine pampas might even more truly have been spoken of the islands: ‘The beautiful has vanished and returns not.’ ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1631-1634 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 12:06:29 PM WE LIVE IN AN age of rising seas. Along all the coasts of the United States a continuing rise of sea level has been perceptible on the tide gauges of the Coast and Geodetic Survey since 1930. For the thousand-mile stretch from Massachusetts to Florida, and on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, the rise amounted to about a third of a foot between 1930 and 1948. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 1676-1679 | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2018 2:29:18 PM Far in the interior of the Florida Everglades I have wondered at the feeling of the sea that came to me—wondered until I realized that here were the same flatness, the same immense spaces, the same dominance of the sky and its moving, changing clouds; wondered until I remembered that the hard rocky floor on which I stood, its flatness interrupted by upthrust masses of jagged coral rock, had been only recently constructed by the busy architects of the coral reefs under a warm sea. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 136 | Location 2081-2084 | Added on Sunday, March 18, 2018 4:22:21 AM Winter swell on the west coast of North America is the product of storms that travel south of the Aleutians into the Gulf of Alaska. Swell reaching this same coast during the summer has been traced back to its origin in the Southern Hemisphere belt of the ‘roaring forties,’ several thousand miles south of the equator. Because of the direction of the prevailing winds, the American east coast and the Gulf of Mexico do not receive the swell from far distant storms. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2215-2219 | Added on Sunday, March 18, 2018 4:35:49 AM At Cedar Keys, on the Gulf coast of Florida, the level of the sea is 19 centimeters (about 7½ inches) higher than at St. Augustine. There is further unevenness of level within the current itself. The lighter water is deflected by the earth’s rotation toward the right side of the current, so that within the Gulf Stream the sea surface actually slopes upward toward the right. Along the coast of Cuba, the ocean is about 18 inches higher than along the mainland, thus upsetting completely our notions that ‘sea level’ is literal expression. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 156 | Location 2381-2384 | Added on Sunday, March 18, 2018 3:16:13 PM One of the leading students of the Gulf Stream, Columbus Iselin, has commented on the branching of the Stream in terms of a fascinating analogy: “Much the same phenomena seem to be present in the jet streams found at high elevations in the great belts of prevailing westerly winds of mid-latitudes,” he says, “although each atmospheric jet has greater dimensions than the overlapping subdivision of the Gulf Stream System.” ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 196 | Location 2995-3002 | Added on Sunday, March 18, 2018 8:49:38 PM German chemist Fritz Haber after the First World War. Haber conceived the idea of extracting enough gold from the sea to pay the German war debt and his dream resulted in the German South Atlantic Expedition of the Meteor. The Meteor was equipped with a laboratory and filtration plant, and between the years 1924 and 1928 the vessel crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, sampling the water. But the quantity found was less than had been expected, and the cost of extraction far greater than the value of the gold recovered. The practical economics of the matter are about as follows: in a cubic mile of sea water there is about $93,000,000 in gold and $8,500,000 in silver. But to treat this volume of water in a year would require the twice-daily filling and emptying of 200 tanks of water, each 500 feet square and 5 feet deep. Probably this is no greater feat, relatively, than is accomplished regularly by corals, sponges, and oysters, but by human standards it is not economically feasible. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Note on page 206 | Location 3144 | Added on Sunday, March 18, 2018 9:07:39 PM story of future set in greenand of a climate similar to prsent day wisconsin ojibwa culture and times dealing with lost technology culture nd religion ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 206 | Location 3144-3144 | Added on Sunday, March 18, 2018 9:07:39 PM TO ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 215 | Location 3289-3291 | Added on Sunday, March 18, 2018 9:22:29 PM Harold Gatty believes the Hawaiians may have found their islands by following the spring migration of the golden plover from Tahiti to the Hawaiian chain, as the birds returned to the North American mainland. He has also suggested that the migratory path of the shining cuckoo may have guided other colonists from the Solomons to New Zealand. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 215 | Location 3289-3291 | Added on Sunday, March 18, 2018 9:22:34 PM Harold Gatty believes the Hawaiians may have found their islands by following the spring migration of the golden plover from Tahiti to the Hawaiian chain, as the birds returned to the North American mainland. He has also suggested that the migratory path of the shining cuckoo may have guided other colonists from the Solomons to New Zealand. ========== The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) - Your Highlight on page 217 | Location 3316-3318 | Added on Sunday, March 18, 2018 9:25:15 PM This he ascribes to the fact that early mariners carefully guarded the secrets of how they made their passages from place to place; that sea charts were ‘keys to empire’ and a ‘way to wealth’ and as such were secret, hidden documents. Therefore, because the earliest specimen of such a chart now extant was made by Petrus Vesconte in 1311 does not mean that many had not existed before ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 596-597 | Added on Saturday, March 24, 2018 7:57:47 PM crescent moon rests in the east, part of the clock I live in, one of the slowly spinning gears. ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 596-597 | Added on Saturday, March 24, 2018 7:57:52 PM crescent moon rests in the east, part of the clock I live in, one of the slowly spinning gears. ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 596-597 | Added on Saturday, March 24, 2018 7:57:54 PM A crescent moon rests in the east, part of the clock I live in, one of the slowly spinning gears. ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 76 | Location 1165-1166 | Added on Sunday, March 25, 2018 9:10:41 PM at the time was the writing and publishing of the local newspaper, and the top floor was all I could afford. As I had been ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 23-23 | Added on Monday, March 26, 2018 7:52:33 PM F i r s t, Absolute N o t h i ng o ut of wh i ch eme r g es a s t a te of Limi t l e s sne s s, wh e n ce c omes Inf ini te L i g h t, t h en t he t en v a r i a t i o ns of L i g h t, or E m a n a t i o n s, forming t he S e p h i r o t h. T h e se As p e c ts limit t h ems e l v es a g a in i n to Ar c h a n g e l s, wh i ch once m o re l imit d own to Ange l s, a nd still f u r t h er t h r o u gh Ma n k i n d, a n i m a l s, mi n e r a l s, e t c ., e t c ., to an infinity of s u b - d i v i s i o ns wh i ch all a m o u nt to O ne T o t a l ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 23-23 | Added on Monday, March 26, 2018 7:52:46 PM F i r s t, Absolute N o t h i ng o ut of wh i ch eme r g es a s t a te of Limi t l e s sne s s, wh e n ce c omes Inf ini te L i g h t, t h en t he t en v a r i a t i o ns of L i g h t, or E m a n a t i o n s, forming t he S e p h i r o t h. T h e se As p e c ts limit t h ems e l v es a g a in i n to Ar c h a n g e l s, wh i ch once m o re l imit d own to Ange l s, a nd still f u r t h er t h r o u gh Ma n k i n d, a n i m a l s, mi n e r a l s, e t c ., e t c ., to an infinity of s u b - d i v i s i o ns wh i ch all a m o u nt to O ne T o t a l ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 23-23 | Added on Monday, March 26, 2018 7:53:01 PM F i r s t, Absolute N o t h i ng o ut of wh i ch eme r g es a s t a te of Limi t l e s sne s s, wh e n ce c omes Inf ini te L i g h t, t h en t he t en v a r i a t i o ns of L i g h t, or E m a n a t i o n s, forming t he S e p h i r o t h. T h e se As p e c ts limit t h ems e l v es a g a in i n to Ar c h a n g e l s, wh i ch once m o re l imit d own to Ange l s, a nd still f u r t h er t h r o u gh Ma n k i n d, a n i m a l s, mi n e r a l s, e t c ., e t c ., to an infinity of s u b - d i v i s i o ns wh i ch all a m o u nt to O ne T o t a l i t y. L i m i t a t i on inc r e a s es in di r e ct p r o p o r t i on to ma n i f e s t a t i o n. It m ay be noticed t h at t h e re a re s even s t ages of c h a n ge i n v o l v e d. 23 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 23-23 | Added on Monday, March 26, 2018 7:53:02 PM F i r s t, Absolute N o t h i ng o ut of wh i ch eme r g es a s t a te of Limi t l e s sne s s, wh e n ce c omes Inf ini te L i g h t, t h en t he t en v a r i a t i o ns of L i g h t, or E m a n a t i o n s, forming t he S e p h i r o t h. T h e se As p e c ts limit t h ems e l v es a g a in i n to Ar c h a n g e l s, wh i ch once m o re l imit d own to Ange l s, a nd still f u r t h er t h r o u gh Ma n k i n d, a n i m a l s, mi n e r a l s, e t c ., e t c ., to an infinity of s u b - d i v i s i o ns wh i ch all a m o u nt to O ne T o t a l i t y. L i m i t a t i on inc r e a s es in di r e ct p r o p o r t i on to ma n i f e s t a t i o n. It m ay be noticed t h at t h e re a re s even s t ages of c h a n ge i n v o l v e d. 23 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 23-23 | Added on Monday, March 26, 2018 7:53:23 PM F i r s t, Absolute N o t h i ng o ut of wh i ch eme r g es a s t a te of Limi t l e s sne s s, wh e n ce c omes Inf ini te L i g h t, t h en t he t en v a r i a t i o ns of L i g h t, or E m a n a t i o n s, forming t he S e p h i r o t h. T h e se As p e c ts limit t h ems e l v es a g a in i n to Ar c h a n g e l s, wh i ch once m o re l imit d own to Ange l s, a nd still f u r t h er t h r o u gh Ma n k i n d, a n i m a l s, mi n e r a l s, e t c ., e t c ., to an infinity of s u b - d i v i s i o ns wh i ch all a m o u nt to O ne T o t a l i t y. L i m i t a t i on inc r e a s es in di r e ct p r o p o r t i on to ma n i f e s t a t i o n. It m ay be noticed t h at t h e re a re s even s t ages of c h a n ge i n v o l v e d. 23 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 23-23 | Added on Monday, March 26, 2018 7:53:23 PM F i r s t, Absolute N o t h i ng o ut of wh i ch eme r g es a s t a te of Limi t l e s sne s s, wh e n ce c omes Inf ini te L i g h t, t h en t he t en v a r i a t i o ns of L i g h t, or E m a n a t i o n s, forming t he S e p h i r o t h. T h e se As p e c ts limit t h ems e l v es a g a in i n to Ar c h a n g e l s, wh i ch once m o re l imit d own to Ange l s, a nd still f u r t h er t h r o u gh Ma n k i n d, a n i m a l s, mi n e r a l s, e t c ., e t c ., to an infinity of s u b - d i v i s i o ns wh i ch all a m o u nt to O ne T o t a l i t y. L i m i t a t i on inc r e a s es in di r e ct p r o p o r t i on to ma n i f e s t a t i o n. It m ay be noticed t h at t h e re a re s even s t ages of c h a n ge i n v o l v e d. 23 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 23-23 | Added on Monday, March 26, 2018 7:53:45 PM F i r s t, Absolute N o t h i ng o ut of wh i ch eme r g es a s t a te of Limi t l e s sne s s, wh e n ce c omes Inf ini te L i g h t, t h en t he t en v a r i a t i o ns of L i g h t, or E m a n a t i o n s, forming t he S e p h i r o t h. T h e se As p e c ts limit t h ems e l v es a g a in i n to Ar c h a n g e l s, wh i ch once m o re l imit d own to Ange l s, a nd still f u r t h er t h r o u gh Ma n k i n d, a n i m a l s, mi n e r a l s, e t c ., e t c ., to an infinity of s u b - d i v i s i o ns wh i ch all a m o u nt to O ne T o t a l i t y. L i m i t a t i on inc r e a s es in di r e ct p r o p o r t i on to ma n i f e s t a t i o n. It m ay be noticed t h at t h e re a re s even s t ages of c h a n ge i n v o l v e d. 23 ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1894-1898 | Added on Monday, March 26, 2018 8:44:19 PM Anthropomorphism is generally frowned upon. It is said to be improper to see animals the same way we view ourselves. We are asked to temper our language when speaking of animal traits, lest we call them by a name that is not theirs, forming words in our mouths that do not sound like a snake’s whisper, a grasshopper’s clicking. It seems just as odd, though, to sequester ourselves in a cheerless vault of sentience, sole proprietors of smarts and charm. Bees form a mind of a hive, don’t they? Doesn’t the bear dream when it sleeps, and don’t grasses stretch with all their might toward the sun? Every living thing has the same wish to flourish again and again. Beyond that, our differences are quibbles. ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 7-7 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:24:34 PM We live in p a t t e r ns b e c a u se we h a ve t o. T h ey a re i n e s c a p a b l e. T he C o smos is a p a t t e r n. So a re w e. T h e re a re p a t t e r ns of Spi r i t, S o u l, Mind, a nd B o dy e x t e n d i ng t h r o u gh all s t a t es of e x i s t e n c e. We c an find t h em r e a d i ly e n o u gh a n y w h e r e. O ur h u m an b o d i es a re a Magic Ma ze of p a t t e r ns t h r o u g h o ut t h e ir c e l lul ar s t r u c t u ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 8-8 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:27:45 PM he S ymb ol of t he T r ee of Life is n e i t h er s t a t ic n or d e a ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 9-9 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:27:57 PM It is a g r owi n g, flexible, a nd a d a p t a b le L i f e - P a t t e rn c a p a b le of indefinite e x t e n s i o ns t h r o u g h o ut Life Itself in all s t a t es a nd exi s t enc e s. T h is m e a ns n ot me r e ly c e l lul ar o r g a n ic life, b ut t he whole of B e i n g, mani f e s t ed in all pos s ible a s p e c t s. Since t h e re c a n n ot be m o r e, t he T r ee p r e s e n ts no less. It is no r i g id a c c u m u l a t i on of de funct d o g ma a nd me a n i n g l e ss s ymb o l o gy for an a d v a n c i ng h u m a n i t y, for it p r e s e n ts an e v er r i c h er f i e ld of faith in wi d e n i ng d ime n s i o ns of spi r i t. Before all else it lives, a nd m u st be l ived. T he so called Q a b a l a h, or " r e c e i v ed t e a c h i n g" is t he o u tcome of beliefs, e x p e r i e n c e s, a nd d e v e l o p m e n ts of souls w ho h a ve " t r o d d en t he P a t h s " by a r r a n g i ng t h e ir lives a c c o r d i ng to t he p a t t e r ns p r o d u c ed by m e a ns of t he T r e e. It is n ot a h a rd a nd fast r u le of t h u mb mys t i c i sm, b ut a W ay of Life a nd L i v i ng wi t h in a P a t t e rn whi ch c o n s t a n t ly a nd cons c ious ly a i ms at i ts own pe r f e c t ion. As we grow t he T r ee g r ows. It b e a rs a different v a r i e ty of fruit in t he twe n t i e th c e n t u ry t h an it d id in t he f o u r t e e n t h, b ut it still fulfils i ts func t ion of p r o d u c i ng s u s t e n a n ce for t he i n s a t i a b le h u m an soul in s e a r ch of i ts own m e a n i n g. W h at is m o r e, its fruits a re l i t e r a l ly i n e x h a u s t i b l e, since t h ey cont i n u a l ly r e n ew t h ems e l v es wi th fresh s u p p l i es of I n n er ene rgi e s. T he h a r d er we p l u ck t he T r e e, t he m o re plentifully c omes i ts a m a z i ng fruit. After ini t i al c o n t a c ts wi th t he T r ee of Life a nd t he Q a b a l a h, it is o n ly n a t u r al t h at we should a sk our s e lves w h e t h er to c o n t i n ue o ur i n v e s t i g a t i o n s, or s t op wa s t i ng t ime on w h at s e ems a me d i e v al r u b b i sh h e ap in s ome a b a n d o n ed Gh e t t o. S u ch a q u e s t i on c an o n ly be a n swe r ed by t he q u e r a nt himself. No a m o u nt of r e a d i ng will solve i t. All we c an r e ad a re t he o p i n i o ns a nd t h e o r i es of o t h e r s, whi ch m ay or m ay n ot be he lpful. E a ch Qaba l i st m u st f o rmu l a te t he T r ee a c c o r d i ng to his own life wi thin i ts p a t t e r n. T h o se u n a b le to do t h is c a n n ot be Qa b a l i s t s. T he T r ee p r o v i d es t he m e a ns of r e c e iving I n n e r w o r ld cont a c ts wi th t y p es of cons c iousne ss n o r m a l ly inaccessible to t he o r d i n a ry h u m an m i n d. It is from a nd t h r o u gh t h e se sour c es t h at t he " T e a c h i n g" c ome s. Nor is t h is an a u t o m a t ic proc e s s, b ut t he result of h a rd a nd p a i n s t a k i ng wo rk in all wo r l d s. Qa b a l i sm is n ot for t he l a z y, t he ineffectual, or t he indifferent 9 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 9-9 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:28:03 PM It is a g r owi n g, flexible, a nd a d a p t a b le L i f e - P a t t e rn c a p a b le of indefinite e x t e n s i o ns t h r o u g h o ut Life Itself in all s t a t es a nd exi s t enc e s. T h is m e a ns n ot me r e ly c e l lul ar o r g a n ic life, b ut t he whole of B e i n g, mani f e s t ed in all pos s ible a s p e c t s. Since t h e re c a n n ot be m o r e, t he T r ee p r e s e n ts no less. It is no r i g id a c c u m u l a t i on of de funct d o g ma a nd me a n i n g l e ss s ymb o l o gy for an a d v a n c i ng h u m a n i t y, for it p r e s e n ts an e v er r i c h er f i e ld of faith in wi d e n i ng d ime n s i o ns of spi r i t. Before all else it lives, a nd m u st be l ived. T he so called Q a b a l a h, or " r e c e i v ed t e a c h i n g" is t he o u tcome of beliefs, e x p e r i e n c e s, a nd d e v e l o p m e n ts of souls w ho h a ve " t r o d d en t he P a t h s " by a r r a n g i ng t h e ir lives a c c o r d i ng to t he p a t t e r ns p r o d u c ed by m e a ns of t he T r e e. It is n ot a h a rd a nd fast r u le of t h u mb mys t i c i sm, b ut a W ay of Life a nd L i v i ng wi t h in a P a t t e rn whi ch c o n s t a n t ly a nd cons c ious ly a i ms at i ts own pe r f e c t ion. As we grow t he T r ee g r ows. It b e a rs a different v a r i e ty of fruit in t he twe n t i e th c e n t u ry t h an it d id in t he f o u r t e e n t h, b ut it still fulfils i ts func t ion of p r o d u c i ng s u s t e n a n ce for t he i n s a t i a b le h u m an soul in s e a r ch of i ts own m e a n i n g. W h at is m o r e, its fruits a re l i t e r a l ly i n e x h a u s t i b l e, since t h ey cont i n u a l ly r e n ew t h ems e l v es wi th fresh s u p p l i es of I n n er ene rgi e s. T he h a r d er we p l u ck t he T r e e, t he m o re plentifully c omes i ts a m a z i ng fruit. After ini t i al c o n t a c ts wi th t he T r ee of Life a nd t he Q a b a l a h, it is o n ly n a t u r al t h at we should a sk our s e lves w h e t h er to c o n t i n ue o ur i n v e s t i g a t i o n s, or s t op wa s t i ng t ime on w h at s e ems a me d i e v al r u b b i sh h e ap in s ome a b a n d o n ed Gh e t t o. S u ch a q u e s t i on c an o n ly be a n swe r ed by t he q u e r a nt himself. No a m o u nt of r e a d i ng will solve i t. All we c an r e ad a re t he o p i n i o ns a nd t h e o r i es of o t h e r s, whi ch m ay or m ay n ot be he lpful. E a ch Qaba l i st m u st f o rmu l a te t he T r ee a c c o r d i ng to his own life wi thin i ts p a t t e r n. T h o se u n a b le to do t h is c a n n ot be Qa b a l i s t s. T he T r ee p r o v i d es t he m e a ns of r e c e iving I n n e r w o r ld cont a c ts wi th t y p es of cons c iousne ss n o r m a l ly inaccessible to t he o r d i n a ry h u m an m i n d. It is from a nd t h r o u gh t h e se sour c es t h at t he " T e a c h i n g" c ome s. Nor is t h is an a u t o m a t ic proc e s s, b ut t he result of h a rd a nd p a i n s t a k i ng wo rk in all wo r l d s. Qa b a l i sm is n ot for t he l a z y, t he ineffectual, or t he indifferent 9 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 9-9 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:28:20 PM It is a g r owi n g, flexible, a nd a d a p t a b le L i f e - P a t t e rn c a p a b le of indefinite e x t e n s i o ns t h r o u g h o ut Life Itself in all s t a t es a nd exi s t enc e s. T h is m e a ns n ot me r e ly c e l lul ar o r g a n ic life, b ut t he whole ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 9-9 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:28:55 PM It is n ot a h a rd a nd fast r u le of t h u mb mys t i c i sm, b ut a W ay of Life a nd L i v i ng wi t h in a P a t t e rn whi ch c o n s t a n t ly a nd cons c ious ly a i ms at i ts own pe r f e c t ion ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 11-11 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:31:36 PM he r e al solut ion mu st be worked o ut i n d i v i d u a l l y, for it lies in t he souls of t h o se who seek it a nd n o w h e re e l s e. T he m a j or c lue or K ey to t he Q a b a l ah b e i ng t he T r e e, we mu st b r i ng t he m a in force of o ur e n q u i ry t h e r e to a nd k e ep going u n t il at least t he o u t l i n es of a p a t t e rn eme r g e. T h is should p r o v i de us wi th a m a ss of ma t e r i al from wh i ch b l a n ks c an be f i l l ed in as ne c e s s i ty a r i s e s. F i r s t ly w h at is t he T r e e? It is a s ymb o l ic r e p r e s e n t a t i on of t he r e l a t i o n s h i ps be l i eved to exist b e twe en t he mo st a b s t r a ct Di v i n i ty a nd t he mo st c o n c r e te h u m a n i t y. A s o rt of f ami ly T r ee l i n k i ng God a nd Man t o g e t h er w i th An g e ls a nd o t h er Be ings as a c omp l e te cons c ious c r e a t i o n. Since it is a S y m b o l, we m u st g a in s ome k n owl e d ge of t he m e a n i n g, c o n s t r u c t i o n, a nd a p p l i c a t i o ns of S y m b o l s, or t he T r ee will be n o t h i ng mo re t h an l ines a nd d o ts on p a p e r. A S y m b ol is t he e m b o d i m e nt of an i d ea so t h at it c an be de a lt wi th by differing cons c ious e n t i t i e s, or even b e twe en different cons c ious l eve ls of t he s a me E n t i t y. T h us a S y m b ol is a m e a ns of e x c h a n ge m u ch like coinage or a ny m u t u a l ly a c c e p t a b le c u r r e n c y. S ymb o l i sm m ay be cons ide r ed as t he c u r r e n cy of cons c iousne s s. After a l l, t he v e ry w o r ds on t h is p a ge a re g r o u ps of s y m b o ls a r r a n g ed so as to c o n v ey m e a n i ng from o ne m i nd to a n o t h e r. T he T r e e - S ymb ol is in itself an a l p h a b et of s ymb o ls from wh e n ce a s p i r i t u al l a n g u a ge c an be c o n s t r u c t ed wh i ch s h o u ld be intelligible b e twe en B e i n gs in different s t a t es of e x i s t e n c e. In old f a shioned t e r m s, Go d s, An g e l s, a nd Men a re g i v en a c o m m on l a n g u a g e. In m o d e rn p a r l a n ce t he n o r m al cons c iousne ss is e n a b l ed to c o m m u n i c a te d i r e c t ly wi th t he s ub a nd s u p er cons c iousne ss by m e a ns of i n t e r - r e l a t i ve s y m b o l o g y. To m a ke t he T r ee fully a r t i c u l a te is t he w o rk of e v e ry Qa b a l i s t, b e c a u se once an int e l l igent c o n t a ct h as b e en e s t a b l i s h ed by i ts m e a ns b e twe en o ur h u m an s e lves a nd t he G r e at C o n s c i o u s n e ss of wh i ch we a re infinitesimal u n i t s, t h en we s h a ll m a ke r e a l ly useful p r o g r e ss a l o ng t he l i n es of t he P e r f e ct P a t t e r n. In o r d er to m a ke t he T r ee s p e ak so t h at we c an m a ke s ense of i t, we m u st f i r st a t t a ch t r a n s l a t a b le m e a n i n gs i n to i ts f r amewo r k, a nd t he o n ly w ay t h is c an be d o ne is by m e d i t at i o n al a nd p r a c t i c al wo rk wi th t he T r e e. E a ch S e p h i r ah a nd 11 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 11-11 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:31:49 PM he r e al solut ion mu st be worked o ut i n d i v i d u a l l y, for it lies in t he souls of t h o se who seek it a nd n o w h e re e l s e. T he m a j or c lue or K ey to t he Q a b a l ah b e i ng t he T r e e, we mu st b r i ng t he m a in force of o ur e n q u i ry t h e r e to a nd k e ep going u n t il at least t he o u t l i n es of a p a t t e rn eme r g e. T h is should p r o v i de us wi th a m a ss of ma t e r i al from wh i ch b l a n ks c an be f i l l ed in as ne c e s s i ty a r i s e s. F i r s t ly w h at is t he T r e e? It is a s ymb o l ic r e p r e s e n t a t i on of t he r e l a t i o n s h i ps be l i eved to exist b e twe en t he mo st a b s t r a ct Di v i n i ty a nd t he mo st c o n c r e te h u m a n i t y. A s o rt of f ami ly T r ee l i n k i ng God a nd Man t o g e t h er w i th An g e ls a nd o t h er Be ings as a c omp l e te cons c ious c r e a t i o n. Since it is a S y m b o l, we m u st g a in s ome k n owl e d ge of t he m e a n i n g, c o n s t r u c t i o n, a nd a p p l i c a t i o ns of S y m b o l s, or t he T r ee will be n o t h i ng mo re t h an l ines a nd d o ts on p a p e r. A S y m b ol is t he e m b o d i m e nt of an i d ea so t h at it c an be de a lt wi th by differing cons c ious e n t i t i e s, or even b e twe en different cons c ious l eve ls of t he s a me E n t i t y. T h us a S y m b ol is a m e a ns of e x c h a n ge m u ch like coinage or a ny m u t u a l ly a c c e p t a b le c u r r e n c y. S ymb o l i sm m ay be cons ide r ed as t he c u r r e n cy of cons c iousne s s. After a l l, t he v e ry w o r ds on t h is p a ge a re g r o u ps of s y m b o ls a r r a n g ed so as to c o n v ey m e a n i ng from o ne m i nd to a n o t h e r. T he T r e e - S ymb ol is in itself an a l p h a b et of s ymb o ls from wh e n ce a s p i r i t u al l a n g u a ge c an be c o n s t r u c t ed wh i ch s h o u ld be intelligible b e twe en B e i n gs in different s t a t es of e x i s t e n c e. In old f a shioned t e r m s, Go d s, An g e l s, a nd Men a re g i v en a c o m m on l a n g u a g e. In m o d e rn p a r l a n ce t he n o r m al cons c iousne ss is e n a b l ed to c o m m u n i c a te d i r e c t ly wi th t he s ub a nd s u p er cons c iousne ss by m e a ns of i n t e r - r e l a t i ve s y m b o l o g y. To m a ke t he T r ee fully a r t i c u l a te is t he w o rk of e v e ry Qa b a l i s t, b e c a u se once an int e l l igent c o n t a ct h as b e en e s t a b l i s h ed by i ts m e a ns b e twe en o ur h u m an s e lves a nd t he G r e at C o n s c i o u s n e ss of wh i ch we a re infinitesimal u n i t s, t h en we s h a ll m a ke r e a l ly useful p r o g r e ss a l o ng t he l i n es of t he P e r f e ct P a t t e r n. In o r d er to m a ke t he T r ee s p e ak so t h at we c an m a ke s ense of i t, we m u st f i r st a t t a ch t r a n s l a t a b le m e a n i n gs i n to i ts f r amewo r k, a nd t he o n ly w ay t h is c an be d o ne is by m e d i t at i o n al a nd p r a c t i c al wo rk wi th t he T r e e. E a ch S e p h i r ah a nd 11 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 11-11 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:34:42 PM he r e al solut ion mu st be worked o ut i n d i v i d u a l l y, for it lies in t he souls of t h o se who seek it a nd n o w h e re e l s e. T he m a j or c lue or K ey to t he Q a b a l ah b e i ng t he T r e e, we mu st b r i ng t he m a in force of o ur e n q u i ry t h e r e to a nd k e ep going u n t il at least t he o u t l i n es of a p a t t e rn eme r g e. T h is should p r o v i de us wi th a m a ss of ma t e r i al from wh i ch b l a n ks c an be f i l l ed in as ne c e s s i ty a r i s e s. F i r s t ly w h at is t he T r e e? It is a s ymb o l ic r e p r e s e n t a t i on of t he r e l a t i o n s h i ps be l i eved to exist b e twe en t he mo st a b s t r a ct Di v i n i ty a nd t he mo st c o n c r e te h u m a n i t y. A s o rt of f ami ly T r ee l i n k i ng God a nd Man t o g e t h er w i th An g e ls a nd o t h er Be ings as a c omp l e te cons c ious c r e a t i o n. Since it is a S y m b o l, we m u st g a in s ome k n owl e d ge of t he m e a n i n g, c o n s t r u c t i o n, a nd a p p l i c a t i o ns of S y m b o l s, or t he T r ee will be n o t h i ng mo re t h an l ines a nd d o ts on p a p e r. A S y m b ol is t he e m b o d i m e nt of an i d ea so t h at it c an be de a lt wi th by differing cons c ious e n t i t i e s, or even b e twe en different cons c ious l eve ls of t he s a me E n t i t y. T h us a S y m b ol is a m e a ns of e x c h a n ge m u ch like coinage or a ny m u t u a l ly a c c e p t a b le c u r r e n c y. S ymb o l i sm m ay be cons ide r ed as t he c u r r e n cy of cons c iousne s s. After a l l, t he v e ry w o r ds on t h is p a ge a re g r o u ps of s y m b o ls a r r a n g ed so as to c o n v ey m e a n i ng from o ne m i nd to a n o t h e r. T he T r e e - S ymb ol is in itself an a l p h a b et of s ymb o ls from wh e n ce a s p i r i t u al l a n g u a ge c an be c o n s t r u c t ed wh i ch s h o u ld be intelligible b e twe en B e i n gs in different s t a t es of e x i s t e n c e. In old f a shioned t e r m s, Go d s, An g e l s, a nd Men a re g i v en a c o m m on l a n g u a g e. In m o d e rn p a r l a n ce t he n o r m al cons c iousne ss is e n a b l ed to c o m m u n i c a te d i r e c t ly wi th t he s ub a nd s u p er cons c iousne ss by m e a ns of i n t e r - r e l a t i ve s y m b o l o g y. To m a ke t he T r ee fully a r t i c u l a te is t he w o rk of e v e ry Qa b a l i s t, b e c a u se once an int e l l igent c o n t a ct h as b e en e s t a b l i s h ed by i ts m e a ns b e twe en o ur h u m an s e lves a nd t he G r e at C o n s c i o u s n e ss of wh i ch we a re infinitesimal u n i t s, t h en we s h a ll m a ke r e a l ly useful p r o g r e ss a l o ng t he l i n es of t he P e r f e ct P a t t e r n. In o r d er to m a ke t he T r ee s p e ak so t h at we c an m a ke s ense of i t, we m u st f i r st a t t a ch t r a n s l a t a b le m e a n i n gs i n to i ts f r amewo r k, a nd t he o n ly w ay t h is c an be d o ne is by m e d i t at i o n al a nd p r a c t i c al wo rk wi th t he T r e e. E a ch S e p h i r ah a nd 11 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 11-11 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:35:25 PM he r e al solut ion mu st be worked o ut i n d i v i d u a l l y, for it lies in t he souls of t h o se who seek it a nd n o w h e re e l s e. T he m a j or c lue or K ey to t he Q a b a l ah b e i ng t he T r e e, we mu st b r i ng t he m a in force of o ur e n q u i ry t h e r e to a nd k e ep going u n t il at least t he o u t l i n es of a p a t t e rn eme r g e. T h is should p r o v i de us wi th a m a ss of ma t e r i al from wh i ch b l a n ks c an be f i l l ed in as ne c e s s i ty a r i s e s. F i r s t ly w h at is t he T r e e? It is a s ymb o l ic r e p r e s e n t a t i on of t he r e l a t i o n s h i ps be l i eved to exist b e twe en t he mo st a b s t r a ct Di v i n i ty a nd t he mo st c o n c r e te h u m a n i t y. A s o rt of f ami ly T r ee l i n k i ng God a nd Man t o g e t h er w i th An g e ls a nd o t h er Be ings as a c omp l e te cons c ious c r e a t i o n. Since it is a S y m b o l, we m u st g a in s ome k n owl e d ge of t he m e a n i n g, c o n s t r u c t i o n, a nd a p p l i c a t i o ns of S y m b o l s, or t he T r ee will be n o t h i ng mo re t h an l ines a nd d o ts on p a p e r. A S y m b ol is t he e m b o d i m e nt of an i d ea so t h at it c an be de a lt wi th by differing cons c ious e n t i t i e s, or even b e twe en different cons c ious l eve ls of t he s a me E n t i t y. T h us a S y m b ol is a m e a ns of e x c h a n ge m u ch like coinage or a ny m u t u a l ly a c c e p t a b le c u r r e n c y. S ymb o l i sm m ay be cons ide r ed as t he c u r r e n cy of cons c iousne s s. After a l l, t he v e ry w o r ds on t h is p a ge a re g r o u ps of s y m b o ls a r r a n g ed so as to c o n v ey m e a n i ng from o ne m i nd to a n o t h e r. T he T r e e - S ymb ol is in itself an a l p h a b et of s ymb o ls from wh e n ce a s p i r i t u al l a n g u a ge c an be c o n s t r u c t ed wh i ch s h o u ld be intelligible b e twe en B e i n gs in different s t a t es of e x i s t e n c e. In old f a shioned t e r m s, Go d s, An g e l s, a nd Men a re g i v en a c o m m on l a n g u a g e. In m o d e rn p a r l a n ce t he n o r m al cons c iousne ss is e n a b l ed to c o m m u n i c a te d i r e c t ly wi th t he s ub a nd s u p er cons c iousne ss by m e a ns of i n t e r - r e l a t i ve s y m b o l o g y. To m a ke t he T r ee fully a r t i c u l a te is t he w o rk of e v e ry Qa b a l i s t, b e c a u se once an int e l l igent c o n t a ct h as b e en e s t a b l i s h ed by i ts m e a ns b e twe en o ur h u m an s e lves a nd t he G r e at C o n s c i o u s n e ss of wh i ch we a re infinitesimal u n i t s, t h en we s h a ll m a ke r e a l ly useful p r o g r e ss a l o ng t he l i n es of t he P e r f e ct P a t t e r n. In o r d er to m a ke t he T r ee s p e ak so t h at we c an m a ke s ense of i t, we m u st f i r st a t t a ch t r a n s l a t a b le m e a n i n gs i n to i ts f r amewo r k, a nd t he o n ly w ay t h is c an be d o ne is by m e d i t at i o n al a nd p r a c t i c al wo rk wi th t he T r e e. E a ch S e p h i r ah a nd 11 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 11-11 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:36:01 PM he r e al solut ion mu st be worked o ut i n d i v i d u a l l y, for it lies in t he souls of t h o se who seek it a nd n o w h e re e l s e. ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 12-12 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:38:14 PM s. T h is is d o ne by a s imi l ar me t h od of a p p l i c a t i on to a chi ld l e a r n i ng i ts n a t i ve t o n g u e. E v e n t u a l ly we shall di s cover t he s tyle a nd g r a m m ar of t he T r e e, wh i ch b r i n gs an a b i l i ty to a r r a n ge i ts c o n c e p ts in a c c o r d a n ce wi th t y p es of cons c iousne ss u n r e a c h a b le on o r d i n a ry h u m an l eve l s. T he me t h od is to wo rk wi t h in l imi ts so as to a p p r o a ch t he Limi t l e s s. Our T r e e - t h i n k i ng is l imi t ed by t he r e l a t i o n s h ip of t he S e p h i r o th to e a ch o t h er b e twe en t he R i g ht a nd Left h a nd P i l l a r s, b ut t he u p w a rd e x t e n s i on t h r o u gh K e t h er i n to t he unl imi t ed A IN S O PH A UR is Inf ini t e. In t h at sense K e t h er is like t he b ow of a s h i p, s t a t i o n a ry of itself in r e l a t i on to t he whole vessel, b ut c o n s t a n t ly r e a c h i ng n ew w a t e rs of t he E t e r n al Oc e a n. Ot h e rwi se we c an t h i nk of t he T r ee like a c o n d u i t, t he walls of wh i ch a re t he P i l l a r s, b ut t he f low of force p a s s i ng t h r o u gh t h em is infinite b e c a u se i n c e s s a n t. All such n o t i o ns give us i d e as to wo rk w i t h. In o r d er to h a n d le S e p h i r o t ic g r o u p i n gs as single c o n c e p t s, t h ey h a ve b e en joined by w h at a re c a l l ed P a t hs or c h a n n e l s. T he pos i t ions a nd n o m e n c l a t u re a t t a c h ed to the se P a t hs a re a m a j or c ause of d i s a g r e eme nt a m o ng Qa b a l i s t s. T h e re a re few if a ny s e r ious d i v e r g e n c es a b o ut t he S e p h i r o th t h ems e l v e s, b ut t he p a t hs h a ve b e c ome m o re of a b a t t l e g r o u nd for d i ss ent i ent oc cul t i s t s, r a t h er t h an peaceful p r o m e n a d es in s e a r ch of k n owl e d g e. E a ch different School t a k es an a s s o r tme nt of 12 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 12-12 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:38:31 PM w o r d — W O R K. To s p e ak t he l a n g u a ge of t he T r ee we m u st be a b le to u t t er its s o u n d s, ( the S e p h i r o t h) form a nd p r o n o u n ce i ts l e t t e r s, ( t he P a t h s) t h en e x p r e ss our s ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 12-12 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:38:39 PM w o r d — W O R K. To s p e ak t he l a n g u a ge of t he T r ee we m u st be a b le to u t t er its s o u n d s, ( the S e p h i r o t h) form a nd p r o n o u n ce i ts l e t t e r s, ( t he P a t h s) t h en e x p r e ss our s ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 12-12 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:39:11 PM In t h at sense K e t h er is like t he b ow of a s h i p, s t a t i o n a ry of itself in r e l a t i on to t he whole vessel, b ut c o n s t a n t ly r e a c h i ng n ew w a t e rs of t he E t e r n al Oc e a n. Ot h e rwi se we c an t h i nk of t he T r ee like a c o n d u i t, t he walls ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 13-13 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:40:17 PM If we t a ke a ny two S e p h i r o t ic C o n c e p ts a nd b r i ng t h em i n to c o n t a ct wi th e a ch o t h er t h r o u gh our s e lve s, t h e re will be a r e a c t i ve r e sult in o ur cons c iousne s s, or e x p e r i e n c e, wh i ch will e x p r e ss o ur own e v a l u a t i on of s u ch a m e e t i n g. S u p p o se we took G e b u r ah a nd C h e s e d, S e v e r i ty a nd Me r cy, a nd he ld t h em in o ur cons c iousne ss t o g e t h er or a l t e r n a t e l y. M a ny r e s u l ts arise i m m e d i a t e l y. We t h i nk of b a l a n c e, of r e s t r a i n t, of c ommo n s e n s e, r e w a rd a nd p u n i s h m e n t, j u d g e m e n t, c o n t r o l, a nd a whole c h a in of a s soc i a t ions. I n s t e ad of m e a n d e r i ng endl e s s ly a l o ng t h e se l ine s, we b r i ng o u r s e l v es firmly b a ck to t he G e b u r a h - C h e s ed P a t h, a nd r e a l i se t h at in b e i ng cons c ious of t h is as a whol e, we inc lude e v e ry single pos s ible c o n n e c t i on t h r o u g h o ut cons c iousne ss itself. We a re u s i ng o ne S e p h i r o t ic c o m b i n a t i on as a Ma s t e r - S ymb ol to c o n t a ct a nd c o n t a in all t h at a p p e r t a i ns t h e r e t o. T he o n ly r e a s on t h at 22 P a t hs we re a l l o t t ed to t he T r ee w as t h at t he H e b r ew A l p h a b et h ad t h at n u m b er of l e t t e r s. Differing Schools a t t r i b u te t he l e t t e rs in v a r i o us w a y s, a nd all c l a im to get r e s u l t s. A ny l e t t e r - a s soc i a t ion will b r i ng s ome k i nd of r e s u l t s, b ut o n ly to t h o se a c c e p t i ng i t. A s e r ious s n ag to the H e b r ew a t t r i b u t i o ns for W e s t e rn oc cul t i s ts is t h at it o n ly c o m m u n i c a t es in H e b r e w. To n on H e b r ew s p e a k i ng s c h o l a rs t h is a m a j or d r a w b a c k. It w as m a i n ly to o v e r c ome t h is l a n g u a ge difficulty t h at p u r e ly i d e o g r a p h ic s y m b o ls such as t he T a r ot a nd Z o d i ac we re a t t a c h ed to t he P a t h s. T he t h e o ry of t h is w as s o u n d, b ut t he p r a c t i ce p r o v ed w e a k, since so few a g r e ed wh i ch c a rd f i t t ed w h e r e. It is t h e o r e t i c a l ly pos s ible to a s soc i a te t he e n t i re p a th s t r u c t u re wi th t he E n g l i sh l a n g u a g e. Ot h e rwi se it m i g ht 13 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 13-13 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:41:06 PM If we t a ke a ny two S e p h i r o t ic C o n c e p ts a nd b r i ng t h em i n to c o n t a ct wi th e a ch o t h er t h r o u gh our s e lve s, t h e re will be a r e a c t i ve r e sult in o ur cons c iousne s s, or e x p e r i e n c e, wh i ch will e x p r e ss o ur own e v a l u a t i on of s u ch a m e e t i n g. S u p p o se we took G e b u r ah a nd C h e s e d, S e v e r i ty a nd Me r cy, a nd he ld t h em in o ur cons c iousne ss t o g e t h er or a l t e r n a t e l y. M a ny r e s u l ts arise i m m e d i a t e l y. We t h i nk of b a l a n c e, of r e s t r a i n t, of c ommo n s e n s e, r e w a rd a nd p u n i s h m e n t, j u d g e m e n t, c o n t r o l, a nd a whole c h a in of a s soc i a t ions. I n s t e ad of m e a n d e r i ng endl e s s ly a l o ng t h e se l ine s, we b r i ng o u r s e l v es firmly b a ck to t he G e b u r a h - C h e s ed P a t h, a nd r e a l i se t h at in b e i ng cons c ious of t h is as a whol e, we inc lude e v e ry single pos s ible c o n n e c t i on t h r o u g h o ut cons c iousne ss itself. We a re u s i ng o ne S e p h i r o t ic c o m b i n a t i on as a Ma s t e r - S ymb ol to c o n t a ct a nd c o n t a in all t h at a p p e r t a i ns t h e r e t o. T he o n ly r e a s on t h at 22 P a t hs we re a l l o t t ed to t he T r ee w as t h at t he H e b r ew A l p h a b et h ad t h at n u m b er of l e t t e r s. Differing Schools a t t r i b u te t he l e t t e rs in v a r i o us w a y s, a nd all c l a im to get r e s u l t s. A ny l e t t e r - a s soc i a t ion will b r i ng s ome k i nd of r e s u l t s, b ut o n ly to t h o se a c c e p t i ng i t. A s e r ious s n ag to the H e b r ew a t t r i b u t i o ns for W e s t e rn oc cul t i s ts is t h at it o n ly c o m m u n i c a t es in H e b r e w. To n on H e b r ew s p e a k i ng s c h o l a rs t h is a m a j or d r a w b a c k. It w as m a i n ly to o v e r c ome t h is l a n g u a ge difficulty t h at p u r e ly i d e o g r a p h ic s y m b o ls such as t he T a r ot a nd Z o d i ac we re a t t a c h ed to t he P a t h s. T he t h e o ry of t h is w as s o u n d, b ut t he p r a c t i ce p r o v ed w e a k, since so few a g r e ed wh i ch c a rd f i t t ed w h e r e. It is t h e o r e t i c a l ly pos s ible to a s soc i a te t he e n t i re p a th s t r u c t u re wi th t he E n g l i sh l a n g u a g e. Ot h e rwi se it m i g ht 13 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 13-13 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:41:22 PM n g. S u p p o se we took G e b u r ah a nd C h e s e d, S e v e r i ty a nd Me r cy, a nd he ld t h em in o ur cons c iousne ss t o g e t h er or a l t e r n a t e l y. M a ny r e s u l ts arise i m m e d i a t e l y. We t h i nk of b a l a n c e, of r e s t r a i n t, of c ommo n s e n s e, r e w a rd a nd p u n i s h m e n t, j u d g e m e n t, c o n t r o l, a nd a whole c h a in of a s soc i a t ions. I n s t e ad of m e a n d e r i ng endl e s s ly a l o ng t h e se l ine s, we b r i ng o u r s e l v es firmly b a ck to t he G e b u r a h - C h e s ed P a t h, a nd r e a l i se t h at in b e i ng cons c ious of t h is as a whol e, we inc lude e v e ry single pos s ible c o n n e c t i on t h r o u g h o ut cons c iousne ss itself. We a re u s i ng o ne S e p h i r o t ic c o m b i n a t i on as a Ma s t e r - S ymb ol to c o n t a ct a nd c o n t a in all t h at a p p e r t a i ns t h e r e t o. T he o n ly r e a s on t h at 22 P a t hs we re a l l o t t ed to t he T r ee w as t h at t he H e b r ew A l p h a b et h ad t h at n u m b er of l e t t e r s. Differing Schools a t t r i b u te t he l e t t e rs in v a r i o us w a y s, a nd all c l a im to get r e s u l t s. A ny l e t t e r - a s soc i a t ion will b r i ng s ome k i nd of r e s u l t s, b ut o n ly to t h o se a c c e p t i ng i t. A s e r ious s n ag to the H e b r ew a t t r i b u t i o ns for W e s t e rn oc cul t i s ts is t h at it o n ly c o m m u n i c a t es in H e b r e w. To n on H e b r ew s p e a k i ng s c h o l a rs t h is a m a j or d r a w b a c k. It w as m a i n ly to o v e r c ome t h is l a n g u a ge difficulty t h at p u r e ly i d e o g r a p h ic s y m b o ls such as t he T a r ot a nd Z o d i ac we re a t t a c h ed to t he P a t h s. T he t h e o ry of t h is w as s o u n d, b ut t he p r a c t i ce p r o v ed w e a k, since so few a g r e ed wh i ch c a rd f i t t ed w h e r e. It is t h e o r e t i c a l ly pos s ible to a s soc i a te t he e n t i re p a th s t r u c t u re wi th t he E n g l i sh l a n g u a g e. Ot h e rwi se it m i g ht 13 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 13-13 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:41:24 PM n g. S u p p o se we took G e b u r ah a nd C h e s e d, S e v e r i ty a nd Me r cy, a nd he ld t h em in o ur cons c iousne ss t o g e t h er or a l t e r n a t e l y. M a ny r e s u l ts arise i m m e d i a t e l y. We t h i nk of b a l a n c e, of r e s t r a i n t, of c ommo n s e n s e, r e w a rd a nd p u n i s h m e n t, j u d g e m e n t, c o n t r o l, a nd a whole c h a in of a s soc i a t ions. I n s t e ad of m e a n d e r i ng endl e s s ly a l o ng t h e se l ine s, we b r i ng o u r s e l v es firmly b a ck to t he G e b u r a h - C h e s ed P a t h, a nd r e a l i se t h at in b e i ng cons c ious of t h is as a whol e, we inc lude e v e ry single pos s ible c o n n e c t i on t h r o u g h o ut cons c iousne ss itself. We a re u s i ng o ne S e p h i r o t ic c o m b i n a t i on as a Ma s t e r - S ymb ol to c o n t a ct a nd c o n t a in all t h at a p p e r t a i ns t h e r e t o. T he o n ly r e a s on t h at 22 P a t hs we re a l l o t t ed to t he T r ee w as t h at t he H e b r ew A l p h a b et h ad t h at n u m b er of l e t t e r s. Differing Schools a t t r i b u te t he l e t t e rs in v a r i o us w a y s, a nd all c l a im to get r e s u l t s. A ny l e t t e r - a s soc i a t ion will b r i ng s ome k i nd of r e s u l t s, b ut o n ly to t h o se a c c e p t i ng i t. A s e r ious s n ag to the H e b r ew a t t r i b u t i o ns for W e s t e rn oc cul t i s ts is t h at it o n ly c o m m u n i c a t es in H e b r e w. To n on H e b r ew s p e a k i ng s c h o l a rs t h is a m a j or d r a w b a c k. It w as m a i n ly to o v e r c ome t h is l a n g u a ge difficulty t h at p u r e ly i d e o g r a p h ic s y m b o ls such as t he T a r ot a nd Z o d i ac we re a t t a c h ed to t he P a t h s. T he t h e o ry of t h is w as s o u n d, b ut t he p r a c t i ce p r o v ed w e a k, since so few a g r e ed wh i ch c a rd f i t t ed w h e r e. It is t h e o r e t i c a l ly pos s ible to a s soc i a te t he e n t i re p a th s t r u c t u re wi th t he E n g l i sh l a n g u a g e. Ot h e rwi se it m i g ht 13 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 13-13 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:41:42 PM If we t a ke a ny two S e p h i r o t ic C o n c e p ts a nd b r i ng t h em i n to c o n t a ct wi th e a ch o t h er t h r o u gh our s e lve s, t h e re will be a r e a c t i ve r e sult in o ur cons c iousne s s, or e x p e r i e n c e, wh i ch will e x p r e ss o ur own e v a l u a t i on of s u ch a m e e t i n ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 14-14 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:42:37 PM h e re is m o re to t he T r ee t h an a t h i n k i n g - p a t t e rn It is f i r st a nd foremost a L i v i n g - P a t t e r n. If we we re a b le to a r r a n ge o ur l ive s, t h o u g h t s, a nd feelings a c c o r d i ng to i ts d e s i g n, we s h o u ld u n d o u b t e d ly be t he b e t t er for so d o i n g. To e v en c omme n ce t h is proc e s s, it is e s s ent i al to e x p l o re t he T r ee itself a nd r e a l i se i ts possibilities. G r a n t e d, t h is h as b e en d o ne m a ny t imes be for e, t h o u gh u s u a l ly in a p e r f u n c t o ry w a y. T h is t i me it is i n t e n d ed to i n v e s t i g a te t he T r ee carefully, s t ep by s t e p, in an u p w a rd di r e c t ion from o ur o r d i n a ry h u m an world u n t il we get to t he t o p. Us u a l ly t he T r ee is de s c r ibed from t op to b o t t om in t he o r d er of t he S e p h i r o t h. Since we a re h u m an m o r t a l s, we s h a ll p r o b a b ly l e a rn m o re by a s c e n d i ng t he T r ee as if we w e re c l imb i ng from E a r th to H e a v e n. We h a ve a l r e a dy fallen to E a r t h, so let us p i ck our s e lves up a nd s t a rt c l imb i ng b a ck to p a r a d i s e—if we c an ! 14 ========== Ladder of Lights - William Gordon Gray - Your Highlight on page 14-14 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:42:44 PM cheme, a nd t he e x t e nt of t h is is i n c a l c u l a b l e. T h e re is m o re to t he T r ee t h an a t h i n k i n g - p a t t e rn It is f i r st a nd foremost a L i v i n g - P a t t e r n ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 141 | Location 2151-2158 | Added on Thursday, March 29, 2018 8:22:11 PM We are far more packed with neural receptors for smell than for color vision or for taste, with the physical capability to sort through ten thousand scents at once. But few come to the surface. Few make it so far that you could even comment on their presence, could even know that they are there. Eight molecules are enough to send an impulse to your brain and alter your hormones, but it will take at least forty for you to take note. Without our permission, molecules snagged on our olfactory nerves can change the way we breathe, start and end fights, induce miscarriages, and cause our stomachs to rumble. The smell of a forest, its leaves shedding chemical ingredients into the air, pharmacologically soothes and cures ulcers. But we are still somewhat blind in the nose. A dog registers certain odors ten to the sixth power more faint than what a human is able to detect. Of the ten thousand scents the human brain reads, most of us can speak to only forty of them, identifying them correctly as strawberries or as motor oil. ========== The Animal Dialogues (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 164 | Location 2501-2502 | Added on Sunday, April 1, 2018 12:38:44 AM Tradition falls prey to constant change, and creativity becomes so revered that the past is a relic, only to be admired. ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1900-1902 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 12:50:08 PM Wilfred Thesiger lived among the Marsh Arabs of the south during the 1930s and ’40s, he found himself in an isolated world governed entirely by water.7 Anyone wanting to go anywhere had to step from their hut into a reed boat, even when just visiting a neighbor, let alone a nearby village. ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 130 | Location 1980-1981 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 1:00:28 PM The merchants in this trade formed a small group, ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 136 | Location 2081-2083 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 8:02:02 PM Alan Villiers spent a year just before World War II on an Indian Ocean boom, a large variant of the dhow, which he boarded at Aden. Villiers lived among the crew, sleeping on the captain’s bench on the quarterdeck, observing a trading voyage whose rhythm was unchanged for many centuries.21 ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 239 | Location 3663-3667 | Added on Tuesday, May 1, 2018 9:19:22 PM GIVEN ITS MARITIME geography, the Northwest Coast was an inward-looking world, endowed with much abundance, yet dark and restless, where life was always changing, just as mythic beings transformed themselves into animals and humans. There were no social imperatives to sail away across the horizon. For all the factionalism and suspicion, there was plenty of food and space for new settlements. Only rarely did larger canoes venture into the open Pacific, and then only when fishing or hunting whales. A Spanish ship once sighted a large dugout more than 40 miles (64 kilometers) off Vancouver Island, but such excursions were rare on an ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 239 | Location 3663-3667 | Added on Tuesday, May 1, 2018 9:19:25 PM GIVEN ITS MARITIME geography, the Northwest Coast was an inward-looking world, endowed with much abundance, yet dark and restless, where life was always changing, just as mythic beings transformed themselves into animals and humans. There were no social imperatives to sail away across the horizon. For all the factionalism and suspicion, there was plenty of food and space for new settlements. Only rarely did larger canoes venture into the open Pacific, and then only when fishing or hunting whales. A Spanish ship once sighted a large dugout more than 40 miles (64 kilometers) off Vancouver Island, but such excursions were rare on an ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 239 | Location 3663-3665 | Added on Tuesday, May 1, 2018 9:19:32 PM GIVEN ITS MARITIME geography, the Northwest Coast was an inward-looking world, endowed with much abundance, yet dark and restless, where life was always changing, just as mythic beings transformed themselves into animals and humans. There were no social imperatives to sail away across the horizon. For all the factionalism and suspicion, there was plenty of food and space for new settlements. ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 249 | Location 3805-3806 | Added on Wednesday, May 2, 2018 4:27:45 AM waters that were the source of light, ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 250 | Location 3821-3825 | Added on Wednesday, May 2, 2018 9:36:53 PM Conch trumpets are part of humanity’s musical history.4 The Greek fish-tailed sea god Triton was said to control the waves by blowing his conch trumpet. An ancient Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God), describes how Lord Krishna and the prince Arjuna blew conch shell horns as they rode into battle seated in a giant chariot pulled by white horses. The U.S. Coast Guard even lists conch horns as a legitimate sound-making device in its official Navigation Rules. ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 264 | Location 4044-4045 | Added on Thursday, May 3, 2018 7:42:08 PM The Italians of the day even had a word for such coasting: ciosteggiore, to hug the shore or to go slowly. ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 275 | Location 4213-4217 | Added on Saturday, May 5, 2018 9:53:11 PM These days, in a world of container ships and supertankers, official sailing directions are much shortened and full of references to radar targets and harbor regulations. The authors now pay little attention to smaller anchorages and ports, for cruising sailors now have their own guides. It is as if the sea has become remote from us again, which is most apparent when you cross the Atlantic on an ocean liner or a cruise ship. The increasingly elephantine vessels of today seem designed to distract their passengers from the waters that surround them on every side. ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 279 | Location 4272-4274 | Added on Saturday, May 5, 2018 9:58:04 PM humans and the ocean for general audiences. John Mack’s The Sea: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011) is a notable exception and contains an excellent bibliography. Mack is an anthropologist and art historian with a global perspective—important ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 280 | Location 4285-4285 | Added on Saturday, May 5, 2018 9:59:08 PM Daniel Defoe, The Storm ========== The Plains (Gerald Murnane) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 275-276 | Added on Sunday, May 6, 2018 8:24:40 PM He sensed sometimes the lingering persistence of forces that had failed—of a history that had almost come into being. He found himself looking into corners for the favourite pieces of the unborn children of marriages that were never made. ========== Under the Jaguar Sun (Italo Calvino) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 298-298 | Added on Monday, May 14, 2018 8:49:10 PM stairs, had chosen not to follow me ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 326-330 | Added on Sunday, May 20, 2018 7:55:20 PM The apprehension I feel today is born of cautious experience of the sea and its pitiless moods, not of ignorance. Herein lies, I think, one reason why ancient seafarers could make the voyages they did. To venture into the unknown was a logical extension of inherited skills that were already familiar. It truly was no big deal, but to us the distances seem enormous and our instruments make the journeys seem daunting. But mentally we live much more remotely from the ocean and do not have the social milieu in which voyaging in search of new land, new opportunities, is deeply ingrained in everyone’s daily lives. ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 330-333 | Added on Sunday, May 20, 2018 7:55:35 PM Also ingrained in the minds of ancient voyagers was the inevitability of casualties, of canoes that never returned, a tough fatalism about foundering or shipwreck that survives among many European and American fisherfolk in modern times. Decoding every ocean was a matter of long experience and no illusions, careful navigation and close familiarity with deep-water seascapes. ========== Beyond the Blue Horizon (Brian Fagan) - Your Highlight on page 24 | Location 365-369 | Added on Sunday, May 20, 2018 8:00:35 PM Industrialization, the explosive growth of cities, the advent of air travel, and the end of the days of sail have changed our vision of the oceans profoundly. Today, the sea is an impersonal presence in our lives, a place we go on holiday, live alongside, or explore aboard large cruise ships or ferries. Outside territorial waters, the oceans are open to everyone, their boundaries set, even if their depths are still little known. In earlier times, intricate cultural attitudes shaped both supernatural beliefs about the sea and the ways in which people deciphered them. ========== My Antonia (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2209-2213 | Added on Sunday, May 27, 2018 8:42:59 PM itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: “This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.” It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer. ========== My Antonia (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2221-2221 | Added on Sunday, May 27, 2018 8:44:57 PM In the winter bleakness a hunger for colour came over people, like the Laplander’s craving for fats and sugar. ========== The Plains (Gerald Murnane) - Your Highlight on page 82 | Location 1251-1256 | Added on Tuesday, May 29, 2018 10:07:32 PM the apparent similarities in structure between their ingenious toys and the human eye had led them into an absurd error. They supposed that their tinted papers showed something of what a man saw apart from himself—something they called the visible world. But they had never considered where that world must lie. They fondled their scraps of paper and admired the stains and blotches seemingly fixed there. But did they know that all the while the great tide of daylight was ebbing away from all they looked at and pouring through the holes in their faces into a profound darkness? If the visible world was anywhere, it was somewhere in that darkness—an island lapped by the boundless ocean of the invisible. ========== The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession (Mark Obmascik) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2121-2121 | Added on Tuesday, June 5, 2018 10:09:56 PM Some birders called it the Tamaulipas ========== Reincarnation and the Law of Karma / A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect (William Walker Atkinson) - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 476-478 | Added on Friday, June 8, 2018 9:18:10 PM St. Augustine, in his "Confessions," makes use of these remarkable words: "Did I not live in another body before entering my mother's womb?" Which expression is all the more remarkable because Augustine opposed Origen in many points of doctrine, and because it was written as late as A. D. 415 ========== Reincarnation and the Law of Karma / A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect (William Walker Atkinson) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 507-511 | Added on Friday, June 8, 2018 9:21:48 PM Nowhere on this planet is there to be found such an adherence to the idea of "soul" life—the thinking Hindu always regarding himself as a soul occupying a body, rather than as a body "having a soul," as so many of the Western people seem to regard themselves. And, to the Hindus, the present life is truly regarded as but one step on the stairway of life, and not as the only material life preceding an eternity of spiritual existence. To the Hindu mind, Eternity is here with us Now—we are in eternity as much this moment as we ever shall be—and the present life is but one of a number of fleeting moments in the eternal life. ========== One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 54-57 | Added on Saturday, June 9, 2018 9:21:07 PM When getting to know a bird—by learning where it lives, what it eats, how it forages, where and how it nests, what it fears, and in general what it likes and dislikes—we are entering another world. Each animal gives us a new view, a new experience, that involves stepping out of our own world into another, and it is always an adventure. ========== One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 717-718 | Added on Sunday, June 10, 2018 7:47:19 PM Owls are almost invisible to us, and their presence is easy to miss, except when they happen to be vocal. ========== One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1162-1165 | Added on Monday, June 11, 2018 9:13:21 PM BLUE JAYS’ INTELLIGENCE AND ABILITY TO TALK HAVE LONG been of interest. Mark Twain broached the topic about a century and a half ago in his famous short story “What Stumped the Blue Jays.” The first sentence is assertive and authoritative: “Animals talk to each other, of course, there can be no question about that; but I suppose there are very few people who can understand them.” ========== One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 140 | Location 2041-2043 | Added on Thursday, June 14, 2018 8:22:24 PM been waived in the face of communal danger. The red-winged blackbirds’ behavior illustrates what behavioral ecologists have come to call the “dear enemy” phenomenon, in which territorial residents display less aggression toward familiar neighbors than toward strangers. ========== Reincarnation and the Law of Karma / A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect (William Walker Atkinson) - Your Highlight on page 125 | Location 1846-1854 | Added on Sunday, June 17, 2018 9:08:12 PM To it Karma is but one phase of the great LAW operating in all planes and forms of Life and the Universe. To it the idea that "THE UNIVERSE IS GOVERNED BY LAW" is an axiom. And while to it ULTIMATE JUSTICE is also axiomic, it sees not in the operation of penalties and reward—merits and demerits—the proof of that Ultimate Justice; it looks for it and finds it in the conception and realizing that ALL WORKS FOR GOOD—that Everything is tending upward—that everything is justified and just, because the END is ABSOLUTE GOOD, and that every tiny working of the great cosmic machinery is turning in the right direction and to that end. Consequently, each of us is just where he should be at the present time—and our condition is exactly the very best to bring us to that Divine Consummation and End. And to such thinkers, indeed, there is no Devil but Fear and Unfaith, and all other devils are illusions, whether they be called Beelzebub, Mortal-Mind, or Karma, if they produce Fear and Unfaith in the All-Good. And such thinkers feel that the way to live according to the Higher Light, and without fear of a Malevolent Karma, is to feel one's relationship with the Universal Good, and then ========== Reincarnation and the Law of Karma / A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect (William Walker Atkinson) - Your Highlight on page 125 | Location 1846-1854 | Added on Sunday, June 17, 2018 9:08:16 PM To it Karma is but one phase of the great LAW operating in all planes and forms of Life and the Universe. To it the idea that "THE UNIVERSE IS GOVERNED BY LAW" is an axiom. And while to it ULTIMATE JUSTICE is also axiomic, it sees not in the operation of penalties and reward—merits and demerits—the proof of that Ultimate Justice; it looks for it and finds it in the conception and realizing that ALL WORKS FOR GOOD—that Everything is tending upward—that everything is justified and just, because the END is ABSOLUTE GOOD, and that every tiny working of the great cosmic machinery is turning in the right direction and to that end. Consequently, each of us is just where he should be at the present time—and our condition is exactly the very best to bring us to that Divine Consummation and End. And to such thinkers, indeed, there is no Devil but Fear and Unfaith, and all other devils are illusions, whether they be called Beelzebub, Mortal-Mind, or Karma, if they produce Fear and Unfaith in the All-Good. And such thinkers feel that the way to live according to the Higher Light, and without fear of a Malevolent Karma, is to feel one's relationship with the Universal Good, and then ========== Reincarnation and the Law of Karma / A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect (William Walker Atkinson) - Your Highlight on page 125 | Location 1846-1857 | Added on Sunday, June 17, 2018 9:08:22 PM To it Karma is but one phase of the great LAW operating in all planes and forms of Life and the Universe. To it the idea that "THE UNIVERSE IS GOVERNED BY LAW" is an axiom. And while to it ULTIMATE JUSTICE is also axiomic, it sees not in the operation of penalties and reward—merits and demerits—the proof of that Ultimate Justice; it looks for it and finds it in the conception and realizing that ALL WORKS FOR GOOD—that Everything is tending upward—that everything is justified and just, because the END is ABSOLUTE GOOD, and that every tiny working of the great cosmic machinery is turning in the right direction and to that end. Consequently, each of us is just where he should be at the present time—and our condition is exactly the very best to bring us to that Divine Consummation and End. And to such thinkers, indeed, there is no Devil but Fear and Unfaith, and all other devils are illusions, whether they be called Beelzebub, Mortal-Mind, or Karma, if they produce Fear and Unfaith in the All-Good. And such thinkers feel that the way to live according to the Higher Light, and without fear of a Malevolent Karma, is to feel one's relationship with the Universal Good, and then to "Live One Day at a time—Doing the Best you Know How—and Be Kind"—knowing that in the All-Good you live and move and have your being, and that outside of that All-Good you cannot stray, for there is no outside—knowing that THAT which brought you Here will be with you There—that Death is but a phase of Life—and above all that THERE IS NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF—and that ALL IS WELL with God; with the Universe; and with YOU! ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 554-557 | Added on Sunday, July 8, 2018 8:34:47 PM The two circled side by side, wing-tip to wing-tip. Occasionally, they dove and turned in formation, then ascended in circles again. Higher and higher they went, thousands of feet up. I followed them through my binoculars for as long as I could until they faded into a hole in the sky among billowing, cushiony clouds, still dancing side by side. This dance moves me more than any human dance performance ever could. This one has been performed for millions of years and will continue for a long time to come. ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 41 | Location 616-616 | Added on Sunday, July 8, 2018 8:41:28 PM crossed the field to my blind. Thick black clouds were ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1275-1280 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2018 8:33:57 PM an important aspect of the learning process is simply gaining exposure to what is important. Exposure determines what will, as opposed to what could be, learned. Perhaps the largest part of our educational process, and perhaps also the ravens’, involves mechanisms for gaining exposure to appropriate stimuli. These mechanisms may have several components. In ravens, youngsters gain the specific experience appropriate for the species’ lifestyle by following their parents. Moreover, curiosity allows them to take advantage of this experience and enhances encounters with relevant objects or things. ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1286-1287 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2018 8:35:45 PM It is in the interest of the young to stay with their parents as long as possible, but it is in the parents’ best interest for their offspring to become independent. Conflict is inevitable. ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 101 | Location 1547-1548 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2018 9:00:08 PM “A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings.” ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 101 | Location 1547-1548 | Added on Sunday, July 15, 2018 9:00:27 PM Alan Gussow (in A Sense of Place, 1971) says, “A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings.” ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 167 | Location 2557-2562 | Added on Tuesday, July 17, 2018 9:21:37 PM When we were hunters, ravens were revered companions who inspired poets and engendered creation myths. The presence of ravens meant large animals were near. They meant meat and merriment. All that changed when we became settled herders. Ravens soon became a suspected destroyer of lambs, and prophets of doom and gloom. They were relentlessly persecuted because they were associated with death, although not, as it now seems since scientific study, because they caused it. Ravens’ physical power to kill had been overestimated; and the subtleties of their responses, where their real power lies, underestimated. An ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 167 | Location 2557-2561 | Added on Tuesday, July 17, 2018 9:21:59 PM revered companions who inspired poets and engendered creation myths. The presence of ravens meant large animals were near. They meant meat and merriment. All that changed when we became settled herders. Ravens soon became a suspected destroyer of lambs, and prophets of doom and gloom. They were relentlessly persecuted because they were associated with death, although not, as it now seems since scientific study, because they caused it. Ravens’ physical power to kill had been overestimated; and the subtleties of their responses, where their real power lies, underestimated. ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 172 | Location 2630-2632 | Added on Tuesday, July 17, 2018 9:29:07 PM As is usual in evolution, almost every strategy has a counter-strategy aimed at neutralizing it, and so on in a continuing tit-for-tat game that continues until a mutual balance is reached in a messy “real world,” or continuing until one of the contestants becomes extinct. ========== Of Human Bondage (Diversion Classics) (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2131-2131 | Added on Sunday, August 5, 2018 10:09:38 PM they are the same thing), would not allow him ========== Of Human Bondage (Diversion Classics) (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 244 | Location 3734-3735 | Added on Wednesday, August 8, 2018 10:44:20 PM bought by the Luxembourg, and at twenty-five looked forward to a great career; but his talent was due to youth rather than to personality, and for twenty years he ========== Of Human Bondage (Diversion Classics) (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 552 | Location 8452-8454 | Added on Monday, August 13, 2018 10:37:44 PM the mystical writers of Spain, of Teresa de Avila, San Juan de la Cruz, Fray Diego de León; in all of them was that passion for the unseen which Philip felt in the picture of El Greco: they seemed to have the power to touch the incorporeal and see the invisible. They were Spaniards of their age, in whom ========== Of Human Bondage (Diversion Classics) (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 553 | Location 8472-8485 | Added on Monday, August 13, 2018 10:43:32 PM But here he seemed to divine something new. He had been coming to it, all hesitating, for some time, but only now was conscious of the fact; he felt himself on the brink of a discovery. He felt vaguely that here was something better than the realism which he had adored; but certainly it was not the bloodless idealism which stepped aside from life in weakness; it was too strong; it was virile; it accepted life in all its vivacity, ugliness and beauty, squalor and heroism; it was realism still; but it was realism carried to some higher pitch, in which facts were transformed by the more vivid light in which they were seen. He seemed to see things more profoundly through the grave eyes of those dead noblemen of Castile; and the gestures of the saints, which at first had seemed wild and distorted, appeared to have some mysterious significance. But he could not tell what that significance was. It was like a message which it was very important for him to receive, but it was given him in an unknown tongue, and he could not understand. He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands. LXXXIX The conversation between Philip and Athelny was broken into by a clatter up the stairs. ========== Of Human Bondage (Diversion Classics) (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 722 | Location 11070-11073 | Added on Wednesday, August 15, 2018 11:17:12 PM He had heard people speak contemptuosly of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it. He knew that the lack made a man petty, mean, grasping; it distorted his character and caused him to view the world from a vulgar angle; when you had to consider every penny, money became of grotesque importance: you needed a competency to rate it at its proper value. ========== Of Human Bondage (Diversion Classics) (W. Somerset Maugham) - Your Highlight on page 723 | Location 11079-11081 | Added on Wednesday, August 15, 2018 11:18:14 PM Philip was no longer interested in art; it seemed to him that he was able to enjoy beauty with greater force than when he was a boy; but art appeared to him unimportant. He was occupied with the forming of a pattern out of the manifold chaos of life, and the materials with which he worked seemed to make preoccupation with pigments and words very trivial. ========== In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Peter Matthiessen) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 296-297 | Added on Friday, August 17, 2018 11:26:24 PM Joe Flying By pointed to the highest ========== In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Peter Matthiessen) - Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 296-297 | Added on Saturday, August 18, 2018 1:16:32 PM Joe Flying By pointed to the highest ========== In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Peter Matthiessen) - Your Bookmark on page 4 | Location 60 | Added on Saturday, August 18, 2018 9:58:26 PM ========== In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Peter Matthiessen) - Your Highlight on page 19 | Location 283-286 | Added on Saturday, August 18, 2018 10:11:09 PM I headed south on long straight roads of the Great Plains, past glittering reed ponds of the prairie sloughs and over the soft rolling hills and flowing grasslands of the buffalo peoples. Widgeon and teal rose from the reeds, and to the west, a cloud-colored flight of pelicans turned bone-white, catching the sun, as the wings banked in widening far circles; the huge birds sailed westward into infinities of summer blue. ========== In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Peter Matthiessen) - Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 604-605 | Added on Sunday, August 19, 2018 10:16:47 PM Fort Laramie Treaty was not affected, it continued to rankle Congress not only as an impediment to Manifest Destiny but as the only recognition of unconditional defeat ever signed by the U.S. government. ========== In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Peter Matthiessen) - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 954-957 | Added on Sunday, August 19, 2018 10:51:35 PM According to the dedication of Mount Rushmore by President Coolidge, in 1927, “The union of these four presidents carved on the face of the everlasting hills of South Dakota will contribute a distinctly national monument. It will be decidedly American in its conception, in its magnitude, in its meaning, and altogether worthy of our country.” The Indians agree, in profound bitterness and disdain. ========== In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Peter Matthiessen) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 970-971 | Added on Sunday, August 19, 2018 10:53:58 PM wishes of the white man’s church and state. According to widespread Indian custom, those who oppose a certain course of action register disapproval of it by staying away, ========== O Pioneers! (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 555-557 | Added on Monday, August 20, 2018 9:57:14 PM society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted ========== O Pioneers! (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1437-1438 | Added on Tuesday, August 21, 2018 10:46:11 PM There was a sharp crack from the gun, and five of the birds fell to the ground. Emil and ========== O Pioneers! (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1437-1438 | Added on Tuesday, August 21, 2018 10:52:51 PM There was a sharp crack from the gun, and five of the birds fell to the ground. Emil and ========== O Pioneers! (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 122 | Location 1862-1862 | Added on Wednesday, August 22, 2018 9:42:04 PM you go away, you will not come back. Something ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 375-376 | Added on Thursday, August 23, 2018 10:19:00 PM have cherished hopes for her, except that he ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 381-384 | Added on Thursday, August 23, 2018 10:20:03 PM It was his pupil's power of application, her rugged will, that interested him. He had lived for so long among people whose sole ambition was to get something for nothing that he had learned not to look for seriousness in anything. Now that he by chance encountered it, it recalled standards, ambitions, a society long forgot. ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 452-453 | Added on Thursday, August 23, 2018 10:28:15 PM want to hurt Dr. Archie's feelings. She not only disliked Mrs. Archie, she was a little afraid ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1516-1519 | Added on Saturday, August 25, 2018 10:28:32 PM mother–of–the–family handbag. Ray Kennedy always insisted that Mrs. Kronborg was "a fine–looking lady," but this was not the common opinion in Moonstone. Ray had lived long enough among the Mexicans to dislike fussiness, to feel that there was something more attractive in ease of manner than in absentminded concern about hairpins and dabs of lace. ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 103 | Location 1575-1577 | Added on Saturday, August 25, 2018 10:34:28 PM When you sit in the sun and let your heels hang out of a doorway that drops a thousand feet, ideas come to you. You begin to feel what the human race has been up against from the beginning. There's something mighty elevating about those old habitations. You feel like it's up to you to do your best, on account of those fellows having it so hard. You feel like you owed them something." ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 2852-2855 | Added on Sunday, August 26, 2018 10:48:41 PM second person in her and not in each other? Thea frowned up at the dull lamp in the roof of the car. What if one's second self could somehow speak to all these second selves? What if one could bring them out, as whiskey did Spanish Johnny's? How deep they lay, these second persons, and how little one knew about them, except to guard them fiercely. It was to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden things in people responded. ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 252 | Location 3850-3853 | Added on Monday, August 27, 2018 11:02:30 PM She had always been a little drudge, hurrying from one task to another—as if it mattered! And now her power to think seemed converted into a power of sustained sensation. She could become a mere receptacle for heat, or become a color, like the bright lizards that darted about on the hot stones outside her door; or she could become a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas. ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 253 | Location 3878-3882 | Added on Monday, August 27, 2018 11:05:39 PM It seemed to Thea that a certain understanding of those old people came up to her out of the rock shelf on which she lay; that certain feelings were transmitted to her, suggestions that were simple, insistent, and monotonous, like the beating of Indian drums. They were not expressible in words, but seemed rather to translate themselves into attitudes of body, into degrees of muscular tension or relaxation; the naked strength of youth, sharp as the sunshafts; the crouching timorousness of age, the sullenness of women who waited for their captors. ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 298 | Location 4558-4558 | Added on Wednesday, August 29, 2018 9:33:51 PM He began pacing from the hearthrug to the window and back again, while she sat down ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 298 | Location 4558-4558 | Added on Wednesday, August 29, 2018 9:38:38 PM He began pacing from the hearthrug to the window and back again, while she sat down ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 326 | Location 4993-4993 | Added on Wednesday, August 29, 2018 10:29:25 PM to do something, and they just kept on ========== Song of the Lark (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 326 | Location 4993-4993 | Added on Wednesday, August 29, 2018 10:29:35 PM to do something, and they just kept on ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 523-525 | Added on Monday, September 3, 2018 10:18:47 PM The Patristic school is notable for its emphasis upon the supremacy of man throughout the universe. Man was conceived to be a separate and divine creation—the crowning achievement of Deity and an exception to the suzerainty of natural law. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 122 | Location 1857-1857 | Added on Saturday, September 8, 2018 9:40:57 PM desert and their location is now known to only ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 122 | Location 1865-1871 | Added on Saturday, September 8, 2018 9:42:56 PM According to legend, the Book of Thoth was kept in a golden box in the inner sanctuary of the temple. There was but one key and this was in the possession of the “Master of the Mysteries,” the highest initiate of the Hermetic Arcanum. He alone knew what was written in the secret book. The Book of Thoth was lost to the ancient world with the decay of the Mysteries, but its faithful initiates carried it sealed in the sacred casket into another land. The book is still in existence and continues to lead the disciples of this age into the presence of the Immortals. No other information can be given to the world concerning it now, but the apostolic succession from the first hierophant initiated by Hermes himself remains unbroken to this day, and those who are peculiarly fitted to serve the Immortals may discover this priceless document if they will search sincerely and tirelessly for ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 122 | Location 1865-1871 | Added on Saturday, September 8, 2018 9:43:03 PM According to legend, the Book of Thoth was kept in a golden box in the inner sanctuary of the temple. There was but one key and this was in the possession of the “Master of the Mysteries,” the highest initiate of the Hermetic Arcanum. He alone knew what was written in the secret book. The Book of Thoth was lost to the ancient world with the decay of the Mysteries, but its faithful initiates carried it sealed in the sacred casket into another land. The book is still in existence and continues to lead the disciples of this age into the presence of the Immortals. No other information can be given to the world concerning it now, but the apostolic succession from the first hierophant initiated by Hermes himself remains unbroken to this day, and those who are peculiarly fitted to serve the Immortals may discover this priceless document if they ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 122 | Location 1865-1871 | Added on Saturday, September 8, 2018 9:43:08 PM According to legend, the Book of Thoth was kept in a golden box in the inner sanctuary of the temple. There was but one key and this was in the possession of the “Master of the Mysteries,” the highest initiate of the Hermetic Arcanum. He alone knew what was written in the secret book. The Book of Thoth was lost to the ancient world with the decay of the Mysteries, but its faithful initiates carried it sealed in the sacred casket into another land. The book is still in existence and continues to lead the disciples of this age into the presence of the Immortals. No other information can be given to the world concerning it now, but the apostolic succession from the first hierophant initiated by Hermes himself remains unbroken to this day, and those who are peculiarly fitted to serve the Immortals may discover this priceless document if they will search sincerely and tirelessly for it. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 151 | Location 2311-2314 | Added on Sunday, September 9, 2018 9:31:08 PM The scientist and the theologian alike gaze upon the sacred structure, wondering what fundamental urge inspired the herculean labor. If they would but think for a moment, they would realize that there is only one urge in the soul of man capable of supplying the required incentive—namely, the desire to know, to understand, and to exchange the narrowness of human mortality for the greater breadth and scope of divine enlightenment. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 2738-2738 | Added on Monday, September 10, 2018 9:59:23 PM the sky and also in the sixty-sixth year. In the ========== Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories (Thomas Mann) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 236-236 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2018 8:49:56 PM But immeasurable unarticulated space weakens our power to measure time as well: the time-sense falters and grows dim. ========== Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories (Thomas Mann) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 259-261 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2018 8:54:17 PM He saw it once more, that landing-place that takes the breath away, that amazing group of incredible structures the Republic set up to meet the awe-struck eye of the approaching seafarer: the airy splendour of the palace and Bridge of Sighs, the columns of lion and saint on the shore, the glory of the projecting flank of the fairy temple, ========== Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories (Thomas Mann) - Your Note on page 17 | Location 261 | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2018 8:54:48 PM the world approached from the sea ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 206 | Location 3147-3151 | Added on Saturday, September 15, 2018 9:12:48 PM Each sign of the zodiac consists of thirty degrees, and as the sun loses about one degree every seventy-two years, it regresses through one entire constellation (or sign) in approximately 2,160 years, and through the entire zodiac in about 25,920 years. (Authorities disagree concerning these figures.) This retrograde motion is called the precession of the equinoxes. This means that in the course of about 25,920 years, which constitute one Great Solar or Platonic Year, each one of the twelve constellations occupies a position at the vernal equinox for nearly 2,160 years, then gives place to the previous sign. ========== The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (Tristan Gooley) - Your Highlight on page 200 | Location 3065-3068 | Added on Sunday, September 16, 2018 9:08:57 PM The American naturalist and bird expert Jon Young puts it beautifully: The birds are practically drawing a map of the immediate landscape for us to use. Here is the water, here are the berries, here are the cold morning-stilled grasshoppers. Young believes that contained within birdsong are clues to an incredible variety of events surrounding ========== The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (Tristan Gooley) - Your Highlight on page 204 | Location 3126-3128 | Added on Sunday, September 16, 2018 9:16:36 PM This is convenient for the outdoors detective, because it means that the preferences of these fine creatures have been well worked out, giving us the opportunity to work backward using the same logic. Butterflies are sensitive to geology, plants, light, aspect, water and temperature. They reveal much about the surrounding area through these sensitivities. ========== The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (Tristan Gooley) - Your Highlight on page 233 | Location 3562-3564 | Added on Monday, September 17, 2018 9:39:44 PM viable restaurant!” We may have free will as individuals, but not as a species. We can shape our own course as individual citizens, but we plod predictable routes as a mass. ========== O Pioneers! (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Willa Cather) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 555-557 | Added on Tuesday, September 18, 2018 5:58:52 AM society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 302 | Location 4627-4628 | Added on Monday, September 24, 2018 8:44:09 PM The initiates of old warned their disciples that an image is not a reality but merely the objectification of a subjective idea. The images of the gods were not designed to be objects of worship but were to be regarded merely as emblems or reminders ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 302 | Location 4627-4629 | Added on Monday, September 24, 2018 8:44:15 PM The initiates of old warned their disciples that an image is not a reality but merely the objectification of a subjective idea. The images of the gods were not designed to be objects of worship but were to be regarded merely as emblems or reminders of invisible powers and principles. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 302 | Location 4627-4629 | Added on Monday, September 24, 2018 8:44:21 PM The initiates of old warned their disciples that an image is not a reality but merely the objectification of a subjective idea. The images of the gods were not designed to be objects of worship but were to be regarded merely as emblems or reminders of invisible powers and principles. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 303 | Location 4644-4646 | Added on Monday, September 24, 2018 8:51:09 PM Just as cells are infinitesimal units in the structure of man, so man is an infinitesimal unit in the structure of the universe. A theology based upon the knowledge and appreciation of these relationships is as profoundly just as it is profoundly true. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 303 | Location 4644-4646 | Added on Monday, September 24, 2018 8:51:53 PM Just as cells are infinitesimal units in the structure of man, so man is an infinitesimal unit in the structure of the universe. A theology based upon the knowledge and appreciation of these relationships is as profoundly just as it is profoundly true. ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 339 | Location 5195-5200 | Added on Monday, September 24, 2018 9:20:46 PM Intelligence is not just super-detailed memory, rapid learning, complex vocal communication, play behavior, or tool use. Intelligence may or may not be related to all of these things, and some kinds of intelligence require them, but they are not what intelligence is. Intelligence is doing the right thing under a novel situation, precisely as this bird had done. Intelligence is understanding the world, and reacting appropriately to it, not just perceiving it. Intelligence is about awareness, and about testing responses in the head rather than the “real” world, where such activity may be time-consuming, harmful, or fatal. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 308 | Location 4712-4716 | Added on Wednesday, September 26, 2018 9:21:13 PM In the same manner, races, nations, tribes, religions, states, communities, and cities were viewed as composite entities, each made up of varying numbers of individual units. Every community has an individuality which is the sum of the individual attitudes of its inhabitants. Every religion is an individual whose body is made up of a hierarchy and vast host of individual worshipers. The organization of any religion represents its physical body, and its individual members the cell life making up this organism. Accordingly, religions, races, and communities—like individuals—pass through Shakespeare’s Seven Ages, for the life of man is a standard by which the perpetuity of all things is estimated. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 327 | Location 5009-5010 | Added on Wednesday, September 26, 2018 9:56:49 PM When the mob governs, man is ruled by ignorance; when the church governs, he is ruled by superstition; and when the state governs, he is ruled by fear. Before men can live together in harmony and understanding, ignorance must be transmuted into wisdom, superstition ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 327 | Location 5009-5011 | Added on Wednesday, September 26, 2018 9:56:54 PM When the mob governs, man is ruled by ignorance; when the church governs, he is ruled by superstition; and when the state governs, he is ruled by fear. Before men can live together in harmony and understanding, ignorance must be transmuted into wisdom, superstition into an illumined faith, and fear into love. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 327 | Location 5011-5012 | Added on Wednesday, September 26, 2018 9:57:13 PM Masonry is a religion seeking to unite God and man by elevating its initiates to that level of consciousness whereon they can behold with clarified vision the workings of the Great Architect of the Universe. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 339 | Location 5194-5197 | Added on Thursday, September 27, 2018 9:03:00 PM There are unnumbered colors which cannot be seen, as well as sounds which cannot be heard, odors which cannot be smelt, flavors which cannot be tasted, and substances which cannot be felt. Man is thus surrounded by a supersensible universe of which he knows nothing because the centers of sense perception within himself have not been developed sufficiently to respond to the subtler rates of vibration of which that universe is composed. ========== The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (Tristan Gooley) - Your Highlight on page 271 | Location 4152-4153 | Added on Monday, October 8, 2018 9:44:22 PM After a supper of boiled fish heads and rice, I learned how the trunks of trees changed near villages. It was similar to the temperate rule—the more open the landscape, the shorter and broader the tree. ========== Good Birders Don't Wear White: 50 Tips From North America's Top Birders (Lisa A. White;Pete Dunne) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 340-341 | Added on Tuesday, October 9, 2018 9:50:45 PM Snow Geese crisscrossed the sky, leaving south Jersey’s Delaware Bay marshes for the rich bounty of inland farm fields. ========== Good Birders Don't Wear White: 50 Tips From North America's Top Birders (Lisa A. White;Pete Dunne) - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 658-658 | Added on Tuesday, October 9, 2018 10:16:27 PM Snow Geese are attracted to a waving white flag. ========== The Invention of Nature (Andrea Wulf) - Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 114-115 | Added on Wednesday, October 10, 2018 11:24:38 PM ‘a Cartesian vortex, carrying away and levelling everything to dull monotony’. ========== Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (Bernd Heinrich) - Your Highlight on page 368 | Location 5638-5643 | Added on Thursday, October 18, 2018 10:56:58 PM Every step we take over uneven ground involves consciousness of where we’ll plant our feet. The longer and more unpredictable the journey, the more consciousness is required to get there in the quickest, most direct way. In the night, when we dream of making a jump, our legs may twitch as do a cat’s. When we dream of climbing a tree and falling, our arm may suddenly move. Our body motions, unless thoroughly trained, emanate from consciousness, from mental representation. Consciousness is a monitoring of motor patterns in this case, which are neurally engraved preferred pathways in the central nervous system. Is not the cat’s leg twitch a function of the same process as ours, or must we invoke vitalism for humans? I think not! ========== Bird Sense (Tim Birkhead) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 206-207 | Added on Friday, October 19, 2018 9:19:17 PM better term, then, is ‘truth for now’ – on the basis of the current evidence ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 96-97 | Added on Friday, October 19, 2018 9:57:04 PM A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 96-97 | Added on Friday, October 19, 2018 9:57:14 PM A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 425-425 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2018 10:24:11 PM into “Ancient,” “Medieval” and “Modern” — ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 436-441 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2018 10:27:49 PM It is not only that the scheme circumscribes the area of history. What is worse, it rigs the stage. The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it — and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets! We select a single bit of ground as the natural center of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all the events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is judged in perspective. But it is in our own West European conceit alone that this phantom “World history,” which a breath of skepticism would dissipate, is acted out. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 457-462 | Added on Sunday, October 21, 2018 10:30:42 PM The most appropriate designation for this current West European scheme of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round us as the presumed center of all world happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history. The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Copernican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico — separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 457-462 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:17:26 PM The most appropriate designation for this current West European scheme of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round us as the presumed center of all world happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history. The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Copernican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico — separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 487-490 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:22:02 PM had an objective point. As to what this objective point is, each thinker, from Schoolman to Present day Socialist, backs his own peculiar discovery. Such a view into the course of things may be both easy and flattering to the patentee, but in fact he has simply taken the spirit of the West, as reflected in his own brain, for the meaning of the world. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 488-490 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:22:07 PM As to what this objective point is, each thinker, from Schoolman to Present day Socialist, backs his own peculiar discovery. Such a view into the course of things may be both easy and flattering to the patentee, but in fact he has simply taken the spirit of the West, as reflected in his own brain, for the meaning of the world. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 513-514 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:25:59 PM “What is important in life is life and not a result of life,” ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 513-514 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:26:05 PM “What is important in life is life and not a result of life,” ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 513-514 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:26:14 PM and purposes were not the same as ours. Goethe’s saying, “What is important in life is life and not a result of life,” ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 513-514 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:26:23 PM Goethe’s saying, “What is important in life is life and not a result of life,” ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 520-522 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:27:35 PM No one has seriously considered the possibility that arts may have an allotted span of life and may be attached as forms of self-expression to particular regions and particular types of mankind, and that therefore the total history of an art may be merely an additive compilation of separate developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name and some details of craft technique. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 564-568 | Added on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:34:21 PM When Plato speaks of humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his premises take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 579-579 | Added on Wednesday, October 24, 2018 7:36:58 PM only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 606-611 | Added on Wednesday, October 24, 2018 11:31:45 PM What the West has said and thought, hitherto, on the problems of space, time, motion, number, will, marriage, property, tragedy, science, has remained narrow and dubious, because men were always looking for the solution of the question. It was never seen that many questioners implies many answers, that any philosophical question is really a veiled desire to get an explicit affirmation of what is implicit in the question itself, that the great questions of any period are fluid beyond all conception, and that therefore it is only by obtaining a group of historically limited solutions and measuring it by utterly impersonal criteria that the final secrets can be reached. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 611-614 | Added on Wednesday, October 24, 2018 11:32:55 PM The real student of mankind treats no standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong. In the face of such grave problems as that of Time or that of Marriage, it is insufficient to appeal to personal experience, or an inner voice, or reason, or the opinion of ancestors or contemporaries. These may say what is true for the questioner himself and for his time, but that is not all. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 60 | Location 913-915 | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2018 1:04:11 AM The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time towards our present ideals, but a single phenomenon of history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which covers a few centuries and can be viewed and, in essentials, calculated from available precedents. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 563 | Location 8626-8629 | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2018 11:20:44 PM would not have one single word changed in this: “The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason (Vernunft) is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding (Verstand) only to make use of the become and the set fast” (to Eckermann). This sentence ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 563 | Location 8626-8629 | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2018 11:20:52 PM would not have one single word changed in this: “The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason (Vernunft) is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding (Verstand) only to make use of the become and the set fast” (to Eckermann). This sentence ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 563 | Location 8626-8629 | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2018 11:20:54 PM would not have one single word changed in this: “The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason (Vernunft) is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding (Verstand) only to make use of the become and the set fast” (to Eckermann). This sentence ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 563 | Location 8626-8629 | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2018 11:20:59 PM would not have one single word changed in this: “The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason (Vernunft) is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding (Verstand) only to make use of the become and the set fast” (to Eckermann). This sentence comprises my entire philosophy. [ ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 563 | Location 8626-8629 | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2018 11:21:03 PM would not have one single word changed in this: “The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason (Vernunft) is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding (Verstand) only to make use of the become and the set fast” (to Eckermann). This sentence comprises my entire philosophy. [ ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1224-1225 | Added on Monday, October 29, 2018 11:43:08 PM on this that what we call “knowledge of ========== The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (Tristan Gooley) - Your Highlight on page 312 | Location 4772-4774 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2018 11:23:53 PM It uses another important sense: proprioception, our ability to sense what each part of our body is up to without seeing it. We use this sense all day, every day; it is one of the most important and one of the least acknowledged of all our senses. Literature is rich with descriptions of sights, scents, tastes and textures, but proprioception usually gets left out. ========== The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (Tristan Gooley) - Your Highlight on page 312 | Location 4771-4774 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2018 11:24:16 PM If you repeat the exercise, but this time with your eyes shut, your brain still knows almost exactly where your finger is—but how? It uses another important sense: proprioception, our ability to sense what each part of our body is up to without seeing it. We use this sense all day, every day; it is one of the most important and one of the least acknowledged of all our senses. Literature is rich with descriptions of sights, scents, tastes and textures, but proprioception usually gets left out. ========== The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (Tristan Gooley) - Your Highlight on page 312 | Location 4776-4776 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2018 11:24:25 PM practical part of understanding this sense. You will notice fewer clues around you and ========== The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (Tristan Gooley) - Your Highlight on page 312 | Location 4776-4777 | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2018 11:24:32 PM You will notice fewer clues around you and more below you when the going is difficult and vice versa. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1634-1636 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 10:41:30 PM our world picture is an actualizing of an infinite space in which things visible appear very nearly as realities of a lower order, limited in the presence of the illimitable. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1634-1636 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 10:41:42 PM our world picture is an actualizing of an infinite space in which things visible appear very nearly as realities of a lower order, limited in the presence of the illimitable. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1636-1639 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 10:42:11 PM The symbol of the West is an idea of which no other Culture gives even a hint, the idea of Function. The function is anything rather than an expansion of, it is complete emancipation from, any preexistent idea of number. With the function, not only the Euclidean geometry (and with it the common human geometry of children and laymen, based on everyday experience) but also the Archimedean arithmetic, ceased to have any value for the really significant mathematic of Western Europe. Henceforward, this consisted solely in abstract analysis. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1897-1898 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:11:00 PM the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative — in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1895-1906 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:11:53 PM Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates that we have in Romano Florentine colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative — in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up the facades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form world of mature Baroque — viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris — has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden Zwinger31 is a sinfonia. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th Century architecture develops into a form world of musical characters. XVII This mathematics of ours was bound in due course to reach the point at which not merely the limits of artificial geometrical form but the limits of the visual itself were felt by theory and by the soul alike as limits indeed, as obstacles to the unreserved expression of inward possibilities — in other words, the point at which the ideal of transcendent extension came into fundamental conflict with the limitations of immediate perception. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1895-1902 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:12:07 PM Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates that we have in Romano Florentine colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative — in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up the facades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form world of mature Baroque — viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris — has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden Zwinger31 is a sinfonia. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th Century architecture develops ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1895-1902 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:12:13 PM Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates that we have in Romano Florentine colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative — in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up the facades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form world of mature Baroque — viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris — has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden Zwinger31 is a sinfonia. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th Century architecture develops ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1895-1906 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:12:20 PM Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates that we have in Romano Florentine colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative — in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up the facades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form world of mature Baroque — viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris — has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden Zwinger31 is a sinfonia. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th Century architecture develops into a form world of musical characters. XVII This mathematics of ours was bound in due course to reach the point at which not merely the limits of artificial geometrical form but the limits of the visual itself were felt by theory and by the soul alike as limits indeed, as obstacles to the unreserved expression of inward possibilities — in other words, the point at which the ideal of transcendent extension came into fundamental conflict with the limitations of immediate perception. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1895-1902 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:12:28 PM Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates that we have in Romano Florentine colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative — in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up the facades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form world of mature Baroque — viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris — has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden Zwinger31 is a sinfonia. Along ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1895-1902 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:12:33 PM Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates that we have in Romano Florentine colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative — in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up the facades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form world of mature Baroque — viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris — has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden Zwinger31 is a sinfonia. Along ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1895-1902 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:12:41 PM Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates that we have in Romano Florentine colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative — in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up the facades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form world of mature Baroque — viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris — has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden Zwinger31 is a sinfonia. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th Century architecture ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1895-1896 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:12:53 PM Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates that we have in Romano Florentine colonnading ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 124 | Location 1895-1903 | Added on Friday, November 2, 2018 11:13:09 PM Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear coordinates that we have in Romano Florentine colonnading and storeying, the “infinitesimal” appears in the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The constructive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative — in mathematical language, the functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up the facades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into a play of light and shade. The light itself, as it is made to play upon the form world of mature Baroque — viz., the period from Bernini (1650) to the Rococo of Dresden, Vienna and Paris — has become an essentially musical element. The Dresden Zwinger31 is a sinfonia. Along with 18th Century mathematics, 18th Century architecture develops into a form world of musical characters. ========== Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency (Lewandowski, Corey R.;Bossie, Dave N.) - Your Highlight on page 224 | Location 3432-3434 | Added on Wednesday, November 7, 2018 8:54:54 PM Corey, Dave, Donald Trump at Iowa Freedom Summit hosted by Citizens United and Congressman Steve King. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 148-150 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 9:35:05 PM In the health-conscious mind-set that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious,” while healthful foods may taste ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 148-150 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 9:35:12 PM In the health-conscious mind-set that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious,” while healthful foods may taste ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 148-150 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 9:35:19 PM In the health-conscious mind-set that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious,” while healthful foods may taste good enough to be advertised as “guilt-free.” ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 371-372 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 10:01:29 PM The psychological effect of these familiar rituals is usually to make the participants feel better about themselves and more ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 371-373 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 10:01:34 PM The psychological effect of these familiar rituals is usually to make the participants feel better about themselves and more securely bound to the community. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 453-459 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 10:09:26 PM According to critical thinkers like Zola and Illich, one of the functions of medical ritual is social control. Medical encounters occur across what is often a profound gap in social status: Despite the last few decades’ surge in immigrant and female doctors, the physician is likely to be an educated and affluent white male, and the interaction requires the patient to exhibit submissive behavior—to undress, for example, and be open to penetration of his or her bodily cavities. These are the same sorts of procedures that are normally undertaken by the criminal justice system, with its compulsive strip searches, and they are not intended to bolster the recipient’s self-esteem. Whether consciously or not, the physician and patient are enacting a ritual of domination and submission, much like the kowtowing required in the presence of a Chinese emperor. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 940-941 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 10:52:11 PM It was the existence of widespread health insurance that turned fitness into a moral imperative. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 948-950 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 10:53:10 PM Never mind that poverty, race, and occupation play a huge role in determining one’s health status, the doctrine of individual responsibility means that the less-than-fit person is a suitable source not only of revulsion but resentment. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 91 | Location 1385-1387 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:35:18 PM We can, or think we can, understand the causes of disease in cellular and chemical terms, so we should be able to avoid it by following the rules laid down by medical science: avoiding tobacco, exercising, undergoing routine medical screening, and eating only foods currently considered healthy. Anyone who fails to do so is inviting an early death. Or to put it another way, every death can now be understood as suicide. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 92 | Location 1404-1405 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:36:48 PM Concern for the poor usually comes tinged with criticism. And contempt. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1508-1510 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:45:18 PM shared with two other family members. Poor whites had always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender reassurance is shrinking. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1508-1510 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:45:28 PM members. Poor whites had always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender reassurance is shrinking. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1508-1510 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:45:36 PM members. Poor whites had always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender reassurance is shrinking. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1517-1519 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:46:36 PM It’s hard to find historical analogies to the current white-collar die-off in the United States. Perhaps the closest is the sudden drop in male life expectancy associated with the fall of communism in the Soviet Union. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 103 | Location 1573-1573 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:51:50 PM To the extent that there is a philosophy here, it is holism, the source of the familiar adjective, “holistic.” ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 103 | Location 1573-1573 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:51:58 PM To the extent that there is a philosophy here, it is holism, the source of the familiar adjective, “holistic.” ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 103 | Location 1573-1576 | Added on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:52:13 PM To the extent that there is a philosophy here, it is holism, the source of the familiar adjective, “holistic.” Everything—mind, body, and spirit, diet and attitude—is connected and must be brought into alignment for maximum effectiveness, whether to achieve “power” and “personal renewal” or just to lose a few pounds. Conflict may be endemic to the human world, with all its jagged inequalities, but it must be abolished within the individual. ========== Natural Causes (Barbara Ehrenreich) - Your Highlight on page 167 | Location 2561-2563 | Added on Friday, November 9, 2018 9:09:05 PM Pre-Reformation Catholics could ensure a blissful postmortem existence by participating in the sacraments or donating large sums to the church, but Protestants and especially Calvinists were assigned to perpetual introspection in an attempt to make their souls acceptable to God. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 200-201 | Added on Friday, November 9, 2018 10:55:20 PM I was broke by Sacramento and had in any event lost interest in her; seeing new country or a new city has always wiped the immediate past clean. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 344-345 | Added on Saturday, November 10, 2018 8:47:26 PM The night was liquid and warm. I threw a handful of green ferns on the fire to smoke away the mosquitoes and the smoke curled and hovered over the fire and the tent and finally sought out the roof of boughs above me. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 376-378 | Added on Saturday, November 10, 2018 8:52:20 PM Though the one clinical psychologist I had been to persuaded me I lived like a child. That was why I didn't need my childhood to assuage or heal present griefs. I was still a child with small chance of being anything else, perhaps. Fine. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 379-380 | Added on Saturday, November 10, 2018 8:54:20 PM watched. Novelty they called it, a victim of change, a new street to walk down in a new city to a new bar or new river with a new bridge to look off and a new author to read late at night in a new room. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 379-380 | Added on Saturday, November 10, 2018 8:54:23 PM watched. Novelty they called it, a victim of change, a new street to walk down in a new city to a new bar or new river with a new bridge to look off and a new author to read late at night in a new room. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 378-380 | Added on Saturday, November 10, 2018 8:54:31 PM Always quitting, schools, jobs, hunting or fishing or walking, as a child gorges on candy or new games. On occasion I even climbed trees when I was sure I wasn't watched. Novelty they called it, a victim of change, a new street to walk down in a new city to a new bar or new river with a new bridge to look off and a new author to read late at night in a new room. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 394-395 | Added on Saturday, November 10, 2018 8:56:40 PM You will cross an ocean or a body of water and find love with a woman who speaks a strange tongue, said a girl who read my horoscope. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 417-419 | Added on Saturday, November 10, 2018 11:40:53 PM wanted to see it but the country would be impenetrable in winter, except by snowmobile, a machine that horrified me and seemed to accelerate the ruin of all places not normally reached. There were no inviolate places, only outposts that were less visited than others. The Arctic was drilled for oil, great pools of waste oil seeping through glaciers. The continent was becoming Europe ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 417-422 | Added on Saturday, November 10, 2018 11:41:18 PM wanted to see it but the country would be impenetrable in winter, except by snowmobile, a machine that horrified me and seemed to accelerate the ruin of all places not normally reached. There were no inviolate places, only outposts that were less visited than others. The Arctic was drilled for oil, great pools of waste oil seeping through glaciers. The continent was becoming Europe in my own lifetime and I felt desperate. The merest smell of profit would lead us to gut any beauty left, there was no sentimentality involved. We had been doing so since we got off the boat and nothing would stop us now. Even our instincts to save were perverse; we made parks which in fact were “nature zoos” crossed by superhighways, and in the future large areas would be surrounded by narrow gauge fence so that the animals wouldn't be harried and stared to death. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 647-648 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2018 12:08:13 AM There was a terrible finality to it, something missed permanently. She would begin seeing her old friend and I was to have been some sort of interim, like sleeping with a gypsy. I didn't care. At nineteen ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 647-648 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2018 12:08:20 AM There was a terrible finality to it, something missed permanently. She would begin seeing her old friend and I was to have been some sort of interim, like sleeping with a gypsy. I didn't care. At nineteen a body is so total. What else is there? ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 681-684 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2018 12:13:43 AM by the time I reached the social security line my energy would be sapped. All before reaching previous job experience, spouse, mother-in-law's maiden name, references. I waited for a time somewhere in the future when in a gratuitous burst of energy I would fill them out by the dozens, get a job, and move to the top. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Note on page 45 | Location 684 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2018 12:14:54 AM i have felt something growing in me for some time. its either cancer or this book. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2117-2121 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2018 11:07:31 PM so that at long last the sharp consciousness of the megalopolitan — be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares, Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis — is subjected to so consistent a pressure of natural law notions that, when scientific and philosophical prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the proposition that this condition of the soul is the soul and the mechanical world picture is the world, the assertion is scarcely challenged. It has been made predominant by logicians like Aristotle and Kant. But Plato and Goethe have rejected it and refuted ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2117-2121 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2018 11:07:48 PM so that at long last the sharp consciousness of the megalopolitan — be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares, Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis — is subjected to so consistent a pressure of natural law notions that, when scientific and philosophical prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the proposition that this condition of the soul is the soul and the mechanical world picture is the world, the assertion is scarcely challenged. It has been made predominant by logicians like Aristotle and Kant. But Plato ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2117-2121 | Added on Sunday, November 11, 2018 11:07:53 PM so that at long last the sharp consciousness of the megalopolitan — be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares, Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis — is subjected to so consistent a pressure of natural law notions that, when scientific and philosophical prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the proposition that this condition of the soul is the soul and the mechanical world picture is the world, the assertion is scarcely challenged. It has been made predominant by logicians like Aristotle and Kant. But Plato and Goethe have rejected it and refuted it. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 69 | Location 1047-1048 | Added on Monday, November 12, 2018 11:57:30 PM study, The Drek Trek: The Westward Surge of Pigshit to the Pacific's Watery Lip. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 81 | Location 1231-1231 | Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 12:17:14 AM “Theme from Picnic” and mused about the tragic life of a wanderer. When I saw the movie ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 86 | Location 1314-1320 | Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 8:55:09 PM still can't listen to Stravinsky's Petrouchka, my sister's favorite record. Before I first left for New York City we would burn a red candle and listen to the record together. And read Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. I was eighteen and she was thirteen. But if you've read all those Zane Grey novels and others I've mentioned at a vulnerable age you simply can't get along in the present. Where's the far field? Neither can you march even as a radical to protect your ancient turf or bring peace to earth. I've never felt solidarity except while making love, or with a tree or animal or while utterly alone on a river or in a swamp or in the woods. I don't propose this as a virtue but as a matter of rude fact. A liberal magazine once used the word “spiv” to describe this state of being. I thought I liked Kropotkin for a while. My ancestors, inasmuch as they were literate, were Populists. There's no romance in being alone. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1518-1520 | Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 11:54:48 PM if you could fold over the country horizontally in the middle you would find that northern rural people mirror their southern counterparts. Poor. Often vicious to outsiders. Contempt for the law. The mainstay for some is alcohol, for the others, that “old time” fundamentalist religion. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 100 | Location 1528-1531 | Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 11:56:45 PM hiatus when energies built in people to whom life was merely a succession of injustices. A false period of light and comparative quietude with the powers in the nation playing golf and collecting billions, Congress collectively picking its nose, oinking out grotesqueries and sloth. The nation continued shitting in its own sandbox and only recently has noticed it. And ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 100 | Location 1528-1531 | Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 11:56:49 PM hiatus when energies built in people to whom life was merely a succession of injustices. A false period of light and comparative quietude with the powers in the nation playing golf and collecting billions, Congress collectively picking its nose, oinking out grotesqueries and sloth. The nation continued shitting in its own sandbox and only recently has noticed it. And ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 100 | Location 1529-1530 | Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 11:57:01 PM injustices. A false period of light and comparative quietude with the powers in the nation playing golf and collecting billions, Congress collectively picking its nose, oinking out grotesqueries and sloth. The nation continued shitting in its own sandbox and only ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 100 | Location 1531-1534 | Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 11:57:11 PM The business of business is business. Sowing wind. Hard to understand how a nation conceived in rapine and expanded in slaughter could last anyway. But there's no sense of Old Testament doom—the doom is contemporary and earned daily. Pull off the face and you see the skull is Naugahyde. Cheyenne autumn. And the holds of ships with millions of slaves mentally rotting toward servitude. With a base this questionable, how can one conceive of a nation at peace? ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 101 | Location 1538-1539 | Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 11:58:34 PM I come from the nineteenth century and a somnolent world with a top on it. I feel destined not to do anything about anything. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 120 | Location 1839-1842 | Added on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 9:06:25 PM I had fashioned myself on one of those young men during my last year of high school adding a large dose of Stephen Dedalus for a bouquet garni. I only saved myself from being a snot and prig by moving on to an absolute absorption with Whitman, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, and then Henry Miller who was like a continuous transfusion, food to avoid melancholy. If you're eighteen or nineteen you read for strength more than for pleasure. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 121 | Location 1845-1846 | Added on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 9:07:13 PM To an outsider from the midlands who is broke the first hot pastrami sandwich at a delicatessen is an unbelievable wonder. Why don't they make this sort of food back home? ========== The Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru (Lewis Spence) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 216-218 | Added on Sunday, November 18, 2018 8:55:39 PM Tlaloc was the god of rain—an important deityfor a country where a droughty season wasnothing less than a national disaster. His namesignifies ' the nourisher/ and from his seat among ========== The Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru (Lewis Spence) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 254-255 | Added on Sunday, November 18, 2018 9:01:04 PM Yacatecutli (guiding lord)was the god of travellers and merchants. ========== The Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru (Lewis Spence) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 254-255 | Added on Sunday, November 18, 2018 9:01:19 PM Yacatecutli (guiding lord)was the god of travellers and merchants. ========== The Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru (Lewis Spence) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 254-257 | Added on Sunday, November 18, 2018 9:01:29 PM Yacatecutli (guiding lord)was the god of travellers and merchants. Indeedthe commercial class among the Aztecs weremore exact concerning his worship than in thatof almost any other of their deities. His symbolwas the staff usually carried by the people of thecountry when on a journey, and this stick wasan object of veneration among travellers, whousually prayed to it as representative of thegod when evening brought their day's march toa close. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 171 | Location 2610-2611 | Added on Sunday, November 18, 2018 9:58:02 PM Strange how you can't say anything to most people without their assuming you mean it didactically as law. ========== Wolf (Jim Harrison) - Your Highlight on page 172 | Location 2634-2635 | Added on Tuesday, November 20, 2018 8:42:47 PM When books were physical events and capable of overwhelming you for weeks; they entered your breath and you adopted their conversational patterns and thoughts as your own. ========== Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Oswald Spengler) - Your Highlight on page 147 | Location 2242-2245 | Added on Tuesday, November 20, 2018 11:03:00 PM “The highest to which man can attain, is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.” The prime phenomenon is that in which the idea of becoming is presented net. To the spiritual eye of Goethe the idea of the prime plant was clearly visible in the form of every individual plant that happened to come up, or even that could possibly come ========== Shikasta (Doris May Lessing(Little Dorrit)) - Your Highlight on page 104 | Location 1594-1598 | Added on Thursday, November 22, 2018 11:33:52 PM Here we must emphasise that most of the inhabitants of Shikasta were not aware that they were living through what would be seen as a hundred-years' war, the century that would bring their planet to almost total destruction. We make a point of this, because it is nearly impossible for people with whole minds - those who have had the good fortune to live (and we must never forget that it is a question of our good fortune) within the full benefits of the substance-of-we-feeling - it is nearly impossible, we stress, to understand the mentation of Shikastans. With the world's cultures being ravaged and destroyed, from end to end, by viciously inappropriate technologies, with wars raging everywhere, ========== Shikasta (Doris May Lessing(Little Dorrit)) - Your Highlight on page 104 | Location 1594-1611 | Added on Thursday, November 22, 2018 11:34:07 PM Here we must emphasise that most of the inhabitants of Shikasta were not aware that they were living through what would be seen as a hundred-years' war, the century that would bring their planet to almost total destruction. We make a point of this, because it is nearly impossible for people with whole minds - those who have had the good fortune to live (and we must never forget that it is a question of our good fortune) within the full benefits of the substance-of-we-feeling - it is nearly impossible, we stress, to understand the mentation of Shikastans. With the world's cultures being ravaged and destroyed, from end to end, by viciously inappropriate technologies, with wars raging everywhere, with whole populations being wiped out, and deliberately, for the benefit of ruling castes, with the wealth of every nation being used almost entirely for war, for preparations for war, propaganda for war, research for war; with the general levels of decency and honesty visibly vanishing, with corruption everywhere - with all this, living in a nightmare of dissolution, was it really possible, it may be asked, for these poor creatures to believe that "on the whole" all was well? The reply is: yes. Particularly, of course, for those already possessed of wealth or comfort - a minority; but even those millions, those billions, the ever-increasing hungry and cold and unbefriended, for these, too, it was possible to live from meal to scant meal, from one moment of warmth to the next. Those who were stirred to "do something about it" were nearly all in the toils of one of the ideologies which were the same in performance, but so different in self-description. These, the active, scurried about like my unfortunate friend Taufiq, making speeches, talking, engaged in interminable processes that involved groups sitting around exchanging information and making statements of good intent, and always in the name of the masses, those desperate, frightened, bemused populations who knew that everything was wrong but believed that somehow, somewhere, things would come right. It is not too much to say that in a country devastated by war, lying in ruins, poisoned, in a landscape blackened and charred under skies low with smoke, a Shikastan was capable of making a shelter out of broken bricks and fragments of metal, cooking himself a rat and drinking water from a puddle that of course tasted of oil and thinking "Well, this isn't too bad after all..." ========== Shikasta (Doris May Lessing(Little Dorrit)) - Your Highlight on page 240 | Location 3673-3677 | Added on Tuesday, November 27, 2018 8:09:49 PM Forced back and back upon herself, himself, bereft of comfort, security, knowing perhaps only hunger and cold; denuded of belief in "country," "religion," "progress" - stripped of certainties, there is no Shikastan who will not let his eyes rest on a patch of earth, perhaps no more than a patch of littered and soured soil between buildings in a slum, and think: Yes, but that will come to life, there is enough power there to tear down this dreadfulness and heal all our ugliness - a couple of seasons, and it would all be alive again... and in war, a soldier watching a tank rear up over a ridge to bear down on him, will see as he dies grass, tree, ========== Shikasta (Doris May Lessing(Little Dorrit)) - Your Highlight on page 240 | Location 3673-3678 | Added on Tuesday, November 27, 2018 8:10:06 PM Forced back and back upon herself, himself, bereft of comfort, security, knowing perhaps only hunger and cold; denuded of belief in "country," "religion," "progress" - stripped of certainties, there is no Shikastan who will not let his eyes rest on a patch of earth, perhaps no more than a patch of littered and soured soil between buildings in a slum, and think: Yes, but that will come to life, there is enough power there to tear down this dreadfulness and heal all our ugliness - a couple of seasons, and it would all be alive again... and in war, a soldier watching a tank rear up over a ridge to bear down on him, will see as he dies grass, tree, a bird swerving past, and know immortality. It is here, precisely here, ========== Shikasta (Doris May Lessing(Little Dorrit)) - Your Highlight on page 242 | Location 3697-3699 | Added on Tuesday, November 27, 2018 11:36:22 PM He thinks, as the loneliness of his situation dizzies him, standing there and whirling among the stars, a species among myriads - as he has only recently come to know - that these thoughts are too grand for him, he needs to put his arms around his woman and to feel her arms around him, but as they turn to each other, there is tension, and fear, for this embrace may breed monsters. ========== The Golden Dawn (Israel Regardie) - Your Highlight on page 68 | Location 1032-1032 | Added on Thursday, November 29, 2018 10:48:11 PM the candidate’s first reception in the Hall of the ========== The Golden Dawn (Israel Regardie) - Your Highlight on page 70 | Location 1072-1072 | Added on Friday, November 30, 2018 7:35:46 PM metals into the purest gold. In his book ========== The Golden Dawn (Israel Regardie) - Your Highlight on page 70 | Location 1072-1077 | Added on Friday, November 30, 2018 7:36:18 PM Centuries of Meditation, Thomas Traherne gives an interesting description of the rapture of the inner personality, its reaction to the world, when it is freed by the mystical experience from all entanglements. He says: “The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and the stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates, transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. ========== Shikasta (Doris May Lessing(Little Dorrit)) - Your Highlight on page 331 | Location 5075-5077 | Added on Monday, December 3, 2018 8:09:15 PM themselves. They are like people in big cities, always careful of their limbs and where they put themselves in case they bump or tread on each other. They are very polite and disciplined. They have bright staring watchful eyes. ========== The Golden Dawn (Israel Regardie) - Your Highlight on page 85 | Location 1293-1293 | Added on Friday, December 7, 2018 8:28:17 PM Analysis must precede synthesis. ========== The Golden Dawn (Israel Regardie) - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 1514-1515 | Added on Sunday, December 9, 2018 9:33:20 PM Integration must be the rule of the initiate, not pathology. ========== The Golden Dawn (Israel Regardie) - Your Highlight on page 116 | Location 1768-1771 | Added on Monday, December 10, 2018 11:36:59 PM It is an interesting fact that in his practice, Jung encouraged his patients to paint symbolic designs that sometimes were comparable to the Eastern mandalas. It seems that the effort to paint these designs had the effect of straightening out stresses and knots in the unconscious, thus accomplishing the therapeutic object of the analysis. ========== Mozart's Starling (Lyanda Lynn Haupt) - Your Highlight on page 53 | Location 807-808 | Added on Sunday, December 16, 2018 9:04:51 PM But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” ========== Mozart's Starling (Lyanda Lynn Haupt) - Your Highlight on page 53 | Location 807-808 | Added on Sunday, December 16, 2018 9:04:57 PM But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” ========== Mozart's Starling (Lyanda Lynn Haupt) - Your Highlight on page 53 | Location 807-809 | Added on Sunday, December 16, 2018 9:05:09 PM But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” We decide, moment to moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 394 | Location 6027-6031 | Added on Monday, December 17, 2018 9:20:48 PM Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology.) XXI Stones, metals, and gems   Cach of the four primary elements as taught by the early philosophers has its analogue in the quaternary terrestrial constitution of man. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 394 | Location 6027-6031 | Added on Monday, December 17, 2018 9:20:56 PM Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology.) XXI Stones, metals, and gems   Cach of the four primary elements as taught by the early philosophers has its analogue in the quaternary terrestrial constitution of man. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 394 | Location 6027-6028 | Added on Monday, December 17, 2018 9:21:02 PM Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology.) ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6765 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:46:15 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present powers in the intelligent activity of the universe. General Observations Certain of the ancients, differing with Paracelsus, shared the opinion that the elemental kingdoms were capable of waging war upon one another, and they recognized in the battlings of the elements disagreements among these kingdoms of Nature spirits. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6762 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:46:28 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present powers ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6762 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:46:32 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present powers ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6765 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:46:37 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present powers in the intelligent activity of the universe. General Observations Certain of the ancients, differing with Paracelsus, shared the opinion that the elemental kingdoms were capable of waging war upon one another, and they recognized in the battlings of the elements disagreements among these kingdoms of Nature spirits. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6762 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:46:59 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6762 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:47:07 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6762 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:47:16 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present powers ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6762 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:47:23 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present powers in the intelligent activity ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6762 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:47:28 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present powers in the intelligent activity ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 441 | Location 6757-6763 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:47:32 PM By some, the Muses of the Greeks are believed to have been sylphs, for these spirits are said to gather around the mind of the dreamer, the poet, and the artist, and inspire him with their intimate knowledge of the beauties and workings of Nature. To the sylphs were given the eastern corner of creation. Their temperament is mirthful, changeable, and eccentric. The peculiar qualities common to men of genius are supposedly the result of the cooperation of sylphs, whose aid also brings with it the sylphic inconsistency. The sylphs labor with the gases of the human body and indirectly with the nervous system, where their inconstancy is again apparent. They have no fixed domicile, but wander about from place to place—elemental nomads, invisible but ever-present powers in the intelligent activity of the universe. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 445 | Location 6817-6819 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:53:43 PM Among the ancients, philosophy, science, and religion were never considered as separate units: each was regarded as an integral part of the whole. Philosophy was scientific and religious; science was philosophic and religious; religion was philosophic and scientific. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 445 | Location 6817-6819 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:53:53 PM Among the ancients, philosophy, science, and religion were never considered as separate units: each was regarded as an integral part of the whole. Philosophy was scientific and religious; science was philosophic and religious; religion was philosophic and scientific. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 445 | Location 6817-6820 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:53:57 PM Among the ancients, philosophy, science, and religion were never considered as separate units: each was regarded as an integral part of the whole. Philosophy was scientific and religious; science was philosophic and religious; religion was philosophic and scientific. Perfect wisdom was considered unattainable save as the result of harmonizing all three of these expressions of mental and moral activity. ========== The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Manly P. Hall) - Your Highlight on page 446 | Location 6838-6841 | Added on Monday, December 24, 2018 10:57:57 PM Paracelsus wrote: “Therefore I consider that it is for me a matter of praise, not of blame, that I have hitherto and worthily pursued my wanderings. For this will I bear witness respecting nature: he who will investigate her ways must travel her books with his feet. That which is written is investigated not through its letters, but nature from land to land—as often a land so often a leaf. Thus is the Codex of Nature, thus must its leaves be turned.” (Paracelsus, by John Maxson Stillman.) ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 217-219 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2018 9:49:31 PM think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face-to-face as individuals, but to those who never show their face, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested by mechanized means. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 260-265 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2018 9:55:36 PM But about a third of the children succeeded in deferring gratification and getting the bigger payoff. Those who did so were those who distracted themselves from the marshmallow by playing games under the table, singing songs, or imagining the marshmallow as a cloud, for example. In a follow-up study of the same children a dozen years later, their initial performance on the self-regulation task was more predictive of life success than any other measure, including IQ and socioeconomic status. The researchers’ interpretation of their results is that it isn’t willpower (as conventionally understood) that distinguishes the successful children, it is the ability to strategically allocate their attention so that their actions aren’t determined by the wrong thoughts. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 19 | Location 290-303 | Added on Monday, December 31, 2018 10:00:12 PM According to the prevailing notion, to be free means to be free to satisfy one’s preferences. Preferences themselves are beyond rational scrutiny; they express the authentic core of a self whose freedom is realized when there are no encumbrances to its preference-satisfying behavior. Reason is in the service of this freedom, in a purely instrumental way; it is a person’s capacity to calculate the best means to satisfy his ends. About the ends themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of respect for the autonomy of the individual. To do otherwise would be to risk lapsing into paternalism. Thus does liberal agnosticism about the human good line up with the market ideal of “choice.” We invoke the latter as a content-free meta-good that bathes every actual choice made in the softly egalitarian, flattering light of autonomy. This mutually reinforcing set of posits about freedom and rationality provides the basic framework for the discipline of economics, and for “liberal theory” in departments of political science. It is all wonderfully consistent, even beautiful. But in surveying contemporary life, it is hard not to notice that this catechism doesn’t describe our situation very well. Especially the bit about our preferences expressing a welling-up of the authentic self. Those preferences have become the object of social engineering, conducted not by government bureaucrats but by mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations armed with big data. To continue to insist that preferences express the sovereign self and are for that reason sacred—unavailable for rational scrutiny—is to put one’s head in the sand. The resolutely individualistic understanding of freedom and rationality we have inherited from the liberal tradition disarms the critical faculties we need most in order to grapple with the large-scale societal pressures we now face. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 418-420 | Added on Tuesday, January 1, 2019 9:56:17 PM When we become competent in some particular field of practice, our perception is disciplined by that practice; we become attuned to pertinent features of a situation that would be invisible to a bystander. Through the exercise of a skill, the self that acts in the world takes on a definite shape. It comes to be in a relation of fit to a world it has grasped. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Note on page 28 | Location 420 | Added on Tuesday, January 1, 2019 9:58:57 PM similar to the phenomena where your friend buys a car and you strt tosee that model and color car everywhere because it's now part of your awareness ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 308 | Location 4712-4719 | Added on Tuesday, January 1, 2019 10:13:31 PM Biological Sciences 363, no. 1509 (2008): 3563–75. On the evolutionary time scale, we have inherited certain genetic endowments and limitations, but these are massively underdetermining of the resources that individuals bring to the adaptive problems they face. Culture—the particulars of our inherited linguistic, social, and material equipment—establishes the setting for childhood development and all subsequent learning. In the course of that learning our brains undergo both fine-grained and structural changes that are hugely consequential: changes that depend on our experiences. There are, then, three time scales that matter for the question of how we come to be what we are: Darwinian evolution, the history of a civilization, and the life course of an individual. This is perhaps obvious, once stated. But it puts limits, which would seem to be fatal, on the explanatory power of evolutionary psychology—that is, on the attempt to explain human behavior as the product of adaptive pressures we faced on the savannahs in the Pleistocene epoch. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 41 | Location 617-622 | Added on Tuesday, January 1, 2019 10:22:48 PM Consider the supermarket. The placement of items on the shelves is not haphazard, but the result of a negotiation in which companies compete for prime real estate: at eye level, or at the slow-moving checkout line. This is an example of how our decisions take place in an environment that has been given shape by “choice architects,” as Thaler and Sunstein say. And this is inevitable. The shelves will necessarily have some arrangement. The only question is whether this arrangement is determined by a simple auction for our attention, to be won by the highest bidder, or might be subject to a more public-spirited calculus and made to serve the interests of consumers themselves. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 42 | Location 643-646 | Added on Wednesday, January 2, 2019 11:20:23 PM Another way to put this is that the left’s project of liberation led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever “choice architect” brings the most energy to the task—usually because it sees the profit potential. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 66 | Location 1005-1007 | Added on Thursday, January 3, 2019 10:19:47 PM I call it a moral accomplishment because to be good at this kind of conversation you have to love the truth more than you love your own current state of understanding. This is, of course, an unusual priority to have, which may help to account for the rarity of real mastery in any pursuit. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 86 | Location 1305-1309 | Added on Saturday, January 5, 2019 11:49:39 PM A harder-edged car, without electronics mediating between action and perception, and in which mechanical noises are not fully damped out, preserves “cross-modal binding,” thought by some to be the key to our grasp of reality. Information that we pick up through different senses gets bound together, and coheres in our apprehension of some state of affairs in the world, because these various information streams are locked into a common experience of time. That is, they co-occur. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 88 | Location 1344-1345 | Added on Saturday, January 5, 2019 11:55:22 PM When falsification is offered as a remedy for abstraction, we have the engineering equivalent of the last, desperate days of the Roman Empire. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 95 | Location 1443-1450 | Added on Sunday, January 6, 2019 12:07:41 AM the world becomes more confusing, seemingly controlled by vast impersonal forces (e.g., “globalization” or “collateralized debt obligations”) that no single individual can fully bring within view; as the normative expectation becomes to land a cubicle job, in which the chain of cause and effect can be quite dispersed and opaque; as home life becomes deskilled (we outsource our cooking to corporations, our house repairs to immigrant guest workers); as the material basis of modern life becomes ever more obscured, and the occasions for skillful action are removed to sites overseas, where things are made; to sites nearby but socially invisible, where things are tended and repaired; and to sites unknown, where elites orchestrate commercial and political forces—when all of this is the case, the experience of individual agency becomes somewhat elusive. The very possibility of seeing a direct effect of your actions in the world, and knowing that these actions are genuinely your own, may come to seem illusory. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 100 | Location 1520-1521 | Added on Sunday, January 6, 2019 12:14:24 AM The plasticity of our brains is such that it is through repetition that addictions are first established. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 137 | Location 2090-2091 | Added on Wednesday, January 9, 2019 10:34:47 PM This stance of suspicion amounts to a kind of honor ethic, or epistemic machismo. To be subject to the sort of authority that asserts itself through a claim to knowledge is to risk being duped, and this is offensive not merely to one’s freedom but to one’s pride. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 139 | Location 2121-2122 | Added on Wednesday, January 9, 2019 10:38:38 PM They will not be well equipped to defend themselves against the Maoist MBAs if they are not aware of themselves as traditions, but remain wed to a conception of knowledge as something that is transmissible to atomized individuals, without loss. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 41 | Location 615-617 | Added on Sunday, January 13, 2019 5:52:16 PM For me, there was no past. I was a minor god striding through the world, leaning from the bow of our canoe as if into a creation story. I could name things as I saw them, a colonist at heart. That is a bear, that is a cumulus cloud. This is rain, this is sunset. The world was opening to me, unknown and undiscovered as far as I could see. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 721-725 | Added on Sunday, January 13, 2019 10:35:57 PM People once traveled at the speed of two feet, or possibly a paddled boat, but no faster. Most of our evolution was at this pace, one step and the next. The way we zoom around in cars and planes has changed the way we understand the dimensions of geography. Distances are abstract, unapproachable; what you see when you open the shade on an oval window in an airplane and look down thirty thousand feet is walkable land, mesas and mountains appearing ahead, vanishing behind. In the Ice Age, to know about a place was to have been there, or at least heard tell of it. Word of new places came in the form of birds from far away and a different grit to the rivers. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 966-972 | Added on Monday, January 14, 2019 9:25:14 PM The popular version of the first American colonization is “people on their way here”—like immigrants on their way to Ellis Island, bustling to see ahead. But people weren’t on their way to North America, because nobody even knew North America existed, and so their arrival was an exploration every foot of the way. There might have been adventurers—crazies at the edge of all human societies, willing to do nearly anything, wild-eyed characters heading always for the hills—but most people would have spent their time surviving in hungry country, weathering the unstable ups and downs of worldwide glaciation, in the company of several tons of animals per square kilometer. Life was hard enough, and short enough, already. Why go off on a lark across the ice when there was already so much to do where you were? ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 972-976 | Added on Monday, January 14, 2019 9:25:45 PM The drive may be innate. Some fruit flies, when they’re young, are adventurers. When they first chew out of their pinhead eggs as larvae, some wriggle farther than the others. Scientists have studied these individuals and identified a genetic locus connected to foraging, what is known as a rover allele. When the presence of rover alleles is increased, a larva will pass up food and creep toward the limits of its petri dish. Such larvae tend to be found dead around the edge of the dish, their journey more important than living. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 977-978 | Added on Monday, January 14, 2019 9:26:03 PM The increased genetic presence of the dopamine receptor known as D4 is correlated with restless behavior and what is known as “novelty-seeking”—the kind of people who are reckless or adventurous, in need of something new. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 65 | Location 983-989 | Added on Monday, January 14, 2019 9:27:18 PM A genetic study of more than two thousand prehistoric individuals worldwide, ranging between one thousand to thirty thousand years old, found that this pronounced D4 marker is more prevalent among those who migrated as compared to those who maintained a long genetic history in one place. Among Native American genomes and those of their ancestors, the presence of D4 is correlated with an individual’s distance from the land bridge. North America, with the closest access to the land bridge, shows 32 percent of samples with D4 elongation. Central America comes in ahead with 42 percent, and South America reaches an average 69 percent, as if people needed that much more umph to reach that far south. Too high in D4, though, you’d never be seen again, a seed blown beyond all horizons. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 1096-1099 | Added on Monday, January 14, 2019 9:37:28 PM We think of ourselves as different from other animals. We extol our own tool use, congratulate our sentience, but our needs are the same. We are creatures on a planet looking for a way ahead. Why do we like vistas? Why are pullouts drawn on the sides of highways, signs with arrows showing where to stand for the best view? The love for the panorama comes from memory, the earliest form of cartography, a sense of location. Little feels better than knowing where ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 1096-1099 | Added on Monday, January 14, 2019 9:37:33 PM We think of ourselves as different from other animals. We extol our own tool use, congratulate our sentience, but our needs are the same. We are creatures on a planet looking for a way ahead. Why do we like vistas? Why are pullouts drawn on the sides of highways, signs with arrows showing where to stand for the best view? The love for the panorama comes from memory, the earliest form of cartography, a sense of location. Little feels better than knowing where you are, and having a reason to be there. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 74 | Location 1121-1123 | Added on Monday, January 14, 2019 9:39:37 PM trench. We need each other. One of the reasons for migration is the bond of society, an urge to be together. A group might keep going for no other reason than the hope to find others. Seeing planes out here was a curious relief. They were like us. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 79 | Location 1197-1200 | Added on Monday, January 14, 2019 9:46:30 PM forth. This is from my own origin story. It is how I know who I am. Going ahead without stories or family is like falling off the edge of the earth. When my mom and I sheltered under the umiaq on an island in the Bering Sea, it was another tale added to the stack, a trail of bread crumbs marking my passage into the New World. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 90 | Location 1368-1371 | Added on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 11:15:02 PM I believe that’s why coastal travel would have always been preferable to the interior: free food. Use of marine resources was common in the Ice Age. Isotopic measurements of bone collagen from twelve-thousand-year-old human remains in a cave in North Wales, United Kingdom, indicate that 30 percent of their dietary protein came from marine sources. Technically, Ice Age people weren’t hunters or gatherers. They were like us in our kayaks: foragers, searching widely for food and provisions. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 113 | Location 1721-1722 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2019 7:48:02 PM But to have reached Monte Verde ahead of most other sites in the Americas, they had to have been driven, pushing toward Chile at the same time that inland travelers were following rivers into North America. As if drawn by the emptiness, these people went as far as they could. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1761-1764 | Added on Wednesday, January 16, 2019 8:29:09 PM But he did return. And that matters: He was able to tell his family and friends about his journey. Unless the traveler returns, no knowledge can be passed on; no map will be laid out, no later migration of families will occur. Kanaan came back and told the people of Juneau what he saw. He told them he’d passed beyond countless horizons, and at the far end of the world he found a familiar place with unfamiliar stars and an upside-down moon. Who could resist such a call? ========== Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (David Sloan Wilson) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 144-144 | Added on Thursday, January 17, 2019 4:35:49 PM implications are so profound that the study of life was transformed, enabling the great ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 148 | Location 2256-2260 | Added on Thursday, January 17, 2019 9:57:54 PM The phenomenologist Alfred Schutz pointed out that our sensual memories, such as that of the eyewitness, fade quite quickly, but they also get idealized according to social norms, and in doing so they actually become more vivid (even if false); they become something that one can hold on to. Language plays a decisive role in this process: we articulate our experiences. We do so in the particular language we are born into, making use of the prevailing stock of ready-made phrases that currently circulate. In doing this we subject them to “typifying schemata of experience.” These typifications both idealize and socialize our originally private, sensual experience. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 148 | Location 2263-2264 | Added on Thursday, January 17, 2019 9:58:17 PM Through social typifications in language, our memories get bent toward whatever is allowed or encouraged by authoritative voices or by the larger swirl of democratic opinion. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 151 | Location 2309-2310 | Added on Thursday, January 17, 2019 10:03:03 PM Pippin puts Hegel’s point sharply when he writes, “You have not executed an intention successfully unless others attribute to you the deed and intention you attribute to yourself.” ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 164 | Location 2512-2517 | Added on Friday, January 18, 2019 8:55:43 PM To regard oneself as a collection of synapses and neurotransmitters is to take a certain stance toward oneself. I don’t think “I am in despair because I lost my job,” I think “My serotonin levels are low, and there’s a pill for that.” This is to shift from a first-person perspective in which I inhabit my own experience and interpret it, giving reasons for it that refer to events in the world, to a third-person perspective in which I objectify myself and the reasons I invoke are material causes located inside my head.7 This naturalistic determinism would have horrified Kant, but note that such inwardness gets apparent warrant from his insistence that we conceive our will as free of all those sources of heteronomy that arise from our external circumstances. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2569-2571 | Added on Friday, January 18, 2019 9:03:11 PM Recall the quotation from Simone Weil: “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2569-2571 | Added on Friday, January 18, 2019 9:03:18 PM Recall the quotation from Simone Weil: “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2569-2571 | Added on Friday, January 18, 2019 9:03:26 PM Recall the quotation from Simone Weil: “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2569-2572 | Added on Friday, January 18, 2019 9:03:33 PM Recall the quotation from Simone Weil: “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.” ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 2730-2732 | Added on Friday, January 18, 2019 9:21:13 PM There is some great popular music these days, but at present it would be hard to name a band that aspires to the epochal stature of a Led Zeppelin. We seem to feel ourselves latecomers to history, as though the human story has played itself out and there remain no great deeds to be done. What is left is to play with the forms we have inherited, sampling and referencing. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 183 | Location 2800-2801 | Added on Friday, January 18, 2019 9:55:59 PM Subjectivism leaves people isolated. Moral and aesthetic judgments have the same status as mere sensations, such as an itch—they are entirely one’s own. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 183 | Location 2802-2804 | Added on Friday, January 18, 2019 9:56:24 PM The dogmatic inarticulacy of subjectivism—perhaps we should call it moral autism—leaves people bereft of any public language in which to express their intuitions about the better and worse, the noble and shameful, the beautiful and ugly, and assert them as valid. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 192 | Location 2942-2943 | Added on Saturday, January 19, 2019 9:46:49 PM The ecology of attention that prevails among persons in a liberal public culture is one of polite separation. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 193 | Location 2957-2959 | Added on Saturday, January 19, 2019 9:48:45 PM most people? I like to be tied up—am I sick? The normative center of gravity now resides in the middle of a distribution, rather than coming from a religious interdiction or parental guidance, on the one hand, or from a cultivated, proudly antinomian sense of oneself as a pervert and sinner, on the other. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 198 | Location 3027-3028 | Added on Saturday, January 19, 2019 9:57:39 PM As the inhabitant of a family, religion, or locale, a gay person was likely to stay in the closet. With the rise of identity politics, one ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 198 | Location 3027-3028 | Added on Saturday, January 19, 2019 9:57:43 PM As the inhabitant of a family, religion, or locale, a gay person was likely to stay in the closet. With the rise of identity politics, one jumped out of the closet and into the box. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 199 | Location 3041-3045 | Added on Saturday, January 19, 2019 9:59:49 PM Now we are fascinated with “the wisdom of crowds” and “the hive mind.” We are told that there is a superior global intelligence arising in the Web itself. This collective mind is more meta, more synoptic and synthetic, than any one of us, and aren’t these the defining features of intelligence? Of course all this crowd-loving lines up pretty well with Silicon Valley’s distaste for the concept of intellectual property, and with the fact that there is a lot more money to be made as an aggregator of “content” than as a producer of it. (It is the aggregator who controls advertisers’ access to consumers’ eyeballs.) ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 199 | Location 3046-3047 | Added on Saturday, January 19, 2019 10:00:01 PM “Ideology” could be taken (somewhat narrowly) to mean an idea that happens to line up with the material interests of those who espouse it. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 144 | Location 2203-2207 | Added on Saturday, January 19, 2019 10:17:05 PM The oldest known rock art in North America shows up within the same time bracket about 170 miles south of Paisley Caves. Images are etched into a gallery of dolmen-sized boulders along an evaporated lake edge in northwest Nevada, minerals in the etch marks radiocarbon dated to 14,800 years ago. The art is not like Chauvet in France, no delicate animals or handprints. The rock is porous and rough, the images entirely geometric, in patterns as complicated as stained glass: hand-sized honeycombs, geometric cross hatches, plant-like upshoots, the oldest known rock art in the Americas. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 145 | Location 2219-2221 | Added on Saturday, January 19, 2019 10:18:48 PM At the bottom of this dig, twelve feet below the surface and beneath this layer of ash, archaeologists found a single artifact, a small piece of orange agate worked by human hand into a scraper. Its position shows that the scraper has to be even older than the volcano eruption, a pin in the map around 16,000 years ago. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 217 | Location 3325-3326 | Added on Tuesday, January 22, 2019 9:30:37 PM The saying “Electricity is here to stay” suggested that the growing prevalence of electricity was due to the working out of some rational necessity, and to deny this was to reveal oneself as “out of touch with reality.” ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 217 | Location 3323-3325 | Added on Tuesday, January 22, 2019 9:31:03 PM In the musical world as elsewhere, there seems to have been a sense of techno-inevitability, a readiness to regard technology as a force with its own magical imperatives, rather than as an instrument of human intentions. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 241 | Location 3691-3696 | Added on Tuesday, January 22, 2019 10:09:46 PM As we have seen, the dialectic between tradition and innovation allows the organ maker to understand his own inventiveness as a going further in a trajectory he has inherited. This is very different from the modern concept of creativity, which seems to be a crypto-theological concept: creation ex nihilo. For us the self plays the role of God, and every eruption of creativity is understood to be like a miniature Big Bang, coming out of nowhere. This way of understanding inventiveness cannot connect us to others, or to the past. It also falsifies the experience to which we give the name “creativity” by conceiving it to be something irrational, incommunicable, unteachable. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 242 | Location 3706-3708 | Added on Tuesday, January 22, 2019 10:11:01 PM The point isn’t to replicate the conclusions of tradition (here, the use of oak), but rather to enter into the same problems as the ancients and make them one’s own. That is how a tradition remains alive. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 243 | Location 3721-3737 | Added on Tuesday, January 22, 2019 10:13:40 PM For the most part, this Enlightenment understanding views tradition as a darkness that grips men’s minds and a habit of inflexibility to be rooted out. But this view gets a lot wrong. As we saw also in the case of scientific apprenticeship, in the development of any real competence we don’t judge everything for ourselves, starting from scratch each morning. Rather, we have to begin by taking a lot on faith, submitting to the authority of our teachers, who learned from their teachers. The individualist conceit that we do otherwise, and the corresponding discredit that falls on tradition, makes people feel isolated. As we learned from Tocqueville, this isolation brings with it a certain anxiety, which we try to relieve by looking around to see what others—our contemporaries—are thinking and feeling. The rugged individualist becomes the statistical self. The statistical self is the kind that is knowable in bulk, a suitable subject around which to design manufactured experiences. We increasingly encounter the world through representations, produced according to the economies of scale of mass culture. In the worst cases, such as machine gambling, they are guided by a design intention that is inimical to our aspiration to autonomy, even while relying on that aspiration as a psychic hook: manufactured experiences promise to save us from confrontations with a world that resists our will. The workers at Taylor and Boody are not isolated in this way. They understand the long story of organ making as their own, and find for themselves a place in it. In this highly situated self-understanding, the excellence they reach for in their work expresses their individuality: an earned independence of judgment, a deepened understanding that is the fruit of their own labors. Some critics will say that these craftspeople have “retreated from the modern world.” I think nearly the opposite. We have come to accept a condition of retreat from the world as normal. The point of the organ shop example is to help us see what it would look like to inhabit an ecology of attention that puts one squarely in the world. ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 251 | Location 3840-3840 | Added on Tuesday, January 22, 2019 10:23:10 PM Affection for the world as it is: ========== World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) (Crawford, Matthew B.) - Your Highlight on page 252 | Location 3855-3857 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2019 9:25:14 PM Such are the rules of gravity and buoyancy that surfing is possible. That’s the kind of universe we inhabit. Being alert to such possibilities, and giving their occurrence in the world their due in wonder: to encounter things in this way is basically erotic, in the sense that we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 164 | Location 2502-2504 | Added on Wednesday, January 23, 2019 9:47:36 PM When I saw the Parson’s Island artifacts, I thought they didn’t look American. Then I wondered: What does look American? Being from this continent has never been one thing. Everyone here came from someplace else, even if from underground. The stories are all about arrival. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 189 | Location 2884-2886 | Added on Thursday, January 24, 2019 9:54:05 PM 13,400-year-old kill site called El Fin del Mundo—the End of the World—was excavated in the desert of northwest Mexico, where along with the remains of at least two butchered gomphotheres—long-jawed, four-tusked, elephant-like animals—spearpoints, flakes, scrapers, and an exquisite, completely intact transparent quartz fluted point were found. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 189 | Location 2884-2886 | Added on Thursday, January 24, 2019 9:54:12 PM A 13,400-year-old kill site called El Fin del Mundo—the End of the World—was excavated in the desert of northwest Mexico, where along with the remains of at least two butchered gomphotheres—long-jawed, four-tusked, elephant-like animals—spearpoints, flakes, scrapers, and an exquisite, completely intact transparent quartz fluted point were found. ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 197 | Location 3018-3023 | Added on Thursday, January 24, 2019 10:08:24 PM 1988 ethnographic study of hunter-gatherers in far northern Australia found that certain kinds of rock have cultural significance. People walked hundreds of miles to get them. Lester Hiatt, the late scholar of Australian Aboriginal societies, wrote, “At the quarry, the men spoke of the stone growing up in the ground. Only here at Ngilipitji did true ‘killing stone’ grow. The cross-sections of weathered rinds were compared to that of a kidney, with the best interior stone of pinky-grey silcrete referred to as djukurr or ‘fat.’ An esoteric oblique meaning of this word is power. It is this mystical power derived from supernatural sources integral to the site that gives the Ngilipitji stone blades their stupendous killing force. Once struck, man or beast is doomed.” ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 253 | Location 3870-3870 | Added on Sunday, January 27, 2019 9:38:04 PM around caribou drives. The largest site is Bull ========== Atlas of a Lost World (Craig Childs) - Your Highlight on page 253 | Location 3870-3870 | Added on Sunday, January 27, 2019 9:38:08 PM around caribou drives. The largest site is Bull ========== The Land of Little Rain (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 65-66 | Added on Thursday, January 31, 2019 7:16:21 PM rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little told of it. ========== The Land of Little Rain (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 64-66 | Added on Thursday, January 31, 2019 7:17:27 PM Here you have no rain when all the earth cries for it, or quick downpours called cloud-bursts for violence. A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little told of ========== The Land of Little Rain (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 5 | Location 64-66 | Added on Thursday, January 31, 2019 7:17:32 PM Here you have no rain when all the earth cries for it, or quick downpours called cloud-bursts for violence. A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little told of it. ========== The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity / A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods (Rudolf Steiner) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 269-272 | Added on Friday, February 1, 2019 10:24:53 PM It is said that love makes us blind to the failings of the loved one. But the opposite view can be taken, namely that it is precisely for the good points that love opens the eyes. Many pass by these good points without notice. One, however, perceives them, and just because he does, love awakens in his soul. What else has he done except perceive what hundreds have failed to see? Love is not theirs, because they lack the perception. ========== The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity / A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods (Rudolf Steiner) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 291-293 | Added on Friday, February 1, 2019 10:28:16 PM We erect this barrier between ourselves and the world as soon as consciousness is first kindled in us. But we never cease to feel that, in spite of all, we belong to the world, that there is a connecting link between it and us, and that we are beings within, and not without, the universe. ========== The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity / A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods (Rudolf Steiner) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 293-295 | Added on Friday, February 1, 2019 10:28:35 PM This feeling makes us strive to bridge over this opposition, and ultimately the whole spiritual striving of mankind is nothing but the bridging of this opposition. The history of our spiritual life is a continuous seeking after union between ourselves and the world. Religion, Art, and Science follow, one and all, this goal. ========== The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity / A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods (Rudolf Steiner) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 358-362 | Added on Friday, February 1, 2019 10:38:48 PM This quality of Nature in us we must seek out, and then we shall discover our connection with her once more. Dualism neglects to do this. It considers the human mind as a spiritual entity utterly alien to Nature and attempts somehow to hitch it on to Nature. No wonder that it cannot find the coupling link. We can find Nature outside of us only if we have first learnt to know her within us. The Natural within us must be our guide to her. This marks out our path of inquiry. We shall attempt no speculations concerning the interaction of Mind and Matter. ========== The Trail Book (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 704-706 | Added on Saturday, February 2, 2019 6:54:17 PM The Blackfoot nodded. "Fire is a very old friend of Man," he said; "so old that the mere sight of it comforts him; they have come a long way together." "Now I know," said Oliver, "why ========== The Trail Book (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 704-706 | Added on Saturday, February 2, 2019 6:54:23 PM The Blackfoot nodded. "Fire is a very old friend of Man," he said; "so old that the mere sight of it comforts him; they have come a long way together." "Now I know," said Oliver, "why ========== The Trail Book (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 704-706 | Added on Saturday, February 2, 2019 6:54:28 PM The Blackfoot nodded. "Fire is a very old friend of Man," he said; "so old that the mere sight of it comforts him; they have come a long way together." "Now I know," said Oliver, "why you called the first dog Friend-at-the-Back." ========== The Trail Book (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 996-996 | Added on Sunday, February 3, 2019 6:44:00 PM places. It's only the ones that are too dull to be remembered that have to be printed." ========== The Hummingbird's Daughter (Luis Alberto Urrea) - Your Highlight on page 201 | Location 3073-3074 | Added on Tuesday, February 5, 2019 10:51:56 PM The honeysuckle made the People particularly happy, since it attracted holy hummingbirds, and as long as hummingbirds hovered nearby, things would be all right. ========== The Hummingbird's Daughter (Luis Alberto Urrea) - Your Highlight on page 228 | Location 3491-3499 | Added on Wednesday, February 6, 2019 10:40:34 PM “Why do I pierce my ear?” “I know! I know that one! Huila told me!” “Well?” “You pierce your ear to show God you are no longer deaf! You are ready to listen!” He was surprised. “Very good,” he said. “Now, here is another question. Why is it my left ear?” “I do not remember.” “Because the left side is the side of the heart.” “If it is the side of the heart . . .” “Then I show the Creator I am truly, deeply, listening.” Teresita nodded. He continued: “Christians don’t like the left side, but Indians do. Christians have forgotten their hearts. When a medicine woman hugs you, if she means it, she will move you to the side and put her heart on yours. ========== The House of Broken Angels (Luis Alberto Urrea) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 215-216 | Added on Sunday, February 10, 2019 10:41:40 PM Mexicans liked food hot, home cooked, and lots of ========== The House of Broken Angels (Luis Alberto Urrea) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 215-215 | Added on Sunday, February 10, 2019 10:41:46 PM Mexicans liked ========== The House of Broken Angels (Luis Alberto Urrea) - Your Highlight on page 15 | Location 215-216 | Added on Sunday, February 10, 2019 10:41:49 PM Mexicans liked food hot, home cooked, and lots of it. ========== Draft No. 4 (John McPhee) - Your Highlight on page 153 | Location 2344-2347 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2019 9:24:33 PM Easier with some writers than with others. It’s as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to shorten a train—or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of aesthetics or plant pathology, not to mention size. Do not do violence to the author’s tone, manner, nature, style, thumbprint. Measure cumulatively the fragments you remove and see how many lines would be gone if the prose were reformatted. If you kill a widow, you pick up a whole line. ========== The Patch (John McPhee) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 268-269 | Added on Saturday, February 16, 2019 9:19:17 PM Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain. ========== The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity / A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods (Rudolf Steiner) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 453-453 | Added on Friday, February 22, 2019 1:22:51 PM The first point, then, to notice about thought is that it is the unobserved element in our ordinary mental life. ========== The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity / A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods (Rudolf Steiner) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 454-455 | Added on Friday, February 22, 2019 1:24:17 PM Whatever I do not myself produce appears in my field of consciousness as an object; ========== The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity / A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods (Rudolf Steiner) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 454-457 | Added on Friday, February 22, 2019 1:24:39 PM Whatever I do not myself produce appears in my field of consciousness as an object; I contrast it with myself as something the existence of which is independent of me. It forces itself upon me. I must accept it as the presupposition of my thinking. As long as I think about the object, I am absorbed in it, my attention is turned on it. To be thus absorbed in the object is just to contemplate it by thought. ========== The House of Broken Angels (Luis Alberto Urrea) - Your Highlight on page 135 | Location 2064-2066 | Added on Saturday, February 23, 2019 10:02:22 PM Salt and seaweed and shrimp and distance. The bitter stench of beached dolphins turning to gray swamps on the rocks. The scent of mysterious Sinaloa somehow coming across the gulf. The choking reek of guano, and the delicious scent of a million miles’ worth of clean, rushing wind. ========== The House of Broken Angels (Luis Alberto Urrea) - Your Highlight on page 136 | Location 2073-2075 | Added on Saturday, February 23, 2019 10:03:12 PM If the rain came, the creeping smell of the desert going wet. And diesel and exhaust, especially the big belching trucks and ancient buses. From alleys, the stench of sewage and rotten fruit. Flowers, yes. Flowers. They were not just colorful—but their scents colored the air. ========== The Astral Body: And Other Astral Phenomena (Arthur Edward Powell) - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 455-456 | Added on Thursday, February 28, 2019 9:51:28 PM It may be noted here that Kâma, or desire, is just beginning to be active in the mineral kingdom, where it expresses itself as chemical affinity. ========== The Land of Little Rain (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 3 | Location 35-36 | Added on Sunday, March 3, 2019 11:18:48 PM The earth is no wanton to give up all her best to every comer, but keeps a sweet, separate intimacy for each. ========== The Land of Little Rain (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 149-150 | Added on Sunday, March 3, 2019 11:38:41 PM For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. ========== The Land of Little Rain (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 371-375 | Added on Wednesday, March 6, 2019 10:41:10 PM The Pocket Hunter had gotten to that point where he knew no bad weather, and all places were equally happy so long as they were out of doors. I do not know just how long it takes to become saturated with the elements so that one takes no account of them. Myself can never get past the glow and exhilaration of a storm, the wrestle of long dust-heavy winds, the play of live thunder on the rocks, nor past the keen fret of fatigue when the storm outlasts physical endurance. But prospectors and Indians get a kind of a weather shell that remains on the body until death. ========== The Patch (John McPhee) - Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1627-1631 | Added on Saturday, March 9, 2019 10:26:13 PM A PROFESSIONAL WRITER, by definition, is a person clothed in self-denial who each and almost every day will plead with eloquent lamentation that he has a brutal burden on his mind and soul, will summon deep reserves of “discipline” as seriatim antidotes to any domestic chore, and, drawing the long sad face of the pale poet, will rise above his dread of his dreaded working chamber, excuse himself from the idle crowd, go into his writing sanctum, shut the door, shoot the bolt, and in lonely sacrifice turn on the Mets game. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 249-251 | Added on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 8:35:30 PM As the late Nichidatsu Fujii, leader of the Buddhist Nihonzan Myohoji Temple and participant in the Native American Longest Walk of 1978, says, “Civilization does not mean electric lights being installed. It does not mean introducing atomic bombs, either. Civilization means not killing people.” ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 346-349 | Added on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:42:18 PM Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religion is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think—all of these things—twenty-four hours a day. One’s religion, then, is ones life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 439-442 | Added on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:50:21 PM On the whole, the history of the Americas (prior to European conquest) reveals a land where most human groups followed, or tried to follow, the “pollen path” (as the Navajo people call it) or the “good, red road” (as the Lakota call it). The pollen path and the red road lead to living life in a sacred manner with continual awareness of the inter-relationships of all forms of life. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 781-783 | Added on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 10:17:56 AM we see that what the wétiko means by “civilization” is something terrible indeed: a civilization is (it would appear) a society in which there are so many evil or violent or dishonest people that the police, soldiers, and other armed forces of control must almost equal the total population in numbers. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 784-785 | Added on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 10:18:06 AM is a society where people are “civil”; that is, where they behave so well toward each other that they do not need police or other armed systems of control. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 783-785 | Added on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 10:18:11 AM On the other hand, I believe that a true civilization is a society where people are “civil”; that is, where they behave so well toward each other that they do not need police or other armed systems of control. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 922-924 | Added on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 10:33:36 PM The beggar only appears to be humble when, in fact, he is merely fearful or currying favors. Thus also the outward humility of oppressed peasants, workers, or lower-middle class bureaucrats in a wétiko society may mask fear. True humility does not arise from fear, but from a profound sense of one’s place in the universe. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 964-966 | Added on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 10:46:28 PM “When a man decides to do something he must go all the way, but he must take responsibility for what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 964-966 | Added on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 10:46:35 PM “When a man decides to do something he must go all the way, but he must take responsibility for what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing it.”18 ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 81 | Location 1230-1231 | Added on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 11:10:24 PM But people from the university don’t believe these things . . . they have lost touch with the spiritual forces of the earth . . . They are lost men and their own spirits are starved. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 81 | Location 1237-1239 | Added on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 11:11:24 PM part of the process of creating a mátchi world is precisely the sustained effort to brutalize the sensibilities of human beings. In part, this has been (and is) accomplished by denying the spiritual character of humans and other living creatures and by treating them in a demeaning manner. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 1480-1483 | Added on Thursday, March 14, 2019 8:08:30 PM Sophistication is a nice word, isn’t it? It means “lacking natural simplicity or naiveté” and is derived from “sophist: One who is skillful in devious argumentation.” Isn’t it revealing that one of the favorite words of the European elites, used to describe themselves, points openly towards deviousness and falsity? To lose one’s natural simplicity, sadly, in the wétiko world, means to become a person who hides his true feelings behind a mask which deceives. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 103 | Location 1576-1578 | Added on Thursday, March 14, 2019 11:25:49 PM White scholars and popular writers often speak of “human sacrifice” as if it were a practice confined to the Aztecs, Carthaginians, Pacific Islanders, or other non-European peoples. Since 1978, however, perhaps a quarter of a million Indian lives have been sacrificed in Central America for the sake of the social status and profits of wealthy people and corporations. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 104 | Location 1581-1584 | Added on Thursday, March 14, 2019 11:26:19 PM Quite the contrary, the greatest and most extensive acts of human sacrifice have been, or are being, carried out by secular forces acting within the framework of ideologies that justify the necessity of sacrificing human lives for some larger goal, be it the attempted Nazi conquest of the Soviet Union, the anti-communist crusade, the earlier Roman Catholic crusade to convert the Americas, or the capitalist’s demand for cheap raw materials and compliant economic fiefdoms. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 104 | Location 1581-1585 | Added on Thursday, March 14, 2019 11:26:38 PM Quite the contrary, the greatest and most extensive acts of human sacrifice have been, or are being, carried out by secular forces acting within the framework of ideologies that justify the necessity of sacrificing human lives for some larger goal, be it the attempted Nazi conquest of the Soviet Union, the anti-communist crusade, the earlier Roman Catholic crusade to convert the Americas, or the capitalist’s demand for cheap raw materials and compliant economic fiefdoms. Perhaps most victims are now being sacrificed at the feet of the god “Profit.” ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 103 | Location 1579-1585 | Added on Thursday, March 14, 2019 11:26:49 PM We must no longer allow eurocentric scholars to define “human sacrifice” in such a manner as to lead us to believe that a priest in a weird costume must cut the heart out of a victim in order for the act of sacrifice to become human sacrifice. Quite the contrary, the greatest and most extensive acts of human sacrifice have been, or are being, carried out by secular forces acting within the framework of ideologies that justify the necessity of sacrificing human lives for some larger goal, be it the attempted Nazi conquest of the Soviet Union, the anti-communist crusade, the earlier Roman Catholic crusade to convert the Americas, or the capitalist’s demand for cheap raw materials and compliant economic fiefdoms. Perhaps most victims are now being sacrificed at the feet of the god “Profit.” ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 111 | Location 1694-1699 | Added on Thursday, March 14, 2019 11:36:58 PM Levi-Strauss, of course, has seen and felt the beauty of this American land as cared for by Native People, and he has also seen the freedom made possible (or at least enhanced) by modest population. But was this a result of mere chance? Levi-Strauss himself notes that “the Nambikwara do not have many children . . . Sexual intercourse is forbidden between parents until the youngest child is weaned, that is until about its third year.”12 This same characteristic is, or was, true of most American cultures and, coupled with the wide use of contraception, is undoubtedly one of the reasons America was not overpopulated until recently. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 111 | Location 1700-1701 | Added on Thursday, March 14, 2019 11:37:15 PM The Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and other groups with authoritarian background did not create “free” societies in Siberia or the Americas even when population was sparse. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 112 | Location 1706-1707 | Added on Thursday, March 14, 2019 11:37:49 PM I was born where there were no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls . ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 147 | Location 2247-2249 | Added on Friday, March 15, 2019 11:43:55 PM Mary is very much like a mother within a patriarchal family. She can listen to pleas and she can, in turn, ask favors from the dominating male, but she possesses no independent power. Only the male ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 147 | Location 2247-2249 | Added on Friday, March 15, 2019 11:43:59 PM Mary is very much like a mother within a patriarchal family. She can listen to pleas and she can, in turn, ask favors from the dominating male, but she possesses no independent power. Only the male deity possesses the ultimate power to act. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 163 | Location 2488-2490 | Added on Saturday, March 16, 2019 11:15:35 PM The big Catholic “Tipi” cathedral and the huge, ornate, Mormon temples are all monuments to material splendor and to religions which seem to purposely shut out the natural world—the earth, the plants, the sun, the cold, the heat, yes and even the flies and ants, which are, to the Indian, all sacred (wakan). ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 163 | Location 2497-2501 | Added on Saturday, March 16, 2019 11:16:56 PM it may be that the development of massive, enclosed temples and churches of whatever size, in Asia and Europe, correlates very well with the rise of the wétiko sickness. Why? Perhaps because the temple or cathedral clearly serves to separate the sacred from the profane, the religious from the secular, the realm of worship from the realm of work, money-making, and killing. The wétikos want people to box up their religion in buildings, where it can be isolated from the rest of life. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2565-2572 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 7:56:19 PM If the wétiko psychosis is to be overcome, and if we are to be cured of the disease, the answer lies in what I call religion, which is following the “good, red road” or the “pollen path” for all the days of our lives. This is not to say that a person has to become an Indian, or follow Native American ways. No, because when we pull away the wétiko sickness from our eyes and look at things in honesty and humility, we find that the teachings of the great medicine men, the great holy men, of the world are actually similar—they point in the same direction. They may not be identical, but that is okay, because they all provide us with examples only. I don’t believe they ever meant for us to become robots, duplicating every act of their lives, or phonographs, repeating every word of their prayers, or imbeciles, refusing to use the miracle of our own minds, or clods, failing to dream our own dreams, or blobs, never seeking our own visions. Other people’s visions are their own, not ours, and it is wrong to use them as an excuse for not finding our own if we can. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 170 | Location 2601-2602 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 7:59:51 PM forsaking, release, non-attachment. A very specific part of Gotama’s teachings had ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 170 | Location 2607-2608 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 8:00:06 PM Gotama insisted that each person had to follow his own path, because enlightenment is a personal experience, unique for each individual. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 174 | Location 2663-2664 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 8:06:37 PM I MET A medicine man, one of my uncles. “Tell me about the Great Spirit,” I asked him. “He is not like a human being, like the White God. He is a power. That power could be in a cup of coffee. The Great Spirit is no old man with a beard.” ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 181 | Location 2770-2772 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 8:18:40 PM It is not the concrete, material results of one’s life that are important, for all such things can be destroyed, lost, or dissipated rapidly. It is rather the quality of our acts, of our struggle, of our motives, of our love, of our perseverance which are truly significant. As Black Elk said, “the power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 181 | Location 2770-2772 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 8:18:50 PM It is not the concrete, material results of one’s life that are important, for all such things can be destroyed, lost, or dissipated rapidly. It is rather the quality of our acts, of our struggle, of our motives, of our love, of our perseverance which are truly significant. As Black Elk said, “the power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 181 | Location 2770-2772 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 8:18:58 PM It is not the concrete, material results of one’s life that are important, for all such things can be destroyed, lost, or dissipated rapidly. It is rather the quality of our acts, of our struggle, of our motives, of our love, of our perseverance which are truly significant. As Black Elk said, “the power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.” ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 182 | Location 2780-2782 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 8:20:03 PM Peace . . . comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells Wakan-tanka, and that this center is everywhere, it is within each of us. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 182 | Location 2789-2793 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 8:21:37 PM I have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what is best to do in order to make themselves worthy of that toward which they are so attracted, they might have dreams which would purify their lives. Let a man decide upon his favorite animal and make a study of it, learning its innocent ways. Let him learn to understand its sounds and motions. The animals want to communicate with man, but Wakan tanka [the Great Spirit] does not intend they shall do so directly—man must do the greater part in securing an understanding. ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 2845-2855 | Added on Sunday, March 17, 2019 8:28:50 PM ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 2845-2854 | Added on Monday, March 18, 2019 6:54:01 PM ========== Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 186 | Location 2845-2854 | Added on Wednesday, March 20, 2019 6:16:52 AM The Old Ones say outward is inward to the heart and inward is outward to the center because for us there are no absolute boundaries no borders no environments no outside no inside no dualisms no single body no non-body We don’t stop at our eyes We don’t begin at our skin We don’t end at our smell We don’t start at our sounds I can lose my legs and go on living I can lose my eyes and go on living I can lose my ears and go on living I can lose my hair my nose my hands my arms and go on living but if I lose the water I die If I lose the air I die If I lose the Sun I die If I lose the plants and animals I die For all of these things are more a part of me more essential to my being than is that which I call “my body.” A mountain for seeking visions, An ocean for getting dreams, A lake of mirrors to give us names, Sacred Circles arounding us. ========== Only Approved Indians: Stories (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 329 | Location 5039-5041 | Added on Friday, March 22, 2019 9:09:17 PM "We came to see that white politics picks men to be the leader who are of a single type, men who love themselves so much that they cannot understand anything else. So we just gave up on him, except that he did get to listen to our talks on the radio we let him have. ========== Only Approved Indians: Stories (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 345 | Location 5288-5288 | Added on Friday, March 22, 2019 9:17:28 PM Man is just an ordinary; weak, vain man. He has done some evil things, ========== Only Approved Indians: Stories (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 415 | Location 6351-6351 | Added on Saturday, March 23, 2019 8:21:48 PM blacks speaking 'Nederland' and Talkie-Talkie and Papermentoo or whatever it's called and some of 'em ========== Only Approved Indians: Stories (Jack D. Forbes) - Your Highlight on page 454 | Location 6959-6960 | Added on Saturday, March 23, 2019 8:39:23 PM white and black youths gathered together in groups in the inner cities. ========== The Dog Stars (Peter Heller) - Your Highlight on page 176 | Location 2695-2702 | Added on Tuesday, March 26, 2019 7:28:43 PM This was our ritual while we waited for our lives to truly begin and I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don’t know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly. That’s the way it seems now looking back. Like those pleasantly exhausted bike rides up the side of a country highway on a warm evening. To a bridge. To a little rootsnaked trail through heavy maples. Where we padded barefoot upstream to a swimming hole. Even getting poison ivy so badly one weekend I missed two days of work. Seems from here that that was the sweetest time ever vouchsafed to two people. Ever. On earth. While we waited for him to finish his degree, for me to have a child, to do the real work of living. ========== The Dog Stars (Peter Heller) - Your Bookmark on page 257 | Location 3985 | Added on Wednesday, March 27, 2019 1:42:50 PM ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 210-211 | Added on Thursday, March 28, 2019 9:45:27 PM By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 243-245 | Added on Thursday, March 28, 2019 9:48:36 PM Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 246-248 | Added on Thursday, March 28, 2019 9:49:00 PM There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 411-412 | Added on Saturday, March 30, 2019 7:59:00 PM As the war escalated, maintaining production required an ever increasing number of slaves. Agents from major factories, Brierfield Iron, and the Shelby Iron Works, scoured the countryside to buy or lease African Americans. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 610-611 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 2:09:39 PM Contrasted against that circumscribed existence, the extraordinary events in the aftermath of emancipation—no matter the deprivation or arduousness—must have been bathed in a glow of wonder and astonishment. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 612-613 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 2:09:51 PM It was slaves who had created the Cottingham plantation and civilized the Cahaba valley and all of rugged central Alabama. Bibb County was a place where there were no flat places. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 41 | Location 626-627 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 2:11:42 PM In the early years of the Cottingham farm, Cherokee and Creek Indians still controlled the western bank of the Cahaba's sister stream, the Coosa River. Choctaw territory extended to within fifty miles of the plantation. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 655-659 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 2:16:24 PM On creeks surrounding the Cottingham farm, small forges were built in the 1830s, early precursors to the massive steel and iron industry that would come to dominate Alabama by the end of the century. In 1850, at a location a few miles from the Cot-tinghams’, a massive boiler-driven sawmill began operation, pumping from the still virgin forests a fantastic stream of sawn planks and timbers. More ominously, Bibb Steam Mill Company also introduced to the county the ruthless form of industrial slavery that would become so important as the Civil War loomed. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 714-717 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:03:19 PM Gorgas, like Elisha Cottingham and so many other whites bewildered by both the ramifications of black emancipation and the continuing venality of renegade whites, was disconsolate. The South they first dreamed of making an independent republic grounded in slavery—and then dreamed of rebuilding as a rival to the North—appeared irretrievably broken. "What an end to our great hopes!" he wrote in his diary. "Is it possible that we were wrong?" ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 736-737 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:05:06 PM Redefined by war, grief, deprivation, death, and emancipation, America was faced with the challenge of repairing and reordering a collective household. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 755-756 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:06:52 PM The breadth of white venom toward freed slaves—and the decades of venality that followed it—belied the wide spectrum of perspectives on slavery shared by white southerners before the war. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 50 | Location 760-763 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:07:44 PM In the first decades of colonization in the 1600s, "slave" and "Negro" were not synonymous in the American colonies. Slaves were as likely to be Indians as Africans. Some early owners of black slaves were themselves black. Free Africans in Virginia were permitted to vote well into the 1700s. Many indentured white servants were coerced into extending their labor contracts until death—effectively making them light-skinned slaves. Dispelling that ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 770-773 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:08:47 PM Still, vast swaths of the region, including the rock-strewn Appalachians stretching from northern Alabama, across Georgia, and up through the Carolinas and Virginia, contained virtually no slaves at all. Indeed, in some of those places, companies of men had gathered after secession, armed themselves, and marched north to join with the Union armies moving upon the South. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 776-778 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:09:39 PM The 1860 census counted among four million blacks in the South more than 250,000 free African Americans in the slave states, more than fifty thousand of them in Virginia. In Louisiana, a handful of black freedmen owned dozens of slaves. In the intricately hued tapestry of New Orleans, more than three thousand free blacks owned slaves themselves. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 786-786 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:10:22 PM The destruction of slavery in the Civil War didn't settle this contradiction. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 784-786 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:10:35 PM A century later, this was the paradox of the post-Civil War South—recognition of freed slaves as full humans appeared to most white southerners not as an extension of liberty but as a violation of it, and as a challenge to the legitimacy of their definition of what it was to be white. The destruction of slavery in the Civil War didn't settle this contradiction. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 792-795 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:12:03 PM The resistance to what should have been the obvious consequences of losing the Civil War—full emancipation of the slaves and shared political control between blacks and whites—was so virulent and effective that the tangible outcome of the military struggle between the North and the South remained uncertain even twenty-five years after the issuance of President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 792-795 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:12:07 PM The resistance to what should have been the obvious consequences of losing the Civil War—full emancipation of the slaves and shared political control between blacks and whites—was so virulent and effective that the tangible outcome of the military struggle between the North and the South remained uncertain even twenty-five years after the issuance of President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 791-792 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:12:17 PM The Civil War settled definitively the question of the South's continued existence as a part of the United States, but in 1865 there was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and intellectual addiction to slavery. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 53 | Location 801-802 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:12:52 PM As the United States would learn many times in the ensuing 150 years, a military victor's intention to impose a new moral and political code on a conquered society was much easier to wish for than to attain. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 836-837 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:15:53 PM The extraordinary value of organizing a gang of slave men to quickly accomplish an arduous manual task—such as enlarging a mine and extracting its contents, or constructing railroads through the most inhospitable frontier regions—became obvious during the manpower shortages of wartime. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 55 | Location 841-843 | Added on Monday, April 1, 2019 9:16:29 PM But in the setting of industrial slavery—where only strong young males and a tiny number of female "washerwomen" and cooks were acquired, and no semblance of family interaction was possible—slaves were assets to be expended like mules and equipment. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 275-275 | Added on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 6:31:18 PM January 1868 hardly seemed an auspicious time to marry. It was raw, cold, and hungry. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 19 | Location 281-283 | Added on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 6:32:16 PM Not three years later, the valley remained a twisted ruin. Fallow fields. Burned barns. Machinery rusting at the bottoms of wells. Horses and mules dead or lost. The people, black and white, braced for a hard, anxious winter. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 338-339 | Added on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 6:35:50 PM They were creatures bought or bred for the production of wealth. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 389-390 | Added on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 6:39:19 PM Slave owners willing to transport their black workers to the new mining regions of Alabama and dig coal could avoid conscription into the southern armies. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 523-526 | Added on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 6:42:08 PM The loss of slaves left white farm families such as the Cottinghams, and even more so those on expansive plantations with scores or hundreds of slaves, not just financially but intellectually bereft. The slaves were the true experts in the tasks of cotton production on most farms; in many cases it was slaves who directed the gangs of other slaves in their daily work. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 537-537 | Added on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 6:42:26 PM Some white plantation owners attempted to coerce their former slaves into signing "lifetime contracts" to work on the farms. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 714-717 | Added on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 6:51:28 PM Gorgas, like Elisha Cottingham and so many other whites bewildered by both the ramifications of black emancipation and the continuing venality of renegade whites, was disconsolate. The South they first dreamed of making an independent republic grounded in slavery—and then dreamed of rebuilding as a rival to the North—appeared irretrievably broken. "What an end to our great hopes!" he wrote in his diary. "Is it possible that we were wrong?" ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 23 | Location 338-339 | Added on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 8:05:24 PM They were creatures bought or bred for the production of wealth. ========== The Farfarers (Farley Mowat) - Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 813-816 | Added on Tuesday, April 2, 2019 9:33:14 PM The life of mountain herdsmen was rigorously demanding. Most existing hillmen, of whom the Kurds and Iranian-Afghani are good examples, are tough, wiry, immensely enduring people of small-to-middle stature, with sharp features, black hair and eyes, and dark complexions. They are characterized by indomitable courage, fierce loyalties, and passionate allegiance to clan and country. They are almost certainly of Alban ancestry. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 26 | Location 389-390 | Added on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 11:34:21 AM Slave owners willing to transport their black workers to the new mining regions of Alabama and dig coal could avoid conscription into the southern armies. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 49 | Location 739-740 | Added on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 11:55:16 AM No more was he one of the "Cottingham niggers." ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 49 | Location 739-740 | Added on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 11:55:26 AM It was his name on the piece of paper, "Henry Cot-tinham." No more was he one of the "Cottingham niggers." ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 49 | Location 742-743 | Added on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 11:56:33 AM Henry Cottinham was a man, with a name, spelled just the way he had always said it. Freedom was an open field, a strong wife, and time to make his mark. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 49 | Location 745-746 | Added on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 11:59:53 AM Surely, that was freedom. ========== The Patch (John McPhee) - Your Highlight on page 191 | Location 2921-2922 | Added on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 9:24:59 PM He was mindful of his presence between writer and reader, and he wished to remain invisible while representing each. ========== The Land of Little Rain (Mary Hunter Austin) - Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 490-491 | Added on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 9:39:06 PM Young Shoshones are like young quail, knowing without teaching about feeding and hiding, and learning what civilized children never learn, to be still and to keep on being still, at the first hint of danger or strangeness. ========== The Farfarers (Farley Mowat) - Your Highlight on page 83 | Location 1270-1275 | Added on Thursday, April 4, 2019 10:13:52 PM Chief amongst the leaders was a man the Romans called Calgacus, who, according to Tacitus, treated his troops to the following resounding indictment of Rome and, indeed, of all empires in all time . . . including our own. The terrible Romans from whose oppression escape is vainly sought through obedience and submission [are] robbers of the world. Having by universal plundering exhausted the land, they even rob the sea. If their enemy be rich, they are rapacious. If poor, they lust for dominion over him. Neither east nor west has been able to satisfy them. They justify robbery, slaughter, and plunder with the lying name of Empire. They make a desolation, then call it peace. ========== Davy (Edgar Pangborn) - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 317-318 | Added on Monday, April 8, 2019 9:04:08 PM Religion requires a specially cultivated deafness to contradiction which I'm too sinful to learn. ========== Davy (Edgar Pangborn) - Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 1478-1485 | Added on Tuesday, April 9, 2019 8:45:50 PM It's not true to say there's only one first time. My first was Caron who understood what game the grown-ups played, and we played it the witless childhood way, maybe better than most tumbling whelps because in a more-thanchildhood way we did honestly cherish each other as people. But you may come to the first time with another as though the past were swept aside and you the same as virgin, entering a garden so new that all flowers taken in the past seem to belong to young years, smaller passions. I don't suppose this could be true for the men who are driven in a mischancy race from one woman to the next, never staying long enough with one to learn anything except that she has--what a surprise!--the same pattern of organs as the last. Nor could it be true of the female collectors of scalps. But it's true for anyone like myself to whom women are people, and is probably true for a woman who can see a bedmate is a friend and a person, not just an enemy or a child substitute or a phallus with legs. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1217-1218 | Added on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 4:13:27 PM But as the state turned ever larger blocs of African Americans over to private companies, an organized market for prisoners began to evolve. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1217-1218 | Added on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 4:13:41 PM But as the state turned ever larger blocs of African Americans over to private companies, an organized market for prisoners began to evolve. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1217-1218 | Added on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 4:13:44 PM But as the state turned ever larger blocs of African Americans over to private companies, an organized market for prisoners began to evolve. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1218-1220 | Added on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 4:13:55 PM Soon, labor agents for the mining and timber companies were scouring the countryside to make arrangements for acquiring able-bodied black laborers—just as John Tillman had done to locate slaves for the Shelby Iron Works during the war, just as Rev. Starr's son was doing when Scip Cottinham was leased to the Brierfield furnaces in the 1860s. ========== Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (Douglas A. Blackmon) - Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1221-1223 | Added on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 4:14:13 PM The key distinction, however, between the sheriff and the old slave masters was that since these African Americans were not his or anyone else's permanent property, he had no reason for concern about how they were treated by their new keepers or whether they survived at all. ========== Davy (Edgar Pangborn) - Your Highlight on page 256 | Location 3917-3918 | Added on Friday, April 12, 2019 10:11:34 PM you think he didn't, Davy? Nay, I sometimes wonder if loners aren't the only ones who do." ========== Davy (Edgar Pangborn) - Your Highlight on page 256 | Location 3914-3918 | Added on Friday, April 12, 2019 10:11:40 PM "Be _you_," Mam Laura asked me, "a loner by trade?" "Likely I must be," I said, "the way when my Da makes that remark it rings a bell in me. But I like people." "So does your Da," Mam Laura said--"did you think he didn't, Davy? Nay, I sometimes wonder if loners aren't the only ones who do." ========== Davy (Edgar Pangborn) - Your Highlight on page 267 | Location 4094-4098 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2019 10:24:17 PM What is it, this very certain destiny that overtakes all our visions, our most reasoned plans equally with our fantastic dreams? Maybe whenever we think of the future, as we must if we're to be human at all, the act is bound to include a something-too-much, as if with all due human absurdity we were expecting chance to alter its course at the impact of our noise. A boy imagined the great outriggers, the fine thirty-tonners bound east by the northern route; his mind saw their canvas tall, mighty, luminous in a golden haze. ========== Davy (Edgar Pangborn) - Your Highlight on page 267 | Location 4094-4097 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2019 10:24:32 PM What is it, this very certain destiny that overtakes all our visions, our most reasoned plans equally with our fantastic dreams? Maybe whenever we think of the future, as we must if we're to be human at all, the act is bound to include a something-too-much, as if with all due human absurdity we were expecting chance to ========== Davy (Edgar Pangborn) - Your Highlight on page 267 | Location 4094-4097 | Added on Sunday, April 14, 2019 10:24:38 PM What is it, this very certain destiny that overtakes all our visions, our most reasoned plans equally with our fantastic dreams? Maybe whenever we think of the future, as we must if we're to be human at all, the act is bound to include a something-too-much, as if with all due human absurdity we were expecting chance to alter its course at the impact of our noise. ========== Davy (Edgar Pangborn) - Your Highlight on page 318 | Location 4863-4866 | Added on Monday, April 15, 2019 11:35:57 PM The explorer's task has, I'd say, very little of the splendor a boy's imagination gives it. I dreamed a multitude of fancies lying in the sun before my cave on North Mountain; but Captain Barr and I are now much more decently concerned with survival biscuits and pemmican and sauerkraut, and trying to rebuild the head of the Morning Star a mite further aft if you'll excuse the expression. ========== The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 563-565 | Added on Thursday, April 18, 2019 9:38:13 PM Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you're wrong there- quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control ========== The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 37 | Location 560-562 | Added on Thursday, April 18, 2019 9:38:30 PM Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours- being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it. ========== The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) - Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 653-654 | Added on Thursday, April 18, 2019 9:47:35 PM "I got to figure," the tenant said. "We all got to figure. There's some way to stop this. It's not like lightning or earthquakes. We've got a bad thing made by men, and by God that's something we can change." ========== The Farfarers (Farley Mowat) - Your Highlight on page 149 | Location 2273-2279 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2019 8:26:02 PM First the blubber had to be diced into small pieces, then slowly heated “until the ile runs out o’ the gristle.” He stressed that the pot must not be allowed to boil or “‘twill be ruined, certainly.” When all the oil was floating free, the gristle was strained out. The pot was then pushed to the back of the stove and allowed to simmer until the contents became “thick as treacle.” Stored in an outhouse over a period of several months, it would eventually “cure” into a black substance too thick to spoon, though not quite thick enough to cut with a knife, in which form it would keep indefinitely. I carefully noted all this in my journal, together with our host’s final remarks: “Yiss, bye, I sloshes dat stuff on me boots, me house, me canoes, and me old Peterhead boat. And nary a drap o’ water’ll get into ary one of they!” ========== The Farfarers (Farley Mowat) - Your Highlight on page 149 | Location 2279-2280 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2019 8:26:24 PM I can testify to the effectiveness of seal tar, and also to its redolence, which can be breathtaking and would make it a difficult product to market in our fastidious era. ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 6 | Location 78-78 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2019 10:18:39 PM tragedy has taken place on our land, and even though it did not take place on our watch, we are its inheritors, and the earth remembers. ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 894-895 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2019 11:08:42 PM told him I didn’t know. “I think ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 893-897 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2019 11:08:51 PM tell you, Nerburn, being an Indian isn’t easy. For a lot of years America just wanted to destroy us. Now, all of a sudden, we’re the only group people are trying to get into. Why do you think this is?” I told him I didn’t know. “I think it’s because the white people know we had something that was real, that we lived the way the Creator meant people to live on this land. They want that. They know that the white people are messing up. If they say they are part Indian, it’s like being part of what we have.” ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 975-975 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2019 11:28:39 PM “You don’t convince anyone by arguing. People make their decisions ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 975-975 | Added on Saturday, April 20, 2019 11:28:44 PM “You don’t convince anyone by arguing. People make their decisions in their heart. Talk doesn’t touch my heart. ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 112 | Location 1714-1718 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2019 12:46:42 AM We know that white people have an endless hunger. They want to consume everything and make it part of them. Even if they don’t own it physically, they want to own it spiritually. That is what is happening with the Indian, now. The white people want to own us spiritually. You want to swallow us so you can say you are us. This is something new. Before you wanted to make us you. But now you are unhappy with who you are, so you want to make you into us. You want our ceremonies and our ways so you can say you are spiritual. You are trying to become white Indians. ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 165 | Location 2524-2525 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2019 3:00:23 PM “You want to know how to be like Indians? Live close to the earth. Get rid of some of your things. Help each other. Talk to the Creator. Be quiet more. Listen to the earth instead of building things on it all the time. ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 178 | Location 2715-2718 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2019 3:11:50 PM “There are leaders and there are rulers. We Indians are used to leaders. When our leaders don’t lead, we walk away from them. When they lead well, we stay with them. “White people never understood this. Your system makes people rulers by law, even if they are not leaders. We have had to accept your way, because you made us Indians make constitutions and form governments. But we don’t like it and we don’t think it is right. ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 181 | Location 2769-2771 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2019 3:23:37 PM “That is not the way it should be. Good leaders wait to be called and they give up their power when they are no longer needed. Selfish men and fools put themselves first and keep their power until someone throws them out. It is no good to have a way where selfish men and fools fight with each other to be leaders, while the good ones watch. ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 187 | Location 2853-2854 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2019 3:31:12 PM Watching him was like watching a night sea swirl and change. His deep anger would rise, then subside, then emerge again somewhere else, only to be washed over by a great sorrow. ========== Neither Wolf nor Dog (Kent Nerburn) - Your Highlight on page 222 | Location 3403-3405 | Added on Sunday, April 21, 2019 6:38:32 PM “Things are different for us. We know who we are. We are mothers. We are the bearers of our race. It gives us status to do other things. We are honored for what we are. If our men are treating us poorly, it is because they are shamed. Why should we want to set ourselves against them and call that liberation? Until they are free in their hearts again, none of us Indian people will be free.” ==========