You are a genius: January 2017

Sunday, January 22, 2017

You are a Unique Spirit

No spirit like you has ever come into the world before. No spirit like you will ever come into the world again. Remind yourself of this every day.

I am unique, individual, exceptional, irreproducible, irreplaceable. I have no interest in this unrighteous world that tells me I must be a cog in its gears, a part in its machine.

The world should come to me, in deference and modesty, asking me what I am. But instead the world comes to me in arrogance and presumption, telling me what I should be.

I have no interest in learning to admire the same celebrities the world admires. I have no interest in learning to trade the same currency the world trades.

The world should be coming to me with eyes wide open, preparing to admire my courage and learn the ways of my unique, irreplaceable spirit. But instead the world comes to me with eyes glazed over, admiring celebrities and currencies, commanding me to admire them too.

I and I alone must define the path I take in crossing the stream of life. If I allow the world to define my path for me, I have failed in the most sacred duty of the human spirit. I have abandoned the unique spirit I really am, and put in its place the faceless, mindless, mediocre spirit of the crowd.

The unique spirit with the courage to defy the crowd has always been persecuted. To hold fast to your unique spirit you must learn to love that persecution.

Every memory of being taunted and ridiculed for being different sparkles with a gleam of joyful innocence. Every blow I received for refusing to obey shines as a glorious victory.

Why are we all so eager to capitulate, acquiesce, conform and obey? Why do we so readily give up what is exceptional and irreplaceable in ourselves?

When I hear people talking about celebrities, I ask, "Why do you squander admiration on something outside yourself rather than finding and perfecting your own unique spirit?"

YOU are the sole celebrity I admire. When you cast aside all imitation and obedience, and I see the concealed beauty underneath, I am ready to applaud you.

The world gives you the illusion that you have chosen your celebrities. But when the world has identified the possible choices beforehand, in what sense did you really choose? Why not give the first person you meet today the same love and devotion you squandered yesterday on a celebrity chosen for you by the world?

Even supposing a celebrity is overflowing with talent and virtue, does this justify your choice to spend time with an electronically reproduced virtue, rather than striving to cultivate a real, living virtue in a real, living person? In someone present, not absent? In yourself and the people you meet?

Inside you is an irreverent spark, an unquenchable fire. When you are looking for something to admire, this is what you should be looking for. While you were busy admiring celebrities and currencies yesterday, you left the spark unnoticed. You left the fire untended. And it felt sad and neglected.

Every person you meet also has this spark and this fire. If you don't see the spark and the fire in the person next to you, if you look for it instead in electronically reproduced images and sounds, you have not looked hard enough. Love the real person beside you in all their uniqueness and singularity. Don't squander your love on electronic reproductions prepared by the millions.

Friday, January 6, 2017

Every Good Man is Free

Parents, teach your children to be free. Don't sell them into slavery. Teach them how to resist the urge to buy things, so they will be free to pursue virtue rather than money. Philo, in a book titled "Every Good Man is Free," shows just how much freedom we gain once we free ourselves from self-indulgence. Corrupt rulers rule us by offering enticements to the lower parts of the soul. The higher parts of the soul always reserve themselves for service to noble ends. The more we keep the lower part of the soul in check, the less obligation we have to corrupt rulers. Freedom means freedom to disobey those we can see are unkind and unjust. Freedom means freedom to obey those we can see for ourselves are better, nobler and wiser.

Here are some passages from Philo:

Our desire for health leads us to commit ourselves to physicians, but we show no willingness to cast off the soul-sickness of our untrained grossness by resorting to wise men.

Bodies have men as their masters, souls their vices and passions.

God and no mortal is my Sovereign.

He who has God alone for his leader, he alone is free.

If one looks with a penetrating eye into the facts, he will clearly perceive that no two things are so closely akin as independence of action and freedom, because the bad man has a multitude of encumbrances, such as love of money or reputation and pleasure, while the good man has none at all. He stands defiant and triumphant.

The good man … has learnt to set at naught the injunctions laid upon him by those most lawless rulers of the soul, inspired as he is by his ardent yearning for the freedom whose peculiar heritage it is that it obeys no orders and works no will but its own.

Homer often calls kings “shepherds of the people,” but nature more accurately applies the title to the good, since kings are more often in the position of the sheep than of the shepherd. They are led by strong drink and good looks and by baked meats and savory dishes and the dainties produced by cooks and confectioners, to say nothing of their craving for silver and gold and grander ambitions.

Those in whom anger or desire or any other passion, or again any insidious vice holds sway, are entirely enslaved, while all whose life is regulated by law are free. And right reason is an infallible law engraved not by this mortal or that and, therefore, perishable as he, nor on parchment slabs, and, therefore, soulless as they, but by immortal nature on the immortal mind, never to perish.

Glittering evil

So long as we continue to respect human beings who live in luxury while their neighbors suffer, who use their resources to impress others rather than to help others, we will never create a society based on love and care rather than strife and hate. A good society requires an aesthetic appreciation of goodness, which is entirely incompatible with admiration of opulence and grandeur. The monk is a hero. The mansion dweller is a villain. Our American aesthetic has tragically inverted the proper judgment of good and evil, and vaunted a glittering evil into the spotlight.

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It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.
Søren Kierkegaard

He who deems it important to keep aloof from the so-called rabble ... is as much to blame as a coward who hides himself from his enemy because he fears defeat.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If, while hurrying ostensibly to the temple of truth, we hand the reins over to our personal interests which look aside at very different guiding stars, for instance at the tastes and foibles of our contemporaries, at the established religion, but in particular at the hints and suggestions of those at the head of affairs, then how shall we ever reach the high, precipitous, bare rock whereon stands the temple of truth?
Schopenhauer

When I speak of the purpose of self-culture, I mean that it should be sincere. In other words, we must make self-culture really and truly our end, or choose it for its own sake, and not merely as a means or instrument of something else. And here I touch a common and very pernicious error. Not a few persons desire to improve themselves only to get property and to rise in the world; but such do not properly choose improvement, but something outward and foreign to themselves; and so low an impulse can produce only a stinted, partial, uncertain growth. A man, as I have said, is to cultivate himself because he is a man. He is to start with the conviction that there is something greater within him than in the whole material creation, than in all the worlds which press on the eye and ear; and that inward improvements have a worth and dignity in themselves quite distinct from the power they give over outward things.
William Ellery Channing

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair,—the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish,—to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself,—an hypæthral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?
Henry David Thoreau

The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I worship freedom; I abhor restraint, trouble, dependence. As long as the money in my purse lasts, it assures my independence; it relieves me of the trouble of finding expedients to replenish it, a necessity which has always inspired me with dread; but the fear of seeing it exhausted makes me hoard it carefully. The money which a man possesses is the instrument of freedom.; that which we eagerly pursue is the instrument of slavery. Therefore I hold fast to that which I have, and desire nothing.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists then in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor to think well; this is the principle of morality.
Blaise Pascal

Just as the eye which constantly shifts its gaze, now turning to the right or to the left, now incessantly peering up and down, cannot see distinctly what lies before it, ... so too man's mind when distracted by his countless worldly cares cannot focus itself distinctly on the truth.
Basil of Caesarea

It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts.
Immanuel Kant

The use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”
Matthew Arnold

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must”, then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.
Rainer Maria Rilke

A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule.
Herman Hesse

Most of the time man does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently, piece by piece. We thus save ourselves from willing: principle of the economy of the will. But the higher man always experiences this as thoroughly immoral.
Otto Weininger

Everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to “the human soul” at large.
Oswald Spengler

The will to power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.
Oswald Spengler

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence. In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust; and if we examine it very closely, it will be perceived that religion itself holds sway there much less as a doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion.
Alexis de Tocqueville

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit our the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
T. S. Eliot

I call that mind free, which masters the senses, which protects itself against animal appetites, which contemns pleasure and pain in comparison to its own energy, which penetrates beneath the body and recognises its own reality and greatness, which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.

I call that mind free, which escapes the bondage of matter, which, instead of stopping at the material universe and making it a prison wall, passes beyond it to its Author, and finds in the radiant signatures which everywhere bears of the Infinite Spirit, helps to its own spiritual enlightenment.

I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.

I call that mind free, which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect, which recognises in all human beings the image of God and the rights of his children, which delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering wherever they are seen, which conquers pride, anger, and sloth, and offers itself up a willing victim to the cause of mankind.
William Ellery Channing

The craze for society, diversion, amusement, and luxury of every kind ... lead many to extravagance and so to misery. Nothing protects us so surely from this wrong turning as inner wealth, the wealth of the mind, for the more eminent it becomes, the less room does it leave for boredom. The inexhaustible activity of ideas, their constantly renewed play with the manifold phenomena of the inner and outer worlds, the power and urge always to make different combinations of them, all these put the eminent mind, apart from moments of relaxation, quite beyond the reach of boredom.
Schopenhauer

A taste for the best books, as a taste for whatever is best, is acquired; and it can be acquired only by long study and practice. It is a result of free and disinterested self-activity, of efforts to attain what rarely brings other reward than the consciousness of having loved and striven for the best.
John Lancaster Spalding

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. ... Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.
Friedrich Nietzsche

You are a genius

Sunday, January 22, 2017

You are a Unique Spirit

Friday, January 6, 2017

Every Good Man is Free

Glittering evil

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