Previous William Thomas Sherman Page quotes and observations
Second person: “Compared to what?”
As an illustration of one approach to this suggestion, you might ask yourself the question whose or what process came immediately before and seem to have brought forth the image? Having identified and discerned this, the undesirable image(s) will be eliminated, or else at least more easily brought under control and placed it its proper context.
Instant Yogi: "Me" is real, but not as real as the great "Me" which is Brahman, the One, the Eternal, of which all other selves are innumerable and potentially misleading (or perhaps, in very special instances, helpful) manifestations. However, through informed mediation and devotion one can lose one's false self and attain the True Reality.
Instant Nirvana: God has no self. You have no self. Your enemy has no self. "No one" has a self, and self and all selves are merely illusions which obscure an infinite and great light.
Instant Tao: Sometimes to be for someone is to be against them, and sometimes to be against them is to be for them. Less is often more -- more often than you might think.
The hands of Frankenstein
reaching out to strangle an entire nation!
People sold whole
as food to a ghost
by well meaning economists
and deceived people!
McMartin Pre-School case
Silence of the Lambs
Green River Killer
Jonestown
Post office shootings
Waco Massacre
Columbine Shooting
Attacks on the White House with private plane and assault rifle
Independence Day
Heaven's Gate
Oklahoma Bombings
Television journalism
Television Court
Reality Television
The War on Drugs
Kill Bill
Check first with your doctor
The War on Terrorism
The magic of Skittles
Anger management
MSNBC
The Passion of the Christ
Windows XP
No books, no music, no films, no computer programs. Not really.
Our favorite haunts and landmarks shutting down, old friends must bid farewell too soon.
If you hadn't allowed yourself to be so foolishly taken advantage of, you would have had no need of taking such unfair advantage of us!
You know this, but don’t know that.
If you’d known that (and not this) would you really be any different than you are?
It seems that how we deal with what we know (not so much what we know) that our real and deeper selves can be affected. People, like atoms, will normally only change and interact on the surface. If the heat of a given person’s love or desire is great enough, can our own nucleus, or core selves, be affected?
We are not really what we know so much as what we love, and only in this sense would knowing this, or not knowing that make any difference, that is to say if the knowing significantly affected what we love. But it (or they) would have to really be something, now wouldn’t it?
Sometimes when this is there
it is no longer really this.
If somewhere else
it might become merely that
or perhaps something better.
Place and role is everything.
In a different place everything
can or could become something else, but apparently not just anything.
Everything must stop at the infinite, and this includes all that ails you – even time and death. Where then will we find the true infinite?
For the scientist and cognitive philosopher, the infinite, unless assumed to be a notion innate and intuitive to us, can only be a logical, theoretical, or practical construct. If not innate to us, this construct cannot be the true infinite.*
Religious faith, on the other hand, sees itself in a position to insist that the infinite is real and might call or link it to God, Brahman, Nirvana, the Tao, bhakti, Christ’s love – all of which understandably allow of wide interpretation and degrees of comprehension, and often times are expressed by what they are not.
* Note. Some nominalist philosophers, such as Chrysippus, have distinguished between the infinite versus relations or processes which go on infinitely: dismissing the reality of the former while maintaining the feasibility of the latter. So by this view, if you like it, the One (or else the universe) is not infinite or the infinite, but is infinitely divisible.
Enemies beware, keep a proper distance,
Else we'll make you stare at our firm resistance;
Let alone the lads who are freedom tasting,
Don't forget our dads gave you once a basting.
To protect our rights 'gainst your flint and triggers
See on yonder heights our patriotic diggers.
Men of ev'ry age, color, rank, profession,
Ardently engaged, labor in succession.
Pick-axe, shovel, spade, crow-bar, hoe and barrow
Better not invade, Yankees have the marrow.
Grandeur leaves her towers, poverty her hovel,
Here to join their powers with the hoe and shovel.
Here the merchant toils with the patriot sawyer,
There the laborer smiles, near him sweats the lawyer.
Here the mason builds Freedom's shrine of glory,
While the painter guilds the immortal story.
Blacksmiths catch the flame, grocers feed the spirit,
Printers share the fame, and record their merit.
Pick-axe, shovel, spade, crow-bar, hoe and barrow
Better not invade, Yankees have the marrow.
Scholars leave their schools with patriotic teachers
Farmers seize their tools, headed by their preachers,
How they break the soil - brewers, butchers, bakers -
Here the doctors toil, there the undertakers.
Bright Apollo's sons leave their pipe and tabor,
Mid the roar of guns join the martial labor,
Round the embattled plain in sweet concord rally,
And in freedom's strain sing the foes finale.
Pick-axe, shovel, spade, crow-bar, hoe and barrow
Better not invade, Yankees have the marrow.
Better not invade, don't forget the spirit
Which our dads displayed and their sons inherit.
If you still advance, friendly caution slighting,
You may get by chance a bellyful of fighting!
Plumbers, founders, dyers, tinmen, turners, shavers,
Sweepers, clerks, and criers, jewelers and engravers,
Clothiers, drapers, players, cartmen, hatters, tailors,
Gaugers, sealers, weighers, carpenters and sailors!
Pick-axe, shovel, spade, crow-bar, hoe and barrow
Better not invade, Yankees have the marrow.
(Note. For ease of reproduction to html, the stanzas' format, as presented here, is slightly modified from the original.)
The Transmutation of Form, using a piece of music as illustration.
"Heart" + "Mind," perhaps prompted by an emotion, inspiration and imagination (form a1) -->
Musical composition felt/conceptualized (form a2) -->
Musical composition transcribed to notation (form a3) -->
The same now performed by a musician reading from the sheet music (form a4) -->
The music performed takes the form of air/sound waves (form a5) -->
The same music recorded (e.g. digitized) onto recording equipment (form a6) -->
The music duplicated from the recording equipment onto say a CD (form a7) -->
The music as recorded on disk now transferred by means of a player to the air waves of a given listener (form a8) -->
The music listened to and experienced by some one, perhaps moving their heart and mind (form a9)
Of course, there are other steps or forms (or sub-steps or sub-forms) along the way which might be included, but 1 through 9 here will serve our purpose. Now how was it possible for form a1 to retain its shape (in some fashion) all the way to form a9? And what was it that was retained? At what given point (before, during, or after any given form “a”) was the essential "form" most real? Or was none more real than any of the others? If none in particular are most real as such, can we speak of the form having an essence, and if so in what does this essence lay? {Note. We also might concievably apply the same analysis and questions to “forms” such as thoughts and brain waves.)
