Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majoram gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith, or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?
But where is the jury who decides whether devotion is of the ‘right’ or the ‘misguided’ kind?
Hierarchies are ‘dissectible’ into their constituent branches, on which the holons form the ‘nodes’. The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises is called its ‘depth’, and the number of holons on any given level its ‘span’.
The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence, out of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries-where, characteristically, the same discovery is often made by several individuals at the same time.
The humorist thrives on deformity; the artist deforms the world to recreate it in his own image.
War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars; and loyalty is a noble thing. I do not mean, of course, that loyalty must necessarily be expressed in group violence-merely that it is a precondition of it; that self-transcending devotion, all through history, has acted as a catalyst for secondary aggression.
I have coined the term ‘bisociation’ in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane’, as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane. The former may be called single-minded, the latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.
We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see.
Insight depends on the multi-dimensional analysis of the input in its various aspects, on extracting relevant messages from irrelevant noise, identifying patterns in the mosaic until it has become saturated, as it were, with meaning.
An emotionally maladjusted species, we have the uncanny power of turning every blessing, including language, into a curse.
Die in silence.
Why, if evolution were a free for all, restrained only by selection for fitness, why did Australia not produce some of the bug-eyed monsters of science fiction? The only moderately unorthodox creation of that isolated island in a hundred million years are the kangaroos and wallabies; the rest of its fauna consists of rather poor replicas of more efficient placental types-vatiations on a limited number of archetypal themes.
The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical.
The Copernican system was not a truly heliocentric one; it was a vacuo-centric system, so to speak.
Newcomers from Paris transmitted to us Goebbels’ ironic congratulations on our cordial reception in the Land of Freedom. Voelkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi organ, published a list of anti-Nazi authors interned in France, asking them whether they still clung to the blessings of democracy. It was cheap irony, but it cut to the quick; it hurt and stung and burnt.
The eight sin, deadlier than all- self transcendence through misplaced devotion-is not included in the list.
The pre-Socratics frequently wrote their treatises in verse; the ancient Peruvian language had a single word-hamavec-for poet and inventor.
Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom.
Saints and mystics spend their lives trying to escape the prison of the flesh;.
Could some similar paradox be responsible for the crisis in modern physics – some unconscious blockage which prevents us from seeing the ‘obvious’, and compels us to persist in our own version of wavemechanical double-think?