When you are tightly boxed in or cornered – all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshipped assumptions – all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned.
I believe that the good that people do, small though it may appear, has more to do with the good that manifests broadly in the world than people think, and I believe the same about evil. We are each more responsible for the state of the world than we believe, or would feel comfortable believing.
If you confront the suffering and malevolence, and if you do that truthfully and courageously, you are stronger, your family is stronger, and the world is a better place. The alternative is resentment, and that makes everything worse.
It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter.
With careful searching, with careful attention, you might tip the balance toward opportunity and against obstacle sufficiently so that life is clearly worth living, despite its fragility and suffering.
Search for the correct words. Organize those words into the correct sentences, and those sentences into the correct paragraphs. The past can be redeemed, when reduced by precise language to its essence.
Osiris stopped paying attention to how his kingdom was being run. That was willful blindness, and there is no blaming that on mere age.
Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute.
Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.
He who has a sword, and knows how to use it, but keeps it sheathed shall inherit the earth.
In truth, what you need – what you deserve, after all – is someone exactly as imperfect as you.
When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening, and talking – but mostly listening. Listening is paying attention. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen.
What shall I do with a lying man? Let him speak so he may reveal himself.
If you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, “What should I do today?” in a manner that means “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?
Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.
Ressentiment8 – hostile resentment – occurs when individual failure or insufficient status is blamed both on the system within which that failure or lowly status occurs and then, most particularly, on the people who have achieved success and high status within that system.
Someone assigned a pointless or even counterproductive task will deflate, if they have any sense, and find within themselves very little motivation to carry out the assignment. Why? Because every fiber of their genuine being fights against that necessity.
Assuming that others think as they do, they expect – instead of ensuring – reciprocity for their thoughtful actions. When this does not happen, they don’t speak up. They do not or cannot straightforwardly demand recognition. The dark side of their characters emerges, because of their subjugation, and they become resentful.
Now, an idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists – Freud and Jung paramount among them – insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas.
We do the things we do because we think those things important, compared to all the other things that could be important. We regard what we value as worthy of sacrifice and pursuit. That worthiness motivates us to act, despite the fact that action is difficult and dangerous.