Statistics can be deceptive: not smoking is 100% fatal.
Statistics are of two varieties: scatology and eschatology. The former examines the outcomes of previous events; the latter predicts events to come.
Faith is blind only when you close your eyes to truth.
"Il y a moins d'inconvénients à être
fous avec des fous qu' à être sage tout seul."
Denis Diderot.
"There are fewer inconveniences in being a fool with
the fools than in being wise all alone."
(Translation by R. Tanney)
The mind is like a refrigerator: closed, it is dark inside; open it, and the light comes on. (Deep Eddy)
If you are alive and well, there is no problem.
If you are ill and recover, there is no problem.
If you are dead and in Heaven, there is no problem.
If you are dead and in Hell and take responsibility for
the behavior that put you there, at last you are wise.
If you are dead and in Hell and still don't know who
is responsible, that is a problem.
If you will be wise, take responsibility seriously.
There is an infinite amount of work to be done:
no matter how
much you do today, when you wake in the morning, there
will still
be an infinite amount of work to be done. Pace
yourself!
Live as if today is your last day. Someday this
will be the true
case, and your whole life will be enriched by living
in preparation
for it. There is only today. Be prepared!
Spinoza said that we examine the world through what he
called
"the lens of philosophy." He said this because
he was a lens
maker. I am grateful that he was not a proctologist.
With apologies
to Severn Darden in his "Professor Walter von der Vögelweide"
character.
Every day you have a choice of making the world easier
or more
difficult for yourself and others to get along in.
There is no acceptable
excuse for making it more difficult.
Every day you have a choice of making the world easier
or harder
for everyone to live in. Which choice is wise?
This is Truth: T.
"The real world is amazingly rich and complex." Eliseo Vivas.
If I say I believe something is true, the test of this
is whether I
behave as if it were so. There is no requirement
that I coerce
you to behave the same way or to believe the same thing
to be
true.
"God exists" is an analytic statement. The only
meaningful questions
about God are questions about character.
Try this experiment: for five minutes behave as
if you have free
will; then for five minutes, behave as if what you do
is predetermined.
What was the difference? Were you predetermined
to act as if
you had free will? Did you choose freely to behave
as if your
acts were predetermined? Whatever your belief,
there is no objective
test to prove it.
Try this experiment: close your eyes and imagine
something, whether
a scene, an action, an object, a person, or nothingness.
Try to do this
without the use of words. Can you think without
words, using only
image and sound?
There is a perfectly good neural network explanation for
everything
you experience, for every thought, for every perception,
for every
mental mechanism. Yet consciousness remains a mystery.
The value of a work of art, or of an aesthetic experience,
lies
in its ability to evoke a response. For each person,
this value is different,
but some works are more universally evocative than others.
Behave as if you are being watched by the final arbiter
of your
fate, whether that watcher be God, or your mother, or
your own
timeless soul.
Temptation is explained by the unconscious desire of the
neural
network as it exerts itself against your rational view
of a situation.
Your unconscious analysis of cues beyond your awareness
believes
that your natural desires can be satisfied through performing
some particular
act. Your conscious mind rebels only because it
recognizes principles
that conflict with performing that act. It is in
making such
choices that we create our ethical principles, and come
to the
realization of who we are.
Any concept which cannot be expressed on one page is too complex.
Love yourself: you are all you've got and all you'll ever have. (Deep Eddy)
Time and space are not infinitely divisible. There
is a smallest
amount of time: this I call a Momentum. There
is a smallest
space: this is a Nowhere. The smallest entity
which is the difference
between being and not being is termed a Quirk.
Questions about
reality at its most fundamental are questions about the
nature,
origin, interaction and qualities of the referents of
these terms.
The universe is discontinuous: it occurs in discrete frames
like
the frames of a motion picture. We experience it
as continuous
in the same way as we experience a movie as continuous,
even though
we know it is simply one frame after another.
History is the fiction we use to describe the results
of events.
Some analyses are more detailed than others, some more
based
on factual evidence than others, but in the end, all
historical
descriptions are interpretations. History is our
account
of what we believe is of value.
Dream what you will, you find undeniable joy and
comfort only
in what is. Reflect on this! It may not be true.
There is only today. Do not argue about history
whether personal, cultural,
national, ethnic, natural or spiritual. What matters
is now:
where do we go from here? What should we do next,
given the
current situation. We must agree, not on the past,
but on the
present. Arguing about who said what to whom a
week ago is not
profitable; ask what it is each wishes to say now.
There is only today. We must learn from the past,
and prepare
for the future, but now is when we live.
From a different perspective, we live always in the past:
by the time you are aware of a thought,
your neural network has already thought it.
By the time you perceive an event, it has already happened.
"Now then" is not an oxymoron, but a statement of fact.
Living is the process of discovering who we are.
I greet each day with a great deal of curiosity.
There is a strong relationship between memory and music.
How
many songs do you know?
Your characterization of others is always a projection
based on
your internal model of your perception of them.
Whatever you
think of them, the thoughts are yours alone, and may
or may not
be an adequate representation of reality.
"You are innocent when you dream." Tom Waits.
"A riddle's just a ticket for a dreamer." Tom Waits.
"Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held
me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the
sea."
Dylan Thomas.
"Tom Waits for no man." Dennis Dittiacur.
"Death, stay thy phantoms!" The Fugs.
"Who's to say?
One who knows.
Who knows?
Who's to say?" A. J. Pasquarello.
Three things must be considered: what is, what happens,
and how
we value these things.
If we define a thought as the least possible part of awareness,
then we may realize that awareness comes at the end of
the brain
event that represents having that thought. How
does awareness
have any effect on what we think, or on the outcome of
that brain
event? You can't think a thought before you think
it. The brain
event has already happened. The outcome of this
event may provide
a modifying factor for the next brain event, the outcome
of which
you will be aware of when it is complete. In order
to claim that
your in some way consciousness represents your will requires
that
there be some initial willful input to the chain of brain
events
leading to the current outcome of thinking. That
expression of
will must also be conscious, and therefore also the result
of
a brain event over which you exercised no control. Thinking
is
a matter of becoming aware of what your brain is doing.
How can one determine what the purpose of life is, other
than
through living it, and seeing what the result is after
the end?
I visited a friend who was in the hospital dying of lung
and brain
cancer. We went outside for a smoke, and I told
him this: I
once attended a holistic health conference, where, for
two days,
they told me that everything I enjoy doing except eating
lettuce
is bad for me (I'm sure some objection will arise to
lettuce-eating
sooner or later). I addressed the conference leader,
and said,
"If I must stop doing all the things I enjoy now, what
is my motivation
for wanting to live longer? What good is an additional
ten years
of a life I do not enjoy?" The conference leader
had no response.
I asked my dying friend what he, who was in the best
position
to address such a question, thought of my question.
He replied,
"I smoked cigarettes for forty-five years. I lived a
full life,
and enjoyed myself. I wouldn't give back a single
cigarette."
When someone is depressed, especially if I am the one
depressed,
I ask, "Where does it hurt now? Show me the pain!"
If my body
is not injured, then my attitude is the source of my
discomfort,
and I am responsible for maintaining that attitude or
changing it.
God is immobile: if God is everywhere, He has nowhere
to move
to. In order to move, something must first be one
place and not
another, and subsequently be not in the first place,
but in the
second. If He is already in all places, He cannot
move. There
is nowhere else to go.
Christ was an over-achiever: according to Christian tradition,
Christ worked in Sheol the Saturday between Good Friday
and Easter.
I have a suspicion that the first person He shook hands
with
after leaving the cross was the recently-hanged Judas,
who had,
after all, repented and given back the thirty pieces
of silver.