Human matter

Meditations II

Modern man dreads and ridicules subjectivity. He believes that, in order to find the truth, he must be fully objective, and must exclude every single trace of subjectivity from his inquiries and speculations. Subjectivity, however, exists, and is part of reality. It is among the ingredients that make up the fullness of reality, the ultimate truth that we so badly want to decipher. By excluding subjectivity from our investigations, we deliberately prevent ourselves from understanding and…
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Before

Before you see anything, you see yourself. In other words, everything you see and experience is filtered through your personal frame of reference, and therefore everything gains a unique sense in your mind which sense cannot be shared with anyone else in the exact same way. But this is only the most superficial aspect of the fact that before you see anything, you see yourself. Coming to the world at a certain point of a…
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Human animal

Reading this college psychology textbook. In every single sentence, it pushes the idea that man is an animal. The book is abounding in sentences like “The key is the amount of time an animal, when free to do anything, engages in a specific behavior associated with the reinforcer. For instance, given freedom of choice, children more often eat ice cream than spinach.” Or: “nonhuman animals.” For some reason, the book’s authors feel the urge to…
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Education

Schools do a great job only if they help students realize that their voice is not the only voice, their interests are not the only interests, and their ideology is not the only ideology in the world. Only if students grow able to realize that there are billions of other realities besides their individual little realities, and billions of other worlds besides their individual little worlds, can schools claim that they not only taught, but truly…
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Advanced civilization

Man is born free as an animal. Yet he consigns his life to slavery: socially, collectively, and on an individual voluntary level as well. We call the prison cells of our civilization work, education, welfare, honor, order, and social system, though by all appearances reality is no more than a broken, dysfunctional, unjust, and inhuman arrangement for existence. In its present form, work and its due compensation is a false, lying, and hazardous concept. Self-deception….
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Money and morality

Money doesn’t make one happy. Doesn’t it? Money doesn’t make you a better person. Doesn’t it? Until recently, I readily agreed with claims like these. I idealized noble poverty and humble austerity, and wanted to convince myself that money was a distracting and corrupting agent in life that had to be put strictly after moral rectitude, honesty, spirituality, and all emotional and ethical respects of human existence. I charmingly ignored that without money (most precisely, without…
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Beyond meanings

At  the root of human existence there is an underlying desire for community and connection. At the center of all human relationships there is a deep longing for shared meaning and connection, not a desire for self-preservation or material gain. Perhaps the purest manifestation of such inherent human longing is sexuality. Not animal mating, but ideology-laden human-divine sexuality. The ideology behind sexuality is the face of conscious existence and the shine of God. Our yearning for…
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Protest

When I say that the Church is dying, most religious people start fighting against my notion, and begin to prove that their Church is strong and eternal. They seem to defend their Church and religion at all costs, with the same blind irrationality as animals protect their young. Clearly, no rationale, proof, evidence, argumentation, or reasoning can persuade them at all. But why? Would God die if the Church died? Would the end of the…
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Mask

Mask

I noticed that in company, especially in company of strangers, most people do not show their real face, but put on and play sham roles, hold the shield of imaginary personalities before themselves that they believe to be funny, marketable, fashionable, and trendy. It is though very easy to discriminate someone playing a role from being themself. Interestingly, these put-on roles and sham personalities are always much less interesting, original, and attractive than the real…
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What do we really celebrate on New Year’s Eve?

Around midnight, hideous clamor, and infernal noise woke me. Outside, explosions echoed throughout the streets, while my neighbors from all sides went crazy within their own little apartment-worlds, bursting into grotesque commotion. It happened to be the midnight of December 31. Since the world made it impossible for me to sleep, I couldn’t help but start ruminating. No apparent reason whatsoever to celebrate anything tonight, yet the world still does. Why? What special occasion is…
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Reading in the Modern Age

Great writing by Nicholas Carr on how the Internet affects reading. I cannot help but answer with Rob Weatherhead’s article Say It Quick, Say It Well – The Attention Span of a Modern Internet Consumer published on www.theguardian.com. Rob Weatherhead is digital operations director at MediaCom. His following article is a professional reference about efficient advertisement and website construction techniques for the modern salesman. “Media organizations must adapt to cater for a generation of internet consumers who expect…
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