Bryant McGill's Blog, page 88

Our receiving expands with our gratitude

It is good to have a dream, as long as the dream does not have you. Ambition can form an impenetrable barrier for those who fail to acknowledge what they already are. Nothing grows in the shadow of want without the sunlight of acknowledging your fullness. You already have and are; your value is intrinsic. The reason you can accomplish something is because you already had it within you. Our value is mirrored back to us through success only when we share the treasure we already are. When you a...

Be beautiful and life will protect you

Being love-filled and beautiful is almost unconquerable. Love absorbs the hard blows of rigid fists; love surrounds, softens and tires violence and force. If you are confronted, bullied or intimidated while expressing your voice of reason, remember this protective strategy--be beautiful. Being love-filled and beautiful is one of the most powerful defenses that one can employ. Imagine that you are a beautiful and unique flower growing in life's garden. Most people will not intentionally step...

Let truth, beauty and love be your guide

Let truth, beauty and love be your guide. Truth is found in the exaltation and protection of beauty. Beauty is like a pristine peak on the landscape of life; yet un-savaged by man’s gruesome defilements. Simple truth is ever-awaiting under the patina of common falsehoods. And how can you know something as subjective as truth? You can know something is a lie when it has no love in it. Hence, truth is the spirit of all that is good and worthy through loving. Love has perfect eyes for beauty. L...

Paradise Lost: Technology, Cubical Prison-Tombs and Screen-Irradiated Mummies

There are so many people in need, who are quietly hovering near the abysmal edges of emotional bankruptcy. Life is dynamic, and it can be ugly. Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that life was, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden that, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Too many people are living those lives of quiet desperation. This is one of the reasons so many people anesthetize themselves with a never-ending, gluttonous cons...

Mind-Flowers are Blooming Everywhere and Your Voice Matters!

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Fr...

State Secessions, Overthrow by Force or Democratic Reforms?

What are your opinions on how to address our national problems: State secessions, overthrow of the federal government by force or democratic reform through the system?

A Natural Rights Declaration from Unrighteous Dominion

We submit to the whole and unimpeachable truth that all flesh and blood souls are sovereign entities, accountable only to their own consciences, and to the natural laws that envelop all creatures. Human law is NOT an extension of natural law, except where it is applied to on...

Vocabulary: Word List 10

surreptitious : done, made, or gotten by stealth; also, marked by stealth. superannuated : belonging to a superannuation plan; obsolete through age or new technological or intellectual developments. parsimony : excessive sparingness in the expenditure of money. sycophant : a servile or abject flatterer; an obsequious person, a toady; a person who acts obsequiously toward someone important in order to gain advantage. transgenic : an organism whose genome has been altered by the transfer of a gene...

The battlefields of life were first meadows and gardens

The battlefields of life were first meadows and gardens. We made them into battlefields, and by the same power, we must release the dark spell, so they are meadows and gardens once again. Through our nobler thought choices, we must reclaim the physical and metaphorical lands of opportunity, and build peaceful gardens in our hearts, communities and throughout the world. The truth is now as it was yesterday, and as it always will be, that the world is -- as we are. The outer world is a reflect...

Once you connect with yourself, it is impossible to be lonely or desperate

From a young age, something kept whispering to me, that things were not right with the world; that something was not right with ME, as a product of an unnatural and dis-eased society. There was a call in my heart to journey beyond the path placed before me, and one-day, I answered that call. As a troubled teen, with deep turmoil and fear in my heart, and with two apples and $12 dollars as my only possessions, I opened my door, walked to the highway at the end of a country dirt road, stuck ou...

The supreme lesson of education is to think for yourself

An important part of revolution is thinking for oneself and diversifying sources of information and education. Defiance and creativity go hand-in-hand. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said over and over, the world is in dire need of an "International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment." Much of education today focuses on obedience skills rather than critical thinking skills. This is because if you teach a child true critical thinking skills, you potentially create a problem...