More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It means that even under conditions of extreme privation, there are more important things than food.
Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving.*3
It’s a call to the pursuit of higher meaning as the mode of living that is simultaneously most practical and of highest quality.
The beneficence of the world manifests itself to those who live properly.
Furthermore, God is in no ways a safety net for the blind. He’s not someone to be commanded to perform magic tricks, or forced into Self-revelation—not even by His own Son.
Instead He rejects the idea that salvation—or even survival, in the shorter term—depends on narcissistic displays of superiority and the commanding of God, even by His Son.
Such expansion of status also provides unlimited opportunity for the inner darkness to reveal itself. The lust for blood, rape and destruction is very much part of power’s attraction.
Power also means the capacity to take vengeance, ensure submission, and crush enemies.
There’s something above even the pinnacle of the highest of dominance hierarchies, access to which should not be sacrificed for mere proximal success.
He who contrives, defeats his purpose; and he who is grasping, loses. The sage does not contrive to win, and therefore is not defeated; he is not grasping, so does not lose.
the individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike, no matter how powerfully and convincingly and realistically those are offered, and dispense, as well with the temptations of evil.
Evil amplifies the catastrophe of life, increasing dramatically the motivation for expediency already there because of the essential tragedy of Being.
Sacrifice of the more prosaic sort can keep that tragedy at bay, more or less successfully, but it takes a special ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
It was that vision, driven by doubt, that provided the tremendous collective and individual motivational power necessary for the development of science, with its extreme demands on individual thinkers for concentration and delay of gratification.
The Christian doctrine elevated the individual soul, placing slave and master and commoner and nobleman alike on the same metaphysical footing, rendering them equal before God and the law.
It is in fact nothing short of a miracle (and we should keep this fact firmly before our eyes) that the hierarchical slave-based societies of our ancestors reorganized themselves, under the sway of an ethical/religious revelation, such that the ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be viewed as wrong.
Christianity made explicit the surprising claim that even the lowliest person had rights, genuine rights—and that sovereign and state were morally charged, at a fundamental level, to recognize those rights.
Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.
But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world.
An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure.
An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance.
An idea is a personality, ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favour.”
If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.
Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death.
Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred.
Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to r...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.
Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good.
Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of u...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The alternative was the twentieth century. The alternative was so close to Hell that the difference is not worth discussing. And the opposite of Hell is Heaven.
To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Expedience is the following of blind impulse.
Meaning trumps expedience. Meaning gratifies all impulses, now and forever. That’s why we can detect it.
“How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?”
There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient.
Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.
What is expedient works only for the moment. It’s immediate, impulsive and limited. What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of Being.
Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose—the glorification of a reality so that no matter how good it has suddenly become, it can get better and better and better more and more deeply forever into the future.
Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that.
Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
I soon came to realize that almost everything I said was untrue. I had motives for saying these things: I wanted to win arguments and gain status and impress people and get what I wanted. I was using language to bend and twist the world into delivering what I thought was necessary. But I was a fake.
Realizing this, I started to practise only saying things that the internal voice would not object to. I started to practise telling the truth—or, at least, not lying.
What should you do, when you don’t know what to do...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Taking the easy way out or telling the truth—those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.
It’s what everyone does when they want something, and decide to falsify themselves to please and flatter.
Typical calculated ends might include “to impose my ideological beliefs,” “to prove that I am (or was) right,” “to appear competent,” “to ratchet myself up the dominance hierarchy,” “to avoid responsibility” (or its twin, “to garner credit for others’ actions”), “to be promoted,” “to attract the lion’s share of attention,” “to ensure that everyone likes me,” “to garner the benefits of martyrdom,” “to justify my cynicism,” “to rationalize my antisocial outlook,” “to minimize immediate conflict,” “to maintain my naïveté,” “to capitalize on my vulnerability,” “to always appear as the sainted
...more
Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist.
What you are currently aiming at might not be worth attaining, just as what you are currently doing might be an error.
The faculty of rationality inclines dangerously to pride: all I know is all that needs to be known.
