Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“How we are swallowed up by the unconscious. How our wounding takes over the entire psyche, that we do things that are completely illogical, things that in the extreme can literally kill us.”

“in the human soul there is a better and also a worse principle; and when the better has the worse under control, then a man is said to be master of himself; and this is a term of praise: but when, owing to evil education or association, the better principle, which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse – in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self and unprincipled.”

“Temperance, I replied, is the ordering or controlling of certain pleasures and desires; this is curiously enough implied in the saying of "a man being his own master"; and other traces of the same notion may be found in language.”

“Now, can we find justice without troubling ourselves about temperance?”

“People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness... They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have... they miss the deeper perfection that is...life itself”

“they are always fancying that by legislation they will make an end of frauds in contracts, and the other rascalities which I was mentioning, not knowing that they are in reality cutting of the heads of a hydra?”

“But, oh heavens! shall we condescend to legislate on any of these particulars? I think, he said, that there is no need to impose laws about them on good men; what regulations are necessary they will find out soon enough for themselves.”

“Through complete acceptance of the form of the Now, you become internally aligned with space, which is the essence of Now. Through acceptance, you become spacious inside. Aligned with space instead of form: That brings true perspective and balance into your life.”

“we emigrate for the benefit of the next generation"

“surrendering is the most powerful act we can do, despite what the bellicose would tell us. It is in surrendering that we accept what is happening, centered in the present and not lost...”

“what is unacknowledged, unheard, an uninvited tears through from the unconscious and poisons us all”

“We are haunted by ghosts of our histories — personal and collective...”

“When you react against the form that Life takes at this moment, when you treat the Now as a means, an obstacle, or an enemy, you strengthen your own form identity, the ego. Hence the ego's reactivity.”

“the lawlessness of which you speak too easily steals in... at first sight it appears harmless... there is no harm; were it not that little by little this spirit of licence, finding a home, imperceptibly penetrates into manners and customs...it invades contracts between man and man..goes on to laws and constitutions, in utter recklessness, ending at last... by an overthrow of all rights, private as well as public.”

“where the corruption of society, and pretension to be what you are not, is confined to cobblers; but when the guardians of the laws and of the government are only seemingly and not real guardians, then see how they turn the State upside down”

“our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice”

“would not a really good education furnish the best safeguard? But they are well-educated already, he replied. I cannot be so confident, my dear Glaucon, I said; I am much more certain that they ought to be, and that true education, whatever that may be, will have the greatest tendency to civilize and humanize them in their relations to one another, and to those who are under their protection."

“To keep watch-dogs, who, from want of discipline or hunger, or some evil habit or other, would turn upon the sheep and worry them, and behave not like dogs but wolves, would be a foul and monstrous thing in a shepherd?”

“consider that there is a further stage of the evil in which a man is not only a life-long litigant, passing all his days in the courts, either as plaintiff or defendant, but is actually led by his bad taste to pride himself on his litigiousness; he imagines that he is a master in dishonesty; able to take every crooked turn, and wriggle into and out of every hole... getting out of the way of justice”

“We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul.”

“How do you let go of attachment to things? Don't even try. It's impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them. In the meantime, just be aware of your attachment to things. Sometimes you may not know that you are attached to something, which is to say, identified, until you lose it or there is the threat of loss.”

“When you become aware of the transience of all forms, your attachment to them lessens, and you dis-identify from them to some extent. Being detached does not mean that you cannot enjoy the good that the world has to offer. In fact, you enjoy it more. Once you see and accept the transience of all things and the inevitability of change, you can enjoy the pleasures of the world while they last without fear of loss...”

“You are a human being. What does that mean? Mastery of life is not a question of control, but of finding a balance between human and Being. Mother, father, husband, wife, young, old, the roles you play, the functions you fulfill... It has its place and needs to be honored... Human and Being are not separate but interwoven.

“Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth? That, Socrates, will be inevitable. And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?”

“Where, then, is justice, and where is injustice, and in what part of the State did they spring up? Probably in the dealings of these citizens with one another. I cannot imagine that they are more likely to be found any where else.”

“to find a place where nothing need be imported is well nigh impossible”

“If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.”

“Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of "I Am," which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form. This is the meaning of identification. This is forgetfulness of Being, the primary error, the illusion of absolute separateness that turns reality into a nightmare.”

“Suppose that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison... like a god among men.”

“he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company ... outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.”