I believe there is an invisible thread connects those destined to meet, despite the time, the place, and despite the circumstances. The thread can be tightened or tangle, but will never be broken. Call it a soul contract. Call it destiny, kismet, karma, fortune or fate. Call it whatever you want to call it. The more I live, the more I meet people in supposed “random” ways, the more I know: we meet the people we need to meet at the exact moments we’re meant to. And each and every one of them offers us a lesson. Some experiences are painful. Some are blissful. Most are intertwined with both. There is an invisible thread between me and you...
If you’re feeling lonely or lost, take comfort. That person you need is out there. S/he can feel you somehow, too. But remember: that thread won’t lead you to what’s on the other side if you’re stuck in your day-to-day routine or on your couch. Take a new route home from work. Go on vacation somewhere – by yourself. Go to the grocery store at an hour you normally wouldn’t. Just do something different. And you’ll see.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
Friday, January 3, 2014
PERSONAL: RANDOMNESS AND LOVE IN TRYING TO FIND A GENUINE PERSON
No one knows the life-changing power of luck better than couples.Just the sheer odds of standing out among thousands of bright-faced, oh-so-impossibly attractive individual could test the stamina of a Zen master. Add to this the randomness of what a person might be looking for at any given period of time for the person they want to spend their life with. Fortunately, luck does exist. Its glittery fingerprints are all over the place. Call it happenstance, coincidence or even fate, but there's a match to your hold card somewhere in that deck and if you're lucky, it'll be the next card you turn up. Usually people look back and celebrate the first date, the first kiss, the first holiday together, but what really counts is what happened before this public story: that moment, more of pulse than of thought, which goes, Yes, perhaps her, and Yes, perhaps him
I think one of most endearing qualities a person can possess is genuiness. When you meet a genuine person they tend to look you directly in the eye and many times they touch you in order to connect.
They don't have the average walls up that many people have in life. They seem to touch you in a way where you immediately connect and they have no false pretenses. I am sure if you think of all the people you have met in life; you will remember many people you felt were genuine. This type of person crosses all barriers and has the ability to connect with others and radiates great empathy to others. It's almost like they have an additional sense. They don't pretend to be perfect or know all the answers but one thing is for sure anything they tell you is coming straight from the heart.
I think one of most endearing qualities a person can possess is genuiness. When you meet a genuine person they tend to look you directly in the eye and many times they touch you in order to connect.
They don't have the average walls up that many people have in life. They seem to touch you in a way where you immediately connect and they have no false pretenses. I am sure if you think of all the people you have met in life; you will remember many people you felt were genuine. This type of person crosses all barriers and has the ability to connect with others and radiates great empathy to others. It's almost like they have an additional sense. They don't pretend to be perfect or know all the answers but one thing is for sure anything they tell you is coming straight from the heart.
VIDEO: BROTHERLY LOVE HEROES TV SERIES (HOW TO STOP AN EXPLODING MAN AND STAGE 5)
You rarely hear two brother tell each other they love each other....but it's so beautiful. Please watch and enjoy...
Watch Heroes stages by doc39
Watch Heroes stages by doc39
DEAR SOULMATE
Dear Soulmate
I would give anything to have my 1 dream come true.
That dream is us, us being together forever. Spending my entire life with you, waking up next to your beautiful face every morning.
Please promise me, that you will never give up on us. No matter what obstacles we’ll face in this life that’s ahead of us cause I know we will.
You need to know that you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, I know I don’t always show it but the moment you came into my life it changed, for the better. I have this amazing person, my soulmate who I care for even more than myself, who I would do anything in the world for in my life, I will never let you go for you’ve become my life.
You’ve taught me how to love, shown me what a bestfriend is, and how lucky I am to have such a special person.
Some say first love never lasts, but it never dies. I want you to be my only love, to always have this fire that burns brighter throughout the years to come.
I love you to the sun and back, forever.
I would give anything to have my 1 dream come true.
That dream is us, us being together forever. Spending my entire life with you, waking up next to your beautiful face every morning.
Please promise me, that you will never give up on us. No matter what obstacles we’ll face in this life that’s ahead of us cause I know we will.
You need to know that you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, I know I don’t always show it but the moment you came into my life it changed, for the better. I have this amazing person, my soulmate who I care for even more than myself, who I would do anything in the world for in my life, I will never let you go for you’ve become my life.
You’ve taught me how to love, shown me what a bestfriend is, and how lucky I am to have such a special person.
Some say first love never lasts, but it never dies. I want you to be my only love, to always have this fire that burns brighter throughout the years to come.
I love you to the sun and back, forever.
Thursday, January 2, 2014
LOVE LETTER: I AM ADDICTED TO YOU
I'm addicted to the way you kiss me. The way you hug me. To sum it all up, the way you love me. Your sweet smell. Your unique sense of style everything about you drives me wild!. I'm totally addicted to your smile and the time we spend is all worth while.You're like a drug; i can't get enough of you. I find myself thinking about you. What else could I say to make you get it?I'm head over heels and I'm surely ADDICTED!
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
SPIRITUALITY: WHAT IS THE POINT?
What's the point?
We all get up in the morning, go to bed in the evening, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, and work, day after day after day, but . . .
What's it all about? Why? Where is this all leading?
t may well be a fact that life, at least at is is usually lived, actually is absurd when seen from a certain perspective.
"Ivan Ilych's life
had been most simple and most ordinary
and therefore most terrible."
- Leo Tolstoy
There is ample evidence for this - as found, for example, by simply reading a few history books, or even just a copy of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. While Frankl's book may not provide the solution to the experience of meaninglessness, it presents an almost perfect case study in how absurd, cruel, unjust, pointless, and simply insane life can sometimes (er, often) be.
And those who are not in denial of these facts or experiences, and have the capacity and willingness to face these fairly unpleasant realities, tend to be, naturally, a little bugged by them.
This includes many intelligent and perceptive individuals throughout history. Such as, for example . . .
Leo Tolstoy
describes the experience:
"But five years ago
something very strange began to happen to me. At first I began having moments of bewilderment, when my life would come to a halt, as if I did not know how to live or what to do; I would lose my presence of mind and fall into a state of depression. But this passed, and I continued to live as before. Then the moments of bewilderment recurred more frequently, and they always took the same form. Whenever my life came to a halt, the questions would arise: Why? And what next?
At first I thought these were pointless and irrelevant questions. I thought that the answers to them were well known and that if I should ever want to resolve them, it would not be too hard for me; it was just that I could not be bothered with it now, but if I should take it upon myself, then I would find the answers. But the questions began to come up more and more frequently, and their demands to be answered became more and more urgent . . .
The questions seemed to be such foolish, simple, childish questions. But as soon as I laid my hands on them and tried to resolve them, I was immediately convinced, first of all, that they were not childish and foolish questions but the most vital and profound questions in life, and, secondly, that no matter how much I pondered them there was no way I could resolve them. Before I could be occupied with my Samara estate, with the education of my son, or with the writing of books, I had to know why I was doing these things. As long as I do not know the reason why, I cannot do anything. In the middle of my concern with the household, which at the time kept me quite busy, a questions would suddenly come into my head: "Very well, you will have 16,200 acres in the Samara province, as well as 300 horses; what then?" And I was completely taken aback and did not know what else to think. As soon as I started to think about the education of my children, I would ask myself, "Why?" Or I would reflect on how the people might attain prosperity, and I would suddenly ask myself, "What concern is it of mine?" Or in the middle of thinking about the fame that my works were bringing me I would say to myself, "Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere, more famous than all the writers in the world - so what?
And I could find absolutely no reply.
My life came to a stop. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep; indeed, I could not help but breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. But there was no life in me because I had no desires whose satisfaction I would have found reasonable. If I wanted something, I knew beforehand that it did not matter whether or not I got it.
If a fairy had come and offered to fulfill my every wish, I would not have known what to wish for. If in moments of intoxication I should have not desires but the habits of old desires, in moments of sobriety I knew that it was all a delusion, that I really desired nothing. I did not even want to discover truth anymore because I had guessed what it was. The truth was that life is meaningless . . .
The only thing that amazed me was how I had failed to realize this in the very beginning. All this had been common knowledge for so long. If not today, then tomorrow sickness and death will come (indeed, they were already approaching) to everyone, to me, and nothing will remain except the stench and the worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later, and I myself will be no more. Why, then, do anything? How can anyone fail to see this and live? That's what is amazing! It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion! Nor is there anything funny or witty about it; it is only cruel and stupid.
- excerpt from Confession
- and Herman Melville . . .
". . . take high abstracted man along;
and he seems a wonder, a grandeur and a woe.
But from the same point,
Take mankind in the mass,
and for the most part,
they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates . . ."
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
- and William Shakespeare . . .
"O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world . . .
This goodly frame, the earth,
seems to me a sterile promontory;
this most excellent canopy, the air, look you,
this brave o'erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,
why,
it appears no other thing to me
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!
in form, in moving, how express an admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
man delights not me; no, nor woman neither . . .
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life . . . "
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- and the author(s) of a 2,500 year-old Sanskrit tale . . .
". . . Because I have no wish for victory, Krishna,
nor for a kingdom, nor for its pleasures.
How can we want a kingdom, Govinda, or its pleasures or even life,
When those for whom we want a kingdom,
and its pleasures, and the joys of life,
are here in this field of battle about to give up their wealth and their life?
Facing us in the field of battle are teachers, fathers and sons;
grandsons, grandfathers, wives' brothers; mothers' brothers and fathers of wives.
These I do not wish to slay, even if I myself am slain.
Not even for the kingdom of the three worlds:
how much less for a kingdom of the earth!"
- The Bhagavad Gita
- and King Solomon . . .
"I have seen all the works that are done under the sun;
and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
That which is crooked cannot be made straight;
and that which is wanting cannot be numbered . . .
Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought,
and on the labor that I had labored to do:
and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit,
and there was no profit under the sun . . ."
- Ecclesiastes
Some individuals - but only a few who possess a certain measure of intelligence - see life in a certain way that it appears meaningless. After all, we live for several years, then die. We work and work, but eventually everything we are working on crumbles to dust. What, then, is the point?
"She's polishing the brass on the Titanic, man.
It's all going down."
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Why, since life is inevitably full of suffering, do we go through it?
Or in a sense, this is another way of asking "Why Are We Here?"
"The truth is that your daily life is but a thin strip of experience
barely seeming in the profundity of who you are at depth.
Your activities and relationships never capture the grandeur
that wants to unfold from your heart into the world.
There may be moments of palpable glory,
brief openings through which magnificence effulgence without curtail,
but mainly your life is a tragic almost-there
of unfulfilled longing and partial gestures of tense effort."
- David Deida
So what can we do about it?
"It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere
that it begins to have meaning."
- P.D. Ouspensky
Many individuals might experience meaninglessness as a kind of depression after experiencing a loss.
For example, suppose a person loses a house, a car, a job, a relationship, or a person who meant a great deal to them. After this loss happens, the individual can experience a painful "emptiness," an absence, something like a newly-lost tooth of the soul, which feels extremely uncomfortable.
The process of healing from this loss lies in grieving and eventually accepting the loss, and allowing oneself to move on, honoring what has been lost while continuing to live.
And since, in the way life is built, loss is an inevitable part of things, a large part of this aspect lies in preparing oneself . .
Preventing Meaninglessness from Attachments
In a way, some unnecessary suffering can be avoided through not getting wrongfully and improportionately "attached" to certain things, whether they be houses, cars, jobs, relationships, ideas, theories, or even people.
There is a phrase "All is change," pointing to the truth that everything changes (except possibly for change itself) - which is a short version of the Buddhist teaching on "Impermanence." When we truly understand "impermanence," then we can also understand that becoming too attached to anything - because any "thing" is, given a long enough time span, necessarily impermanent - then suffering, when that change comes, is inevitable.
This is why many spiritual teachers speak of an attitude of "detachment" - which is not coldly keeping oneself removed and distant from life, but maintaining a proper perspective in things, and not making them the ground and nature of one's own purpose of life. In a way, ignoring impermanence is like looking for "IT" in all the wrong places, or searching for something permanent in the impermanent, for God in places or things where God will not be found.
"It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God.
He only has to refuse his ultimate love to everything that is not God.
This refusal does not presuppose any belief.
It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind:
that all the goods of this world,
past, present, and future, real or imaginary,
are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying
the desire that perpetually burns within us
for an infinite and perfect good."
- Simone Weil
Meaningless as No "Games Worth Playing"
"Seek,
above all,
for a game
worth playing."
- Robert S. de Ropp
Meaninglessness can arrive for a person who sees life as more or less a series of "games" - and none of those games are worth playing.
This can be viewed as spending one's entire life working one's way to the "top of the ladder, only to find that there is nothing there, slaving away at a disagreeable job for one's entire life, only to be rewarded with a demotion, mandatory retirement, or a cheap gold watch; giving one's life to a business, a relationship, a family, a work of art, only to come in the end to see that all the work, sweat, and pain involved is essentially for nothing.
This is the situation for many sensitive and perceptive individuals, who see through many of the games, and so, don't see them as worth getting involved in.
The "solution," in this case, lies in finding "a game worth playing." How does one do this? Well, every individual finds the way for themselves . . . but many alternate option are available, such as, for example, the search for God, the search for Love, or one suggestion proposed by a guy named Robert de Ropp is something called "The Master Game" . . .
"The fact is that this is what society is and always has been:
A symbolic action system,
a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior,
designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism . . .
It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system
is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized.
It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning."
- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Meaninglessness as Created by Wrong Meditation
"There are many pitfalls along the path of meditation,
but there are two principal ones:
the first in which the meditator seeks to be pure observer
by suppressing the (identity of being a) participator (in life),
the other in which the meditator seeks to be pure participant.
In both there is the search for the One at the expense of two . . .
Both extremes, observing and participating, simply "get rid of" ego by a trick.
Both, if used as a form of meditation, lead students
to resent the "interference" of life with their "practice":
on the one hand, seeing life more and more
as a meaningless parade,
scorning people who participate and get involved;
and on the other hand, feeling more and more put upon by things,
feeling increasing self-pity and seeking quiet
- or paradoxically, seeking intense orgiastic situations
such as acid rock, strobe lights, drugs, or the rallies of demagogues and faith healers."
- from The Iron Cow of Zen by Albert Low
Human beings, whoever they may be,
consciously or unconsciously look for a meaning to their lives.
They need a reason to live and, each day, try to find it
through all that their domestic, social and professional life give them.
But in reality no success, no material possession can give them the meaning of life,
precisely because it is a matter of 'meaning',
and meaning is not a material reality;
it can only be found up above on the subtle planes.
In the lower regions, we can find only forms.
Of course we can fill up the form with content,
which is in the feeling, the sensation we experience
when we truly love an object, a person or an activity.
But feeling is often temporary,
and when we lose it, we are left with a sense of emptiness and pain.
So we must look beyond the content for the meaning.
When we reach the meaning, we are fulfilled."
- Mikhaël Omraam Aïvanhov
We all get up in the morning, go to bed in the evening, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, and work, day after day after day, but . . .
What's it all about? Why? Where is this all leading?
t may well be a fact that life, at least at is is usually lived, actually is absurd when seen from a certain perspective.
"Ivan Ilych's life
had been most simple and most ordinary
and therefore most terrible."
- Leo Tolstoy
There is ample evidence for this - as found, for example, by simply reading a few history books, or even just a copy of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. While Frankl's book may not provide the solution to the experience of meaninglessness, it presents an almost perfect case study in how absurd, cruel, unjust, pointless, and simply insane life can sometimes (er, often) be.
And those who are not in denial of these facts or experiences, and have the capacity and willingness to face these fairly unpleasant realities, tend to be, naturally, a little bugged by them.
This includes many intelligent and perceptive individuals throughout history. Such as, for example . . .
Leo Tolstoy
describes the experience:
"But five years ago
something very strange began to happen to me. At first I began having moments of bewilderment, when my life would come to a halt, as if I did not know how to live or what to do; I would lose my presence of mind and fall into a state of depression. But this passed, and I continued to live as before. Then the moments of bewilderment recurred more frequently, and they always took the same form. Whenever my life came to a halt, the questions would arise: Why? And what next?
At first I thought these were pointless and irrelevant questions. I thought that the answers to them were well known and that if I should ever want to resolve them, it would not be too hard for me; it was just that I could not be bothered with it now, but if I should take it upon myself, then I would find the answers. But the questions began to come up more and more frequently, and their demands to be answered became more and more urgent . . .
The questions seemed to be such foolish, simple, childish questions. But as soon as I laid my hands on them and tried to resolve them, I was immediately convinced, first of all, that they were not childish and foolish questions but the most vital and profound questions in life, and, secondly, that no matter how much I pondered them there was no way I could resolve them. Before I could be occupied with my Samara estate, with the education of my son, or with the writing of books, I had to know why I was doing these things. As long as I do not know the reason why, I cannot do anything. In the middle of my concern with the household, which at the time kept me quite busy, a questions would suddenly come into my head: "Very well, you will have 16,200 acres in the Samara province, as well as 300 horses; what then?" And I was completely taken aback and did not know what else to think. As soon as I started to think about the education of my children, I would ask myself, "Why?" Or I would reflect on how the people might attain prosperity, and I would suddenly ask myself, "What concern is it of mine?" Or in the middle of thinking about the fame that my works were bringing me I would say to myself, "Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere, more famous than all the writers in the world - so what?
And I could find absolutely no reply.
My life came to a stop. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep; indeed, I could not help but breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. But there was no life in me because I had no desires whose satisfaction I would have found reasonable. If I wanted something, I knew beforehand that it did not matter whether or not I got it.
If a fairy had come and offered to fulfill my every wish, I would not have known what to wish for. If in moments of intoxication I should have not desires but the habits of old desires, in moments of sobriety I knew that it was all a delusion, that I really desired nothing. I did not even want to discover truth anymore because I had guessed what it was. The truth was that life is meaningless . . .
The only thing that amazed me was how I had failed to realize this in the very beginning. All this had been common knowledge for so long. If not today, then tomorrow sickness and death will come (indeed, they were already approaching) to everyone, to me, and nothing will remain except the stench and the worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later, and I myself will be no more. Why, then, do anything? How can anyone fail to see this and live? That's what is amazing! It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion! Nor is there anything funny or witty about it; it is only cruel and stupid.
- excerpt from Confession
- and Herman Melville . . .
". . . take high abstracted man along;
and he seems a wonder, a grandeur and a woe.
But from the same point,
Take mankind in the mass,
and for the most part,
they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates . . ."
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
- and William Shakespeare . . .
"O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world . . .
This goodly frame, the earth,
seems to me a sterile promontory;
this most excellent canopy, the air, look you,
this brave o'erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,
why,
it appears no other thing to me
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!
in form, in moving, how express an admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
man delights not me; no, nor woman neither . . .
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life . . . "
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- and the author(s) of a 2,500 year-old Sanskrit tale . . .
". . . Because I have no wish for victory, Krishna,
nor for a kingdom, nor for its pleasures.
How can we want a kingdom, Govinda, or its pleasures or even life,
When those for whom we want a kingdom,
and its pleasures, and the joys of life,
are here in this field of battle about to give up their wealth and their life?
Facing us in the field of battle are teachers, fathers and sons;
grandsons, grandfathers, wives' brothers; mothers' brothers and fathers of wives.
These I do not wish to slay, even if I myself am slain.
Not even for the kingdom of the three worlds:
how much less for a kingdom of the earth!"
- The Bhagavad Gita
- and King Solomon . . .
"I have seen all the works that are done under the sun;
and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
That which is crooked cannot be made straight;
and that which is wanting cannot be numbered . . .
Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought,
and on the labor that I had labored to do:
and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit,
and there was no profit under the sun . . ."
- Ecclesiastes
Some individuals - but only a few who possess a certain measure of intelligence - see life in a certain way that it appears meaningless. After all, we live for several years, then die. We work and work, but eventually everything we are working on crumbles to dust. What, then, is the point?
"She's polishing the brass on the Titanic, man.
It's all going down."
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Why, since life is inevitably full of suffering, do we go through it?
Or in a sense, this is another way of asking "Why Are We Here?"
"The truth is that your daily life is but a thin strip of experience
barely seeming in the profundity of who you are at depth.
Your activities and relationships never capture the grandeur
that wants to unfold from your heart into the world.
There may be moments of palpable glory,
brief openings through which magnificence effulgence without curtail,
but mainly your life is a tragic almost-there
of unfulfilled longing and partial gestures of tense effort."
- David Deida
So what can we do about it?
"It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere
that it begins to have meaning."
- P.D. Ouspensky
Many individuals might experience meaninglessness as a kind of depression after experiencing a loss.
For example, suppose a person loses a house, a car, a job, a relationship, or a person who meant a great deal to them. After this loss happens, the individual can experience a painful "emptiness," an absence, something like a newly-lost tooth of the soul, which feels extremely uncomfortable.
The process of healing from this loss lies in grieving and eventually accepting the loss, and allowing oneself to move on, honoring what has been lost while continuing to live.
And since, in the way life is built, loss is an inevitable part of things, a large part of this aspect lies in preparing oneself . .
Preventing Meaninglessness from Attachments
In a way, some unnecessary suffering can be avoided through not getting wrongfully and improportionately "attached" to certain things, whether they be houses, cars, jobs, relationships, ideas, theories, or even people.
There is a phrase "All is change," pointing to the truth that everything changes (except possibly for change itself) - which is a short version of the Buddhist teaching on "Impermanence." When we truly understand "impermanence," then we can also understand that becoming too attached to anything - because any "thing" is, given a long enough time span, necessarily impermanent - then suffering, when that change comes, is inevitable.
This is why many spiritual teachers speak of an attitude of "detachment" - which is not coldly keeping oneself removed and distant from life, but maintaining a proper perspective in things, and not making them the ground and nature of one's own purpose of life. In a way, ignoring impermanence is like looking for "IT" in all the wrong places, or searching for something permanent in the impermanent, for God in places or things where God will not be found.
"It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God.
He only has to refuse his ultimate love to everything that is not God.
This refusal does not presuppose any belief.
It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind:
that all the goods of this world,
past, present, and future, real or imaginary,
are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying
the desire that perpetually burns within us
for an infinite and perfect good."
- Simone Weil
Meaningless as No "Games Worth Playing"
"Seek,
above all,
for a game
worth playing."
- Robert S. de Ropp
Meaninglessness can arrive for a person who sees life as more or less a series of "games" - and none of those games are worth playing.
This can be viewed as spending one's entire life working one's way to the "top of the ladder, only to find that there is nothing there, slaving away at a disagreeable job for one's entire life, only to be rewarded with a demotion, mandatory retirement, or a cheap gold watch; giving one's life to a business, a relationship, a family, a work of art, only to come in the end to see that all the work, sweat, and pain involved is essentially for nothing.
This is the situation for many sensitive and perceptive individuals, who see through many of the games, and so, don't see them as worth getting involved in.
The "solution," in this case, lies in finding "a game worth playing." How does one do this? Well, every individual finds the way for themselves . . . but many alternate option are available, such as, for example, the search for God, the search for Love, or one suggestion proposed by a guy named Robert de Ropp is something called "The Master Game" . . .
"The fact is that this is what society is and always has been:
A symbolic action system,
a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior,
designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism . . .
It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system
is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized.
It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning."
- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Meaninglessness as Created by Wrong Meditation
"There are many pitfalls along the path of meditation,
but there are two principal ones:
the first in which the meditator seeks to be pure observer
by suppressing the (identity of being a) participator (in life),
the other in which the meditator seeks to be pure participant.
In both there is the search for the One at the expense of two . . .
Both extremes, observing and participating, simply "get rid of" ego by a trick.
Both, if used as a form of meditation, lead students
to resent the "interference" of life with their "practice":
on the one hand, seeing life more and more
as a meaningless parade,
scorning people who participate and get involved;
and on the other hand, feeling more and more put upon by things,
feeling increasing self-pity and seeking quiet
- or paradoxically, seeking intense orgiastic situations
such as acid rock, strobe lights, drugs, or the rallies of demagogues and faith healers."
- from The Iron Cow of Zen by Albert Low
Human beings, whoever they may be,
consciously or unconsciously look for a meaning to their lives.
They need a reason to live and, each day, try to find it
through all that their domestic, social and professional life give them.
But in reality no success, no material possession can give them the meaning of life,
precisely because it is a matter of 'meaning',
and meaning is not a material reality;
it can only be found up above on the subtle planes.
In the lower regions, we can find only forms.
Of course we can fill up the form with content,
which is in the feeling, the sensation we experience
when we truly love an object, a person or an activity.
But feeling is often temporary,
and when we lose it, we are left with a sense of emptiness and pain.
So we must look beyond the content for the meaning.
When we reach the meaning, we are fulfilled."
- Mikhaël Omraam Aïvanhov
DATING: BEHIND HAVING SEX..OTHER IDEAS FOR A FIRST DATE
Go to a major chain bookstore, and leave notes to future readers in copies of your favorite books
Build forts out of furniture and blankets, and wage war with paper aeroplanes.
Try and visit as many people as you can in one night, and turn as many things inside their apartment upside down as you can, without them noticing.
Write a piece of fiction together. Outside at a cafe. Ask strangers when you get stuck.
Dress to the nines, pretend to be married, and test drive very expensive vehicles at an auto dealership.
In the middle of the night, drive to the beach, so you arrive just as the sun is rising. Have a breakfast picnic, then fall asleep together. Bring a sun umbrella.
Drive somewhere unknown and have dinner in a city you’ve never been to. With fake names.
Walk around the city all night and find a place to eat breakfast at dawn
Rent a movie you’ve never seen before. Set on mute and improvise dialogue
Build forts out of furniture and blankets, and wage war with paper aeroplanes.
Try and visit as many people as you can in one night, and turn as many things inside their apartment upside down as you can, without them noticing.
Write a piece of fiction together. Outside at a cafe. Ask strangers when you get stuck.
Dress to the nines, pretend to be married, and test drive very expensive vehicles at an auto dealership.
In the middle of the night, drive to the beach, so you arrive just as the sun is rising. Have a breakfast picnic, then fall asleep together. Bring a sun umbrella.
Drive somewhere unknown and have dinner in a city you’ve never been to. With fake names.
Walk around the city all night and find a place to eat breakfast at dawn
Rent a movie you’ve never seen before. Set on mute and improvise dialogue
DATING/THOUGHTS: HOW DID I KNOW THEY LOVED ME
When I was dating Joanne, Melissa, Maria..and my ex wife ...how did i know they loved me...there was some signs
1-You're willing to explain why you don't want to date others
Willingness to forgo all others gives power to the partner. But when you're willing to admit that you're willing to share the power and admit your vulnerability (I really like you and hope you like me as much), not only are you in love, but you sound like a rational, fairly adult soul in the bargain.
2-Grow up: If you're old enough to be taken seriously by someone you like, you're old enough to take yourself seriously. Committed adult relationships don't have room for manipulative games.
3-You're willing to go somewhere you hate
The willingness to go someplace you actually hate with someone you actually love — and not be a pain in the neck about it — is one of the hallmarks of love.
When you first start to date, you're tempted to do whatever it takes to get the date off the ground because you're blinded by the possibilities. During the next phase of dating, you stand up for yourself and don't do the activity you hate.
This is a necessary evolution because if there is to be true love, it has to be based on who you are, not who you think your beginning-to-be-significant other will like. But once you actually get to love, your need to constantly assert yourself is softened by your beloved's influence and the sense that you can give because your love will reciprocate your generosity.
You don't need to keep track on a day-to-day basis to make sure everything is 50-50. But the sense that there is fairness and equality and appreciation and respect means that your reluctance to do something you're not crazy about gets overwhelmed by your desire to do something with the person you love. In other words, the person becomes more important than the event.
4-You're willing to save if you're a spend-thrift and spend if you're frugal
The point isn't really about money at all, but a willingness to examine fundamental beliefs as a direct result of valuing another person and his or her perspective and opinion. (Yeah, the same phenomenon can happen with friends, but because friends generally tolerate and celebrate differences, there's less motive or incentive for change.)
Any good relationship changes us. If being around your beloved makes you examine or change some fundamental part of yourself, it may not be love in and of itself, but it does indicate respect, a willingness to learn from another, and a relationship in which you feel safe enough to try something foreign and scary.
Forget about flattery or hypocrisy. Rather, you have the courage, strength, and energy to examine and experiment with a fundamental belief system, be it religion, politics, gun control, abortion, Chinese food, travel, having children, gardening, money, or any other position you used to consider inviolate.
(Money? you say. Yep. It's hard to think of any one commodity that is more basic than money. If you think money is just green stuff that just sits there, you're wrong; it can represent power, lifestyle, control, options, freedom, interaction, and a whole lot more.)
5-The idea of doing nothing together sounds terrific
In the early stages of dating, there is a hunger to discover who the other person is, but this time also feels scary because he or she may not be what you thought or — even worse — you may not be what they're looking for.
Even though the stakes aren't very high at the beginning, you might feel that they are, so you play at dating, and one of the easiest ways to play is to do something at all times — either publicly or privately. The dating ritual is about finding places to go and things to do.
Once a couple is sexual, the thing to do is sexual, and everything else seems just a holding action until the couple can hit the sheets. Then when the initial flurry of sexual activity is over, there is a tendency to want to show each other off because you're feeling connected and proud.
When the idea of doing nothing together is the coolest thing either of you can come up with, you're very likely in love, because you've gone through the other stages of terror, sex, and showing off.
Now, the relationship is just about the two of you, not to the exclusion of everyone or anything else. In fact, your "normal" life has expanded to include each other, but the idea of simply being together is the most wonderful thing either of you can figure out to do — even out of bed.
6-You're willing to risk being yourself
Being yourself is really the big enchilada. Everything else on the How-You-Know-You're-in-Love list hints at being yourself, but when you truly love someone, you want them to know who you are and love you for all that you are, not just for who you pretend to be. When you're in a truly loving relationship, you can be honest and direct and take chances.
The tricky part of being in love is that it can encourage you to be yourself but ups the ante that you might make someone whom you really want to stay change their mind and leave if you show the real you. You want your beloved to be happy now and forever, and the only way to do that is to be who you really are.
It's almost impossible to sustain an illusion over time, and because you are now truly in love, you wouldn't want to hurt your beloved by living a lie. But you also need to be a bit careful of what you confess. Remember that between honesty and duplicity is silence. If you're old enough to be in love, you're old enough to understand the occasional use of silence.
1-You're willing to explain why you don't want to date others
Willingness to forgo all others gives power to the partner. But when you're willing to admit that you're willing to share the power and admit your vulnerability (I really like you and hope you like me as much), not only are you in love, but you sound like a rational, fairly adult soul in the bargain.
2-Grow up: If you're old enough to be taken seriously by someone you like, you're old enough to take yourself seriously. Committed adult relationships don't have room for manipulative games.
3-You're willing to go somewhere you hate
The willingness to go someplace you actually hate with someone you actually love — and not be a pain in the neck about it — is one of the hallmarks of love.
When you first start to date, you're tempted to do whatever it takes to get the date off the ground because you're blinded by the possibilities. During the next phase of dating, you stand up for yourself and don't do the activity you hate.
This is a necessary evolution because if there is to be true love, it has to be based on who you are, not who you think your beginning-to-be-significant other will like. But once you actually get to love, your need to constantly assert yourself is softened by your beloved's influence and the sense that you can give because your love will reciprocate your generosity.
You don't need to keep track on a day-to-day basis to make sure everything is 50-50. But the sense that there is fairness and equality and appreciation and respect means that your reluctance to do something you're not crazy about gets overwhelmed by your desire to do something with the person you love. In other words, the person becomes more important than the event.
4-You're willing to save if you're a spend-thrift and spend if you're frugal
The point isn't really about money at all, but a willingness to examine fundamental beliefs as a direct result of valuing another person and his or her perspective and opinion. (Yeah, the same phenomenon can happen with friends, but because friends generally tolerate and celebrate differences, there's less motive or incentive for change.)
Any good relationship changes us. If being around your beloved makes you examine or change some fundamental part of yourself, it may not be love in and of itself, but it does indicate respect, a willingness to learn from another, and a relationship in which you feel safe enough to try something foreign and scary.
Forget about flattery or hypocrisy. Rather, you have the courage, strength, and energy to examine and experiment with a fundamental belief system, be it religion, politics, gun control, abortion, Chinese food, travel, having children, gardening, money, or any other position you used to consider inviolate.
(Money? you say. Yep. It's hard to think of any one commodity that is more basic than money. If you think money is just green stuff that just sits there, you're wrong; it can represent power, lifestyle, control, options, freedom, interaction, and a whole lot more.)
5-The idea of doing nothing together sounds terrific
In the early stages of dating, there is a hunger to discover who the other person is, but this time also feels scary because he or she may not be what you thought or — even worse — you may not be what they're looking for.
Even though the stakes aren't very high at the beginning, you might feel that they are, so you play at dating, and one of the easiest ways to play is to do something at all times — either publicly or privately. The dating ritual is about finding places to go and things to do.
Once a couple is sexual, the thing to do is sexual, and everything else seems just a holding action until the couple can hit the sheets. Then when the initial flurry of sexual activity is over, there is a tendency to want to show each other off because you're feeling connected and proud.
When the idea of doing nothing together is the coolest thing either of you can come up with, you're very likely in love, because you've gone through the other stages of terror, sex, and showing off.
Now, the relationship is just about the two of you, not to the exclusion of everyone or anything else. In fact, your "normal" life has expanded to include each other, but the idea of simply being together is the most wonderful thing either of you can figure out to do — even out of bed.
6-You're willing to risk being yourself
Being yourself is really the big enchilada. Everything else on the How-You-Know-You're-in-Love list hints at being yourself, but when you truly love someone, you want them to know who you are and love you for all that you are, not just for who you pretend to be. When you're in a truly loving relationship, you can be honest and direct and take chances.
The tricky part of being in love is that it can encourage you to be yourself but ups the ante that you might make someone whom you really want to stay change their mind and leave if you show the real you. You want your beloved to be happy now and forever, and the only way to do that is to be who you really are.
It's almost impossible to sustain an illusion over time, and because you are now truly in love, you wouldn't want to hurt your beloved by living a lie. But you also need to be a bit careful of what you confess. Remember that between honesty and duplicity is silence. If you're old enough to be in love, you're old enough to understand the occasional use of silence.
ARTICLE: NY MAGAZINE:The Dream of a Middle-Class New York By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
In 1890, the richest one percent of Americans were wealthier than the other 99 percent combined, but the disparities were gravest in New York City. At all levels—civic, moral, sanitary—the urgency of the problem was obvious, and from around the United States talented young people arrived to try to do what they could to fix it: professors from Indiana, doctors from Connecticut, nurses from upstate New York. The social sciences were then still fairly new, and the conviction they carried, that through careful study and experimentation society could be improved, still held a thrill. The obvious laboratory was the Lower East Side’s immigrant Tenth Ward—the Typhus Ward, the Suicide Ward, by the reckoning of one prominent historian the most crowded neighborhood in the world, and soon also arguably the most studied. Harlem before Harlem, Bed-Stuy before Bed-Stuy.
These laboratories often took the physical form of settlement houses, tenements where young, well-intentioned children of the American elite would live alongside the immigrant poor, hoping to study them and build institutions that might improve their lives. “In our rooms, it seemed as if we were back in college again,” wrote Jane Robbins, a recent Smith graduate, of the dozen other residents on her floor on Forsyth Street. Their reports were memorably, often dramatically, grim: “They pant for air, and perspiration that drops from their foreheads is like lifeblood, but they toil on steadily, wearily, except when now and again one, crazed by heat, hangs himself to a door jamb.” Robbins and her peers were scrupulous social scientists; they monitored gang wars and ran education and comportment classes for young men and women. Throughout the settlement-house movement, there were wrong turns into cultural condescension, but there were also formal links to the great universities of the day, and a mania for measurement. You can just about see the call-and-response rhythm of modern liberalism being built: the almost theological declaration of injustice, the scientific optimism that society could be fixed. “There is already room,” wrote Stanton Coit, the young Amherst graduate who founded University Settlement, the city’s first settlement house, “to lay at least the foundations for the New and Perfect City.”
We don’t talk about perfect anymore. What we talk about is affordability—what kind of life an ordinary person can buy. In New York, where the pressures of real estate are, shall we say, unique, the subject is manifestly physical. Often it feels like this city really has only two classes: those who believe they can afford the space they need to live in and those who believe they can’t.
The city has gotten steadily wealthier throughout the past generation, but over the last decade the change has been exceptional. And during these most recent few years the population of that second group—those who feel they just can’t afford to live in their own city—has swelled, so that it is now thick with members it would have only recently considered enemies: attorneys, doctors, liberal artists. Bill de Blasio’s campaign, rich as it was in the rhetoric of economic populism—in its reminder of the “nearly half of our neighbors who live beneath the poverty line,” in its conjuring of a spectral, sprawling Brownsville of the mind—was a movement that assembled not only the poor, but also the middle class and alienated professionals. He spoke to the anxiety of not being able to afford a rent increase; to those who feel increasingly priced out of much of the city; to those who can’t afford pre-K for their children and worry about the inadequacies of the public schools and the hospitals. The advance through the city’s residential neighborhoods of young millionaires from the financial industry, and the intrusion of global financial capital in the form of pieds-Ã -terre, has seemed relentless. Proximity, the great economic genius of middle-class cities, no longer looks like a method of collective uplift so much as a theater of envy, in which everything we could possibly want is there to desire, but still just out of reach.
Part of De Blasio’s appeal has been his artful use of an extended historical analogy, in which he cites Dickens and suggests we are living in a second Gilded Age. “Salient elements in De Blasio’s 21st-century agenda,” says John Recchiuti, a historian of progressive reform, “were at the center of progressive New Yorkers’ political activism exactly 100 years ago.” This has been a deft political gesture, capturing the alienation that even many middle-class New Yorkers feel. But it is also a way of summoning political will. To raise the specter of the Gilded Age is not only to remind New Yorkers of how inequality once broke New York. It is also to remember how, afterward, the city was fixed.
On the immigrant Lower East Side, the space itself was the problem—it smothered light, separated people from water and toilets, and pressed them together with strangers and their garbage. In 1901, Seth Low, the president of Columbia and of Stanton Coit’s settlement, was elected mayor on a reform ticket, and the movement that began in the settlement houses acquired political power. Low and his allies won passage of the Tenement Reform Act of 1901, which reformed building codes to require light in every room, and soon six-story New Law buildings started to emerge on ghetto corners, with courtyards and good light.
What is remarkable about this emerging movement is that it did not become a permanent charity endeavor. As the tenement residents left squalor behind and began to acquire a more permanent piece of the middle class, the movement followed them. Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party set up shop on 42nd Street, soliciting ideas about minimum wage and unemployment insurance from the city’s social scientists.
Some of the reform unions began to interpret their mission more broadly. Enter Abraham Kazan, a young, immigrant union official on the Lower East Side, equal parts socialist pauper-prince and A-list macher. From a tub-thumping Scottish anarchist, Kazan learned of European experiments with the cooperative—union members would pool their resources, building houses and factories that they could own themselves. The labor movement had been oriented around strikes, around class combat, but to Kazan the cooperative model seemed to promise something different for his members, a way to buy their own dignity. Soon, the ladies of the garment workers union were building the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx, the Hillman Houses on the Lower East Side. By 1927, Governor Al Smith had signed a law providing public financing for cooperative housing. The model spread, but by 1930 the city still had more cooperative housing than the rest of the country combined. During the Depression, high-end housing around the city went vacant. Not a single working-class cooperative did.
If you grew up middle class in New York’s outer-boroughs at any point in the past half-century, then this has likely been your sentimental geography—some evolved, Taylorized version of Kazan’s design, which metastasized after the Mitchell-Lama middle-class housing initiative of 1955: the airfield-size expanse of Co-op City in the northeast Bronx, the towers perched strangely, opportunistically on top of the approach to the George Washington Bridge. This long phase of development contained all manner of mistakes—it often destroyed neighborhoods, many of them poor, and replaced old communities with brick monstrosities—and it has no real heroes, only complicated figures like Robert Moses, at least 50 percent villain. And yet it is telling that the lasting monuments of the postwar housing boom in New York—one of the wealthiest places in the world, in the era of the greatest economic expansion in human history—are not luxury towers but endless redbrick buildings in the boroughs, space carved out for a middle class.
Even now, no one is certain quite how to pinpoint De Blasio—at some times he has seemed a committed left-wing ideologue, at others an operative, even a hack. So it has been possible to assume that his rhetoric was merely opportunistic campaign talk, his leftward move only tactical. (That some of the mayor’s early appointments have been Establishment figures has reinforced this sentiment.) But this obscures the scale of De Blasio’s stated ambitions, which seem enormous. He built his campaign around the proposal to make prekindergarten universal and free, an idea that policy wonks have pushed for years but that had usually been considered a dreamy political nonstarter. He has said he means to build or preserve 200,000 housing units. This suggests that the new mayor understands something about the nature of reform in New York, that it is—that it has always been—essentially physical, a matter of space.
Affordability is a moving target: What should a middle-class person be able to afford, and what constitutes a denial of his or her dignity? We can agree that the tenements of the 1890s did not meet basic human standards, but middle-class New York does not look like that today. But there are, in fact, real ways in which the city could be rearranged to make it easier for the non-rich to stay here and thrive. A survey of some of the best of them appears on these pages, from attacking housing costs by flooding the market with supply to building a transit system that serves the outer-boroughs as well as it does the inner one; from reviving our public-school system to embracing tax hikes on the city’s financial class to support whole categories of targeted social-service programs for those who are undeniably in need. Of whom there are millions.
The smart line on De Blasio, from just about the beginning of his rise in the polls, has been that he’d picked a fight that he cannot win. Inequality, after all, is a product of global economic forces and national policy choices. And mayors, like presidents, have more rhetorical power than direct control—taxes and major laws run mostly through Albany; control of even the MTA and Port Authority is shared with representatives from the foreign cultures of upstate and New Jersey. For a mayor to make it his mission to force some meaningful consolidation of “two cities” into one seemed a little grand. Adam Davidson, the economics writer for The New York Times Magazine, surveyed the data and the experts and concluded that against the broader forces of inequality De Blasio was, basically, “powerless.”
Powerless—that’s a little extreme. Immigration, after all, was also a product of global forces, mediated by national policy, and though the Progressive Era reformers did not have the power to change the flows of immigration, progressives nevertheless did something even more important, and within their control: They made life more decent for the immigrants. The mayor of New York is the chief executive of a city that is bigger than Israel or Switzerland; the government directly under his control is larger than that of 43 separate states, and the economy under his supervision is roughly the size of Canada’s. Even a partial authority over that much power is a very great deal of power indeed. Consider how radically the last two mayors, by the ends of their terms, had remade the city in their own distinct images.
And yet a program of the scope that De Blasio has begun to sketch out—a symbolic remaking of the city under the banner of affordability—is at least as vast an undertaking as Bloomberg’s or Giuliani’s and arguably more complicated. The first trade-off De Blasio has proposed is about the simplest that he will confront—a somewhat higher marginal municipal tax rate on those making over $500,000 a year in return for universal prekindergarten, which is both an expansion of services to the poor and a cost saver for middle-class parents. Increasing the stock of inexpensive housing and improving our public schools are knottier problems, and it’s far from clear whether this coalition of the emotionally disenfranchised—those making $10,000 and those making $100,000—really does agree on what a better city looks like, or even on a definition of affordable.
But a mayor’s greatest power, says Jonathan Soffer, a scholar of city government in both the Koch administration and the Progressive Era, is often political, “the power to change the corporate culture,” the way the city’s government and the city itself behave. That, yes, and also the power of precedent, the memory that something very similar to his project to correct the excesses of a gilded age has been accomplished, right here, before.
These laboratories often took the physical form of settlement houses, tenements where young, well-intentioned children of the American elite would live alongside the immigrant poor, hoping to study them and build institutions that might improve their lives. “In our rooms, it seemed as if we were back in college again,” wrote Jane Robbins, a recent Smith graduate, of the dozen other residents on her floor on Forsyth Street. Their reports were memorably, often dramatically, grim: “They pant for air, and perspiration that drops from their foreheads is like lifeblood, but they toil on steadily, wearily, except when now and again one, crazed by heat, hangs himself to a door jamb.” Robbins and her peers were scrupulous social scientists; they monitored gang wars and ran education and comportment classes for young men and women. Throughout the settlement-house movement, there were wrong turns into cultural condescension, but there were also formal links to the great universities of the day, and a mania for measurement. You can just about see the call-and-response rhythm of modern liberalism being built: the almost theological declaration of injustice, the scientific optimism that society could be fixed. “There is already room,” wrote Stanton Coit, the young Amherst graduate who founded University Settlement, the city’s first settlement house, “to lay at least the foundations for the New and Perfect City.”
We don’t talk about perfect anymore. What we talk about is affordability—what kind of life an ordinary person can buy. In New York, where the pressures of real estate are, shall we say, unique, the subject is manifestly physical. Often it feels like this city really has only two classes: those who believe they can afford the space they need to live in and those who believe they can’t.
The city has gotten steadily wealthier throughout the past generation, but over the last decade the change has been exceptional. And during these most recent few years the population of that second group—those who feel they just can’t afford to live in their own city—has swelled, so that it is now thick with members it would have only recently considered enemies: attorneys, doctors, liberal artists. Bill de Blasio’s campaign, rich as it was in the rhetoric of economic populism—in its reminder of the “nearly half of our neighbors who live beneath the poverty line,” in its conjuring of a spectral, sprawling Brownsville of the mind—was a movement that assembled not only the poor, but also the middle class and alienated professionals. He spoke to the anxiety of not being able to afford a rent increase; to those who feel increasingly priced out of much of the city; to those who can’t afford pre-K for their children and worry about the inadequacies of the public schools and the hospitals. The advance through the city’s residential neighborhoods of young millionaires from the financial industry, and the intrusion of global financial capital in the form of pieds-Ã -terre, has seemed relentless. Proximity, the great economic genius of middle-class cities, no longer looks like a method of collective uplift so much as a theater of envy, in which everything we could possibly want is there to desire, but still just out of reach.
Part of De Blasio’s appeal has been his artful use of an extended historical analogy, in which he cites Dickens and suggests we are living in a second Gilded Age. “Salient elements in De Blasio’s 21st-century agenda,” says John Recchiuti, a historian of progressive reform, “were at the center of progressive New Yorkers’ political activism exactly 100 years ago.” This has been a deft political gesture, capturing the alienation that even many middle-class New Yorkers feel. But it is also a way of summoning political will. To raise the specter of the Gilded Age is not only to remind New Yorkers of how inequality once broke New York. It is also to remember how, afterward, the city was fixed.
On the immigrant Lower East Side, the space itself was the problem—it smothered light, separated people from water and toilets, and pressed them together with strangers and their garbage. In 1901, Seth Low, the president of Columbia and of Stanton Coit’s settlement, was elected mayor on a reform ticket, and the movement that began in the settlement houses acquired political power. Low and his allies won passage of the Tenement Reform Act of 1901, which reformed building codes to require light in every room, and soon six-story New Law buildings started to emerge on ghetto corners, with courtyards and good light.
What is remarkable about this emerging movement is that it did not become a permanent charity endeavor. As the tenement residents left squalor behind and began to acquire a more permanent piece of the middle class, the movement followed them. Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party set up shop on 42nd Street, soliciting ideas about minimum wage and unemployment insurance from the city’s social scientists.
Some of the reform unions began to interpret their mission more broadly. Enter Abraham Kazan, a young, immigrant union official on the Lower East Side, equal parts socialist pauper-prince and A-list macher. From a tub-thumping Scottish anarchist, Kazan learned of European experiments with the cooperative—union members would pool their resources, building houses and factories that they could own themselves. The labor movement had been oriented around strikes, around class combat, but to Kazan the cooperative model seemed to promise something different for his members, a way to buy their own dignity. Soon, the ladies of the garment workers union were building the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx, the Hillman Houses on the Lower East Side. By 1927, Governor Al Smith had signed a law providing public financing for cooperative housing. The model spread, but by 1930 the city still had more cooperative housing than the rest of the country combined. During the Depression, high-end housing around the city went vacant. Not a single working-class cooperative did.
If you grew up middle class in New York’s outer-boroughs at any point in the past half-century, then this has likely been your sentimental geography—some evolved, Taylorized version of Kazan’s design, which metastasized after the Mitchell-Lama middle-class housing initiative of 1955: the airfield-size expanse of Co-op City in the northeast Bronx, the towers perched strangely, opportunistically on top of the approach to the George Washington Bridge. This long phase of development contained all manner of mistakes—it often destroyed neighborhoods, many of them poor, and replaced old communities with brick monstrosities—and it has no real heroes, only complicated figures like Robert Moses, at least 50 percent villain. And yet it is telling that the lasting monuments of the postwar housing boom in New York—one of the wealthiest places in the world, in the era of the greatest economic expansion in human history—are not luxury towers but endless redbrick buildings in the boroughs, space carved out for a middle class.
Even now, no one is certain quite how to pinpoint De Blasio—at some times he has seemed a committed left-wing ideologue, at others an operative, even a hack. So it has been possible to assume that his rhetoric was merely opportunistic campaign talk, his leftward move only tactical. (That some of the mayor’s early appointments have been Establishment figures has reinforced this sentiment.) But this obscures the scale of De Blasio’s stated ambitions, which seem enormous. He built his campaign around the proposal to make prekindergarten universal and free, an idea that policy wonks have pushed for years but that had usually been considered a dreamy political nonstarter. He has said he means to build or preserve 200,000 housing units. This suggests that the new mayor understands something about the nature of reform in New York, that it is—that it has always been—essentially physical, a matter of space.
Affordability is a moving target: What should a middle-class person be able to afford, and what constitutes a denial of his or her dignity? We can agree that the tenements of the 1890s did not meet basic human standards, but middle-class New York does not look like that today. But there are, in fact, real ways in which the city could be rearranged to make it easier for the non-rich to stay here and thrive. A survey of some of the best of them appears on these pages, from attacking housing costs by flooding the market with supply to building a transit system that serves the outer-boroughs as well as it does the inner one; from reviving our public-school system to embracing tax hikes on the city’s financial class to support whole categories of targeted social-service programs for those who are undeniably in need. Of whom there are millions.
The smart line on De Blasio, from just about the beginning of his rise in the polls, has been that he’d picked a fight that he cannot win. Inequality, after all, is a product of global economic forces and national policy choices. And mayors, like presidents, have more rhetorical power than direct control—taxes and major laws run mostly through Albany; control of even the MTA and Port Authority is shared with representatives from the foreign cultures of upstate and New Jersey. For a mayor to make it his mission to force some meaningful consolidation of “two cities” into one seemed a little grand. Adam Davidson, the economics writer for The New York Times Magazine, surveyed the data and the experts and concluded that against the broader forces of inequality De Blasio was, basically, “powerless.”
Powerless—that’s a little extreme. Immigration, after all, was also a product of global forces, mediated by national policy, and though the Progressive Era reformers did not have the power to change the flows of immigration, progressives nevertheless did something even more important, and within their control: They made life more decent for the immigrants. The mayor of New York is the chief executive of a city that is bigger than Israel or Switzerland; the government directly under his control is larger than that of 43 separate states, and the economy under his supervision is roughly the size of Canada’s. Even a partial authority over that much power is a very great deal of power indeed. Consider how radically the last two mayors, by the ends of their terms, had remade the city in their own distinct images.
And yet a program of the scope that De Blasio has begun to sketch out—a symbolic remaking of the city under the banner of affordability—is at least as vast an undertaking as Bloomberg’s or Giuliani’s and arguably more complicated. The first trade-off De Blasio has proposed is about the simplest that he will confront—a somewhat higher marginal municipal tax rate on those making over $500,000 a year in return for universal prekindergarten, which is both an expansion of services to the poor and a cost saver for middle-class parents. Increasing the stock of inexpensive housing and improving our public schools are knottier problems, and it’s far from clear whether this coalition of the emotionally disenfranchised—those making $10,000 and those making $100,000—really does agree on what a better city looks like, or even on a definition of affordable.
But a mayor’s greatest power, says Jonathan Soffer, a scholar of city government in both the Koch administration and the Progressive Era, is often political, “the power to change the corporate culture,” the way the city’s government and the city itself behave. That, yes, and also the power of precedent, the memory that something very similar to his project to correct the excesses of a gilded age has been accomplished, right here, before.
DATING: A WOMAN HAS TO RESPECT YOU
When you deal with women, you must deal with them on a respect level first. I know that she’s so beautiful and she’s all you think about, but you have to put those feelings to the side for a minute. After a while, she’s gonna become “regular”, meaning that her beauty is not gonna make her special anymore. When you establish respect first, when she becomes regular to you, you won’t be fighting for her to act right. Instead, you’ll be able to enjoy her company. The problem with most men is they put her on a pedestal in the beginning. She’s enjoying it and she becomes accustomed to it. When he try to “man up” on her, she’s not gonna take him seriously
When a man has the power to punish a woman’s bad behavior, no matter how beautiful she is, it makes him seem less desperate and more attractive. Women, whether they want to admit it or not, want to be checked when they needs to be. This is why some women get fed up with the men they’re with and say they’re not real men. This is why they’ll sometimes cheat behind the man’s back and throw it in the man’s face. If a woman cheats on a man she loves and respects to a certain degree, she may come to him crying about it. When a woman doesn’t have any respect for a man, she’ll throw it in his face and treat it like an insult on his manhood. She’ll talk about how bad he is in bed. She’ll talk about how much better the other man is compared this him. Stuff like that is why you must punish bad behavior before it gets to that level. When a woman raises her voice to you, you have the right to correct her bad behavior. I know she has a phat ass and nice boobs, but you have to put that to the side and focus on your respect. When you do, you can enjoy her nice boobs and phat ass.
When a man has the power to punish a woman’s bad behavior, no matter how beautiful she is, it makes him seem less desperate and more attractive. Women, whether they want to admit it or not, want to be checked when they needs to be. This is why some women get fed up with the men they’re with and say they’re not real men. This is why they’ll sometimes cheat behind the man’s back and throw it in the man’s face. If a woman cheats on a man she loves and respects to a certain degree, she may come to him crying about it. When a woman doesn’t have any respect for a man, she’ll throw it in his face and treat it like an insult on his manhood. She’ll talk about how bad he is in bed. She’ll talk about how much better the other man is compared this him. Stuff like that is why you must punish bad behavior before it gets to that level. When a woman raises her voice to you, you have the right to correct her bad behavior. I know she has a phat ass and nice boobs, but you have to put that to the side and focus on your respect. When you do, you can enjoy her nice boobs and phat ass.
VIDEO: SMASHING PUMPKINS- CRUSH
One of my favorite song of all time....i love the line..."love comes in different colors"
THOUGHT: DR. MOHINDER SURESH FROM HEROS (TV SERIES) QUOTES
Where does it come from? This quest, this need to solve life’s mysteries when the simplest of questions can never be answered. Why are we here? What is the soul? Why do we dream? Perhaps we’d be better off not looking at all. Not delving, not yearning. That’s not human nature. Not the human heart. That is not why we are here.
Man is a narcissistic species by nature. We have colonized the four corners of our tiny planet. But we are not the pinnacle of so-called evolution. That honor belongs to the lowly cockroach. Capable of living for months without food. Remaining alive headless for weeks at a time. Resistant to radiation. If God has indeed created Himself in His own image, then I submit to you that God is a cockroach.
Some individuals, it is true, are more special. This is natural selection. It begins as a single individual born or hatched like every other member of their species. Anonymous. Seemingly ordinary. Except they’re not. They carry inside them the genetic code that will take their species to the next evolutionary rung. It’s destiny.
We all imagine ourselves the agents of our destiny, capable of determining our own fate. But have we truly any choice in when we rise? Or when we fall? Or does a force larger than ourselves bid us our direction? Is it evolution that takes us by the hand? Does science point our way? Or is it God who intervenes, keeping us safe?
When evolution selects its agents, it does so at a cost, makes demands in exchange for singularity and you may be asked to do something against your very nature. Suddenly the change in your life that should have been wonderful comes as a betrayal. It may seem cruel, but the goal is nothing short of self-preservation, survival.
This force, evolution, is not sentimental. Like the earth itself, it knows only the hard facts of life’s struggle with death. All you can do is hope and trust that when you have served its needs faithfully, there may still remain some glimmer of the life you once knew.
Sometimes questions are more powerful than answers. How is this happening? What are they? Why them and not others? Why now? What does it all mean?
When a change comes, some species feel the urge to migrate, they call it zugunruhe. “A pull of the soul to a far off place,” following a scent in the wind, a star in the sky. The ancient message comes calling the kindred to take flight and gather together. Only then they can hope to survive the cruel season to come.
Evolution is imperfect and often a violent process. A battle between what exists and what is yet to be born. Amidst these birth pains, morality loses its meaning, the question of good and evil reduced to one simple choice: survive or perish.
You do not choose your destiny, it chooses you. And those that knew you before Fate took you by the hand cannot understand the depth of the changes inside. They cannot fathom how much you stand to lose in failure…that you are the instrument of flawless Design. And all of life may hang in the balance. The hero learns quickly who can comprehend and who merely stands in your way.
The Earth is large. Large enough that you think you can hide from anything. From Fate. From God. If only you found a place far enough away. So you run. To the edge of the Earth. Where all is safe again. Quiet, and warm. The solace of salt air. The peace of danger left behind. The luxury of grief. And maybe, for a moment, you believe you have escaped.
You can run far, you can take your small precautions. But have you really gotten away? Can you ever escape? Or is it the truth that you did not have the strength or cunning to hide from destiny? That the world is not small. you are. And, fate can find you anywhere.
We are, if anything, creatures of habit. Drawn to the safety and the comfort of the familiar. But what happens when the familiar becomes unsafe? When the fear that we’ve been desperately trying to avoid, finds us where we live?
To survive in this world, we hold close to us those on whom we depend. We trust in them our hopes, our fears… But what happens when trust is lost? Where do we run, when things we believe in vanish before our eyes? When all seems lost, the future unknowable, our very existence in peril… All we can do is run.
Where does it come from? This quest? This need to solve lifes mysteries when the simpliest of questions can never be answered. Why are we here? What is the soul? Why do we dream? Perhaps we would be better off not looking at all. Not delving. Not yearning. But that’s not human nature. Not the human heart. That is not why we are here. Yet still we struggle to make a difference. To change the world. To dream of hope. Never knowing for certain who we’ll meet along the way. Who, among the world of strangers, will hold our hand. Touch our hearts. And share the pain of trying.
We dream of hope,we dream of change,of fire,of love,of death,and then it happens,the dream becomes real. And the answer to the quest,this need to solve life’s mysteries finally shows itself,like the glowing light of the new dawn. So much struggle, for meaning, for purpose, but in the end we find it only in each other. Our shared experiences of the fantastic, and the mundane. The simple, human need to find the kindred, to connect, and to know in our hearts that we are not alone.
The sun rises on a new dawn. Yet few of us realize the debt we owe to those responsible for this. To those who dwell among us. Anonymous, seemingly ordinary, whom destiny brought together to heal, to save us, from ourselves.
When confronted by our worst nightmares, the choices are few. Fight, or flight. We hope to find the strength to stand against our fears but sometimes, despite ourselves, we run.
It is man’s ability to remember that sets us apart. We are the only species that is concerned with the past. How memories give us voice. And to bear witness to history so that others might learn. So that they might celebrate our triumphs and be warned of our failures.
There are many ways to define our fragile existence. Many ways to give it meaning. But it is our memories that shape its purpose and give it context. The private assortment of images, fears, loves, regrets. For it is the cruel irony of life that we are destined to hold the dark with the light. The good with the evil. Success with disappointment. This is what separates us. What makes us human. And in the end, we must fight to hold on to.
A child is born to innocence. A child is drawn towards good. Why then do so many among us go so horribly wrong? What makes some walk the path of darkness while others choose the light? Is it will, is it destiny? Can we ever hope to understand the force that shapes the soul? To fight evil, one must know evil. One must journey back through time and find that fork in the road, where heroes turn one way and villains turn another.
There is a moment in every war where everything changes. A moment when the road bends. Alliances and battle lines shift. And the rules of engagement are rewritten. Moments like these can change the nature of the battle, and turn the tide for either side. So we do what we can to understand them. To be ready for change, we steady our hearts, curb our fears, muster our forces, and look for signs in the stars. But these moments, these game changes, remain a mystery. Destiny’s invisible hand, moving pieces on a chessboard. No matter how much we prepare for them – how much we resist the change, anticipate the moment, fight the inevitable outcome – in the end, we are never truly ready when it strikes.
There is good, and there is evil. Right, and wrong. Heroes and villains. And if we are blessed with wisdom, then there are glimpses between the cracks of each where light streams through. We wait in silence for these times, when sense can be made. When meaningless existence comes into focus, and our purpose presents itself. And if we have the strength to be honest, and what we find there, staring back at us, is our own reflection. Bearing witness to the duality of life. And each one of us is capable of both the dark, and the light.. the good and evil, of either, of all. And destiny, while marching ever in our direction can be rerouted by the choices we make. By the love we hold on to, and the promises we keep.
Generations unfold — father to son, mother to daughter. Where one leaves off, the other follows, destined to repeat each other’s mistakes, each other’s triumphs. For how do we see the world if not through their lens? The same fears, the same desires? Do we see them as an example to follow, or as a warning of what to avoid? Choosing to live as they have, simply because it’s what we know, or driven to create one’s own identity? And what happens when we find them to be a disappointment? Can we replace them? Our mothers, our fathers? Or will destiny find a way to drive us back? Back to the familiar comforts of home?
It is our nature to protect our children. For each generation to pass on their cautionary tales to the next. So it is with the myth of Icarus, the legend of a boy who fashioned wings from feathers and wax, daring to fly into the heavens. His father was fearful and warned Icarus to be careful, begging him not tempt to fate by flying too close to the sun. But in the end, the boy couldn’t resist. His waxen wings melted from the sun’s rays. And he plunged to his death.
For every being cursed with self awareness, there remains the unanswerable question, “Who am I?” We struggle to find meaningful connections to one another. We are the caring friend, the loving father, the doting mother, the protected child. We fight and we love in the hope that somehow, together, we can understand our significance in the universe. But in the end, no one can share our burden. Each of us alone, must ask the question, “Who am I? What does it mean to be alive? And in the vast infinity of time, how do I matter?”
There are nearly seven billion people on this planet. Each one unique. Different. What are the chances of that? And why? Is it simply biology, physiology that determines this diversity? A collections of thoughts, memories, experiences that carve out our own special place? Or is it something more than this? Perhaps there’s a master plan that drives the randomness of creation. Something unknowable that dwells in the soul, and presents each one of us with a unique set of challenges that will help us discover who we really are.
We are all connected. Joined together by an invisible thread, infinite in its potential and fragile in its design. Yet while connected, we are also merely individuals. Empty vessels to be filled with infinite possibilities. An assortment of thoughts, beliefs. A collection of disjointed memories and experiences. Can I be me without this? Can you be you? And if this invisible thread that holds us together were to sever, to cease, what then? What would become of billions of lone, disconnected souls? Therein lies the great quest of our lives. To find. To connect. To hold on. For when our hearts are pure, and our thoughts in line, we are all truly one. Capable of repairing our fragile world, and creating a universe of infinite possibilities.
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