Many in our community have lived in pain and confusion this past year. What we thought we understood and knew was not to be. Our country and community have been thrown into a state of chaos and pain. There are no quick answers for any of us. We each must find our Truth and reality in finding resolution with this time in history.
Listening is one of the most important skills we need to help us understand where we have come from and where we are headed. It is the most important skill in arbitration and resolving conflicts. Conflicts of personal and public nature can only be resolved when we take the time to listen to what is actually being said. For us to find resolution (NOT COMPROMISE) we must resolve personal interior conflicts and come to terms within our consciousness about our countries current state of affairs. It is my experience that by listening we may find paths we did not know existed.
A friend on Facebook posted a saying that reminded me of how important it is to listen and silence our minds. Most of us try to listen but we seem to hear what we want to hear so we can reply. Fifty seconds out of every 60 minutes of listening is our mind preparing to make a reply. Hence we only hear a small portion of what is actually being said. Because we hear does not mean we are listening.
Finding the Silence
Filling our ears with all we want to say we miss what is being said. The ego mind is fast to respond to any conversation. It feels more intelligent and in control if it is talking. When it’s not speaking verbally it will be filling our head with chatter. The ego mind fears the silence, the space between the words. Words and the meaning we place on words help define the dream state and the illusions of the past and future. We depict the past in words and provide the future a framework built from words. The incessant stream of words from the ego mind allows no room for silence. If there were to be silence the ego mind would cease to exist in that moment.
The silence of listening is an art. When we allow our being, our whole being to be in a state of silence we hear what has yet to be said. The reality is not in the words, but in the space between the words. This space holds silence. The words form relationships to each other and have meaning because of the space between, the silences. Without the silence, the words have no meaning. When we allow the silence to fill our being we allow the reality to speak. The reality of our being can only be heard in the silence. Be silent and hear what you have not heard. One of the most healing acts any of us can perform is to listen to another. This does not mean advising, or coaching or counseling but silently focused in an attending state of consciousness…listening. Fully listening. There is a great cry of pain in our world. Pain and violence are a direct result of deaf ears and separation of spirit. When we feel we are not heard when we feel disconnected we experience pain.
When we listen and know we are heard, we feel connected. Listening creates relationships. When we are connected our pain of separation lessens and disappears. Our spirit feels connected and whole. When we listen to another genuinely listen it is an act of spirit and act of caring and love.
The act of listening can be self-healing. If you listen really listen to your own being…to the truth of you, your I AM I… you will find a great deal of your pain of separation ceases. We can heal ourselves by listening to our spirit…we can rid ourselves of the depression by listening to another. Be quiet and hear!
Suzanne Deakins, H.W.M. is the publisher of Q Press and One Spirit Press. You may find similar topics in her book “When God Whispers” an ontological discourse on similar topics. Her work appears on Amazon.com and other online retailers. For more on listening see Wendell Johnson’s book “Your Most Enchanted Listener.”
Vladimir Lenin addressing a crowd in Moscow in 1918.CreditRussian State Archive of Social and Political History, via Associated Press
The October Revolution, organized by Vladimir Lenin exactly a century ago, is still relevant today in ways that would have seemed unimaginable when Soviet Communism collapsed.
Marxist-Leninism (albeit in the unique capitalist-Maoist form) still propels China, the world’s surging hyperpower, even as that same ideology ruins Cuba and Venezuela. Meanwhile, North Korea, a dystopian Leninist monarchy with nuclear weapons, terrifies the world. Even more surprisingly, Communism is experiencing a resurrection in democratic Britain: Jeremy Corbyn, that quasi-Leninist comfortingly disguised as cuddly grey-beard, is the most extreme politician ever to lead one of Britain’s two main parties, and he is inching toward power.
But Lenin’s tactics, too, are resurgent. He was a sophisticated genius of merciless zero-sum gain, expressed by his phrase “Kto kovo?” — literally, “Who, whom?” asking the question who controls whom and, more important, who kills whom. President Trump is some ways the personification of a new Bolshevism of the right where the ends justify the means and acceptable tactics include lies and smears, and the exploitation of what Lenin called useful idiots. It’s no coincidence that President Trump’s chief campaign strategist, Steve Bannon, once boasted “I am a Leninist.”
One hundred years later, as its events continue to reverberate and inspire, October 1917 looms epic, mythic, mesmerizing. Its effects were so enormous that it seems impossible that it might not have happened the way it did.
And yet it nearly didn’t.
There was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik revolution. By 1917, the Romanov monarchy was decaying quickly, but its emperors may have saved themselves had they not missed repeated chances to reform. The other absolute monarchies of Europe — the Ottomans, the Habsburgs — fell because they were defeated in World War I. Would the Romanovs have fallen, too, if they had survived just one more year to share in the victory of November 1918?
By 1913, the czar’s secret police had dispersed and vanquished the opposition. Just before the fall of the czar, Lenin reflected to his wife that revolution “won’t happen in our lifetime.” Ultimately, it was a spontaneous, disorganized popular uprising and a crisis of military loyalty that forced Nicholas’s abdication. When that moment arrived, Lenin was in Zurich, Trotsky in New York and Stalin in Siberia.
Lenin initially thought it was “a hoax.” He was lucky that Germany inserted him like a bacillus (via the so-called sealed train) to take Russia out of the war. Back in Petrograd, Lenin, aided by fellow-radicals Trotsky and Stalin, had to overpower erring Bolshevik comrades, who proposed cooperation with the provisional government, and force them to agree to his plan for a coup. The government should have found and killed him but it failed to do so. He succeeded.
Even the “storming” of the Winter Palace — restaged in a 1920 propaganda spectacular as a people’s triumph — was no storming at all. Lenin rages as it took days to seize the main buildings of the government, while the palace itself was taken by climbing through unlocked windows, undefended except for adolescent cadets — followed by a bacchanalia, with drunk Bolsheviks slurping the czar’s Château d’Yquem 1847 out of the gutters.
October might have heralded a short-lived interim, like so many other failed revolutions of that era. Any coordinated attack by White armies, the other side in the Russian civil war, or any intervention by Western forces would have swept the Bolsheviks away. It all depended on Lenin. He was very nearly overthrown in a coup by rebellious coalition partners but he made his own luck, though, by a combination of ideological passion, ruthless pragmatism, unchecked bloodletting and the will to establish a dictatorship. And sometimes, he just got plain lucky: On Aug. 30, 1918, he was shot while addressing a crowd of workers at a factory in Moscow. He survived by inches.
Had any of these events foiled Lenin, our own times would be radically different. Without Lenin there would have been no Hitler. Hitler owed much of his rise to the support of conservative elites who feared a Bolshevik revolution on German soil and who believed that he alone could defeat Marxism. And the rest of his radical program was likewise justified by the threat of Leninist revolution. His anti-Semitism, his anti-Slavic plan for Lebensraum and above all the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 were supported by the elites and the people because of the fear of what the Nazis called “Judeo-Bolshevism.”
Without the Russian Revolution of 1917, Hitler would likely have ended up painting postcards in one of the same flophouses where he started. No Lenin, no Hitler — and the 20th century becomes unimaginable. Indeed, the very geography of our imagination becomes unimaginable.
The East would look as different as the West. Mao, who received huge amounts of Soviet aid in the 1940s, would not have conquered China, which might still be ruled by the family of Chiang Kai-shek. The inspirations that illuminated the mountains of Cuba and the jungles of Vietnam would never have been. Kim Jong-un, pantomimic pastiche of Stalin, would not exist. There would have been no Cold War. The tournaments of power would likely have been just as vicious — just differently vicious.
The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps, after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of human history.
That virtuous idealism justified any monstrosity. The Bolsheviks admired the cleansing purges of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror: “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless,” Lenin said. The Bolsheviks created the first professional revolutionaries, the first total police state, the first modern mass-mobilization on behalf of class war against counterrevolution. Bolshevism was a mind-set, an idiosyncratic culture with an intolerant paranoid wordview obsessed with abstruse Marxist ideology. Their zeal justified the mass killings of all enemies, real and potential, not just by Lenin or Stalin but also Mao, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. It also gave birth to slave labor camps, economic catastrophe and untold psychological damage. (These events are now so long ago that the horrors have been blurred and history forgotten; a glamorous glow of power and idealism lingers to intoxicate young voters disenchanted with the bland dithering of liberal capitalism.)
And then there is Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union. President Vladimir Putin’s power is enforced by his fellow former K.G.B. officers, the heirs of Lenin and Stalin’s secret police. Mr. Putin and his regime have adopted the Leninist tactics of “konspiratsia” and “dezinformatsiya,” which have turned out to be ideally suited to today’s technologies. Americans may have invented the internet, but they saw it (decadently) as a means of making money or (naïvely) as a magical click to freedom. The Russians, bred on Leninist cynicism, harnessed it to undermine American democracy.
Mr. Putin mourned the fall of Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, yet he regards Lenin as an agent of chaos between two epochs of national grandeur — the Romanovs before Nicholas II (Peter the Great and Alexander III are favorites) and Soviet Union’s superpower glory under Stalin.
Mr. Putin presents himself as a czar — and like any czar, he fears revolution above all else. That is why it is victory against Germany in 1945, not the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that is the founding myth of Putinist Russia. Hence the irony that while the West has been discussing the revolution at length, Russia is largely pretending it never happened. Lenin’s marble mausoleum in Red Square must echo with his laughter because that’s just the sort of serpentine political calculation he would have appreciated.
This would be a bad week to leave your mansion, seeing as how you’ve betrayed about half of the people of Wisconsin.
Sagittarius
True love will careen into your life without warning next week, spin you around, take your breath away, dislocate your elbow, shatter your femur, and move on without having noticed you.
Capricorn
When all’s said and done, it’s our experiences that make us who we are. However, that doesn’t explain why you’re assistant manager of the produce department.
Aquarius
There are some kinds of pain that never go away, but after all these years you’d think they’d come up with a way to get that lobster to let go of your nose.
Pisces
You will never be able to explain to anyone’s satisfaction how all those chickens could just appear out of nowhere.
Aries
Your fear of change means that spending the next few centuries in a block of ice will be extremely soothing, at least until the New Reformed Xalfraxian Alliance thaws you out.
Taurus
You’ll never again hear a negative word spoken of you, thanks to your sweet nature and an unfortunate incident with a pair of explosive earbuds.
Gemini
It’s unclear whether you’re going to murder ice cream men or become an ice cream man and murder people, but the stars are pretty certain you’re going to be known as the Ice Cream Man Murderer.
Cancer
You’ve never asked anybody for anything in your life, which may be why those expectant waiters have been following you around for years.
Leo
You’ll become a victim of boredom in the workplace when the technicians figure out a way to make your x-rays a lot more interesting.
Virgo
Although roughly 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, that still doesn’t explain why you have to be rescued from drowning all the time.
Libra
You don’t know why people are so freaked out by your collection of bloody children’s underwear. After all, it says Museum of Bloody Children’s Underwear right on the hand-painted sign on your house.
“Golden Buddha, 2005” by Nam June Paik.CreditFred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Not long ago I was accused of something I hadn’t realized was a bad thing: clarity. Adam Gopnik, reviewing my book “Why Buddhism Is True,” in The New Yorker in August, wrote: “He makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear.”
Underlying this allegation (which I vigorously deny!) is a common view: that Buddhist ideas defy clear articulation — and that in a sense the point of Buddhist ideas is to defy clear articulation. After all, aren’t those Zen koans — “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and so on — supposed to suggest that language, and the linear thought it embodies, can’t capture the truth about reality?
Gopnik seems to think that this drift of Buddhist thought — its apparent emphasis on the inscrutability of things — largely insulates it from scrutiny. Buddhist discourse that acknowledges, even embraces, paradox may “hold profound existential truths,” Gopnik says, but by the same token it has, as a kind of built-in property, an “all-purpose evasion of analysis.” So apparently people like me, who would like to evaluate Buddhist ideas in the light of modern science and philosophy, should save our breath.
The question Gopnik is raising isn’t just an academic one. Every day, millions of people practice mindfulness meditation — they sit down, focus on their breath, and calm their minds. But the point of mindfulness meditation isn’t just to calm you down. Rather, the idea — as explained in ancient Buddhist texts — is that a calm, contemplative mind can help you see the world as it really is. It would be nice to critically examine this powerful claim, but if we can’t say clearly what Buddhists mean by “the world as it really is,” then how can we examine it? How can we figure out — or even argue about — whether meditation is indeed drawing people closer to the truth about reality?
The cultural critic Edward Said famously used the term “orientalism” to refer to a patronizing way Westerners sometimes think of Eastern cultures and ideas — as charmingly exotic, perhaps, but as deficient in various Western virtues, including rationality and rigor. Said was talking mainly about Middle Eastern cultures, but much the same could be said of Buddhism: Western thinkers may cherish its art and its cryptic aphorisms, and may see meditation as therapeutically useful, but many of them don’t imagine Buddhist thought playing in the same league as Western thought; they don’t imagine a Buddhist philosophy that involves coherent conceptual structures that can be exposed to evidence and logic and then stand or fall on their merits.
This condescension is unfounded. Not only have Buddhist thinkers for millenniums been making very much the kinds of claims that Western philosophers and psychologists make — many of these claims are looking good in light of modern Western thought. In fact, in some cases Buddhist thought anticipated Western thought, grasping things about the human mind, and its habitual misperception of reality, that modern psychology is only now coming to appreciate.
Consider a quote that Gopnik employs in suggesting that appraising Buddhist philosophy may be a fool’s errand. It is from a Zen Buddhist who, in analyzing a famous text called the Heart Sutra, wrote this: “Things exist but they are not real.” I agree with Gopnik that this sentence seems a bit hard to unpack. But if you go look at the book it is taken from, you’ll find that the author himself, Mu Soeng, does a good job of unpacking it.
It turns out Soeng is explaining an idea that is central to Buddhist philosophy: “not self” — the idea that your “self,” as you intuitively conceive it, is actually an illusion. Soeng writes that the doctrine of not-self doesn’t deny an “existential personality” — it doesn’t deny that there is a you that exists; what it denies is that somewhere within you is an “abiding core,” a kind of essence-of-you that remains constant amid the flux of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and other elements that constitute your experience. So if by “you” we mean a “self” that features an enduring essence, then you aren’t real.
Now, you can argue with this line of thought — with its characterization of the self, its definition of “real” and “exist,” and so on. But the point is that this line of thought is clear enough to argue about — just like the lines of thought Western philosophers produce. In fact, David Hume, an emphatically Western philosopher, made an argument against the reality of the self that is so similar to longstanding Buddhist arguments as to make some scholars (including, as it happens, Alison Gopnik, Adam’s sister) suspect that Hume had encountered Buddhist thought.
In recent decades, important aspects of the Buddhist concept of not-self have gotten support from psychology. In particular, psychology has bolstered Buddhism’s doubts about our intuition of what you might call the “C.E.O. self” — our sense that the conscious “self” is the initiator of thought and action.
A particularly famous experiment seems to show that, before we are consciously aware of deciding to perform an act — push a button, say — the physical processes that initiate the act are already underway. Other experiments suggest that our minds are good at fabricating reasons that we do certain things and hold certain opinions — and that the fabrication happens unconsciously, so that the conscious mind is itself duped into believing these stories, along with their implication that the conscious mind is running the show.
If much of this sounds disappointingly free of the charming paradox commonly associated with Buddhism, I have good news: There is a paradox that can surface if you pursue the logic of not-self through meditation. Namely: recognizing that “you” are not in control, that you are not a C.E.O., can help give “you” more control. Or, at least, you can behave more like a C.E.O. is expected to behave: more rationally, more wisely, more reflectively; less emotionally, less rashly, less reactively.
Here’s how it can work. Suppose that, via mindfulness meditation, you observe a feeling like anxiety or anger and, rather than let it draw you into a whole train of anxious or angry thoughts, you let it pass away. Though you experience the feeling — and in a sense experience it more fully than usual — you experience it with “non-attachment” and so evade its grip. And you now see the thoughts that accompanied it in a new light — they no longer seem like trustworthy emanations from some “I” but rather as transient notions accompanying transient feelings.
Note how, in addition to being therapeutic, this clarifies your view of the world. After all, the “anxious” or “angry” trains of thought you avoid probably aren’t objectively true. They probably involve either imagining things that haven’t happened or making subjective judgments about things that have. In other words, these thoughts are just stories the brain spews out; they are often manifestly misleading, and abandoning them will tend to leave us closer to clarity than embracing them would.
Mindfulness meditation can be enlightening in another way, too. It can make us more aware of how our buttons get pushed — more aware, say, of how people or things we encounter trigger certain feelings and certain stories and thus certain behaviors. Somewhat like “Western” psychological science, mindfulness can illuminate the workings of the mind.
There’s a broader and deeper sense in which Buddhist thought is more “Western” than stereotype suggests. What, after all, is more Western than science’s emphasis on causality, on figuring out what causes what, and hoping to thus explain why all things do the things they do? Well, in a sense, the Buddhist idea of “not-self” grows out of the belief undergirding this mission — that the world is pervasively governed by causal laws. The reason there is no “abiding core” within us is that the ever-changing forces that impinge on us — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes — are constantly setting off chain reactions inside of us.
Indeed, this constant causal interaction with our environment raises doubts not only about how firm the core of the “self” is but, in a sense, how firm the bounds of the self are. Buddhism’s doubts about the distinctness and solidity of the “self” — and of other things, for that matter — rests on a recognition of the sense in which pervasive causality means pervasive fluidity.
The kind of inquiry that produced Buddhist views on the human psyche isn’t scientific; it doesn’t involve experiments that generate publicly observable data. It rests more on a kind of meditative introspection — somewhat in the spirit of what Western philosophers call phenomenology. Yet Buddhism long ago generated insights that modern psychology is only now catching up to, and these go beyond doubts about the C.E.O. self.
For example, psychology has lately started to let go of its once-sharp distinction between “cognitive” and “affective” parts of the mind; it has started to see that feelings are so finely intertwined with thoughts as to be part of their very coloration. This wouldn’t qualify as breaking news in Buddhist circles. A sutra attributed to the Buddha says that a “mind object” — a category that includes thoughts — is just like a taste or a smell: whether a person is “tasting a flavor with the tongue” or “smelling an odor with the nose” or “cognizing a mind object with the mind,” the person “lusts after it if it is pleasing” and “dislikes it if it is unpleasing.”
Brain-scan studies have produced tentative evidence that this lusting and disliking — embracing thoughts that feel good and rejecting thoughts that feel bad — lies near the heart of certain “cognitive biases.” If such evidence continues to accumulate, the Buddhist assertion that a clear view of the world involves letting go of these lusts and dislikes will have drawn a measure of support from modern science.
Gopnik thinks that attempts to corroborate Buddhist ideas with modern science run into a contradiction. After all, Buddhism is in a sense suspicious of “stories” — such as those stories that mindfulness meditation can help liberate us from. And, Gopnik says, science is just “competitive storytelling” — which means, he says, that Buddhism is “antithetical” to scientific argument. He writes, “Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend.” Well, this irony doesn’t seem to have deterred the Buddhists who, a couple of millenniums ago, compiled the “Abhidhamma Pitaka,” which puts names on lots of mental phenomena and tells stories about how they relate to one another. And it doesn’t seem to bother the Dalai Lama, who has embraced science as a legitimate way to test Buddhist ideas.
I agree with Gopnik on one thing: There are parts of Buddhist philosophy that, even when properly understood, seem paradoxical or opaque. But these tend to involve the same issues that drive Western philosophers toward paradox and opaqueness — for example, the relationship of consciousness to the physical body. Language is indeed (as notable Western philosophers have held) incapable of encompassing all of reality, and I’m pretty sure that the human mind is incapable of comprehending all of reality.
All we can do is clear away as many impediments to comprehension as possible. Science has a way of doing that — by insisting that entrants in its “competitive storytelling” demonstrate explanatory power in ways that are publicly observable, thus neutralizing, to the extent possible, subjective biases that might otherwise prevail. Buddhism has a different way of doing it: via meditative disciplines that are designed to attack subjective biases at the source, yielding a clearer view of both the mind itself and the world beyond it.
The results of these two inquiries converge to a remarkable extent — an extent that can be appreciated only in light of the last few decades of progress in psychology and evolutionary science. At least, that’s my argument. It may be wrong. But it’s an argument that can be engaged by anyone willing to engage it — which is something it has in common with Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist psychology.
Under The Skin with Russell Brand and Rupert Sheldrake
Published on Nov 7, 2017
Dubbed “the most controversial scientist on Earth” Rupert Sheldrake joins me to discuss the dogmas within conventional science, the evolving laws of physics, memory in nature, and how science validates and improves spiritual practices.
Morphic resonance is a process whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species. Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.
This hypothesis was first put forward in my book A New Science of Life in 1981, and discussed in my detail in my main theoretical work, The Presence of the Past, published in 1988. See Morphic Fields for a general introduction to the theory.
A new fully updated edition of A New Science of Life was published in the UK in 2009 (Icon Books, London) and in the US under the title Morphic Resonance (Inner Traditions International, Rochester, VT). In this new edition, Appendix A (PDF) describes the results of experimental tests since the first edition of the book was published in 1981, and discusses ten new tests. In Appendix B (PDF) there is a dialogue about morphic fields and quantum physics with the physicist David Bohm.
Bio: William Cowper (November 26, 1731 – April 25, 1800) was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry.
HE WHO KNOWS THE MALE YET CLEAVES TO WHAT IS FEMALE BECOMES LIKE A RAVINE, RECEIVING ALL THINGS UNDER HEAVEN, AND BEING SUCH A RAVINE, HE KNOWS ALL THE TIME OF THE POWER THAT NEVER CALLS UPON IN VAIN, THUS RETURNING TO THE STATE OF INFANCY [THAT IS, THE INFANCY OF MAN].
HE WHO KNOWS THE WHITE, YET CLEAVES TO THE BLACK BECOMES A STANDARD BY WHICH ALL THINGS ARE TESTED. AND BEING SUCH A STANDARD, HE HAS ALL THE TIME AND POWER THAT NEVER ERRS. HE RETURNS TO THE LIMITLESS.
WHO KNOWS GLORY YET CLEAVES TO IGNOMY BECOMES LIKE A VALLEY THAT RECEIVES INTO IT ALL THINGS UNDER HEAVEN. AND BEING SUCH A VALLEY HE HAS ALL THE TIME AND POWER THAT SUFFICES. HE RETURNS TO THE STATE OF THE UNCARVED BLOCK.
Elbert Green Hubbard (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915) was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. Raised in Hudson, Illinois, he had early success as a traveling salesman for the Larkin Soap Company. Wikipedia
The race has gained ground, made headway upon the whole; and thanks to the thinkers gone, there are thinkers now in every community who weigh, sift, try and decide. We no longer accept the doctrine that our natures are rooted in infamy, and that the desires of the flesh are cunning traps set by Satan, with God’s permission, to undo us. We believe that no one can harm us but ourselves, that sin is misdirected energy, that there is no devil but fear, and that the universe is planned for good. On every side we find beauty and excellence held in the balance of things. We know that work is needful, that winter is as necessary as summer, that night is as useful as day, that death is a manifestation of life, and just as good.
We have listened to Coleridge, and others, who said: “You should use your reason and separate the good from the bad, the false from the true, the useless from the useful. Be yourself and think for yourself; and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the opinions forced upon you by those who have a personal interest in keeping you in ignorance. You grow through the exercise of your faculties, and if you do not reason now you never will advance. We are all sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Claim your heritage!”
–“Little Journeys to the Homes of English Authors” by Elbert Hubbard (1910)
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