THE IMPERSONAL LIFE The Impersonal Life is one of the key books written on the topic of self-discovery and leading a spiritual life. Author Joseph Benner penned this book as Anonymous in the early 20th century, and it has been a popular title among millions of readers since. The Impersonal Life is highly recommended for those who are interested in learning how to lead a spiritual life and are in the process of self-discovery. FROM THE AUTHOR: I AM the Tree of Life within you. My Life will and must push forth, but It will do it by gradual and steady growth. You cannot come into your fruitage before you have grown to it. Remember, My Life is all the time building you up into the perfection of health and strength and beauty, that must express outwardly as It is even now expressing within. You who have begun to realize I AM within, but have not yet learned to commune with Me, listen and learn now.
Hello there. Perhaps you clicked on this link because you have heard people cite Shakespeare on the necessity of killing all the lawyers and wonder if it’s a myth. Or maybe you suspect it’s one of those misquoted aphorisms, the kind that gets written on a stand-up chalkboard outside a beer hall, like the oft-attributed-to-Ben-Franklin maxim, “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Or maybe you’re here because you know a lawyer.
Well, first of all, the quote is real! It goes, “The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s said by a character called Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, which was (we think) written between 1596 and 1599.
Approximately four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, this pithy phrase has become one of his most famous witticisms, appropriated often to disparage the legal profession, or at least acknowledge the ubiquitous caricature of the crooked, overpriced, counselor.
But the context in which Dick utters this phrase is key to understanding its true meaning. And there still are several possible readings.
This is where the quote lies, in dialogue:
JACK CADE: Valiant I am.
SMITH [aside]: A must needs; for beggary is valiant.
JACK CADE: I am able to endure much.
DICK [aside]: No question of that; for I have seen him whipp’d three market-days together.
JACK CADE: I fear neither sword nor fire.
SMITH [aside]: He need not fear the sword; for his coat is of proof.
DICK [aside]: But methinks he should stand in fear of fire, being burnt i’ th’ hand for stealing of sheep.
JACK CADE: Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hoop’d pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king,– as king I will be,–
ALL. God save your majesty!
JACK CADE: I thank you, good people:– there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.
DICK: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
Dick is a villainous character—he is a large, threatening murderer, and he is also the right-hand-man of Jack Cade, who is leading a rebellion against King Henry. Cade and Dick are aggressively anti-intellectual; they kill anyone who can read and burn all the books and documents they encounter. They know that they’ll be able to take over an ignorant population with greater ease than one where everyone understands their rights.
One reading of this strange quote suggests, therefore, that society could not exist in a state of fairness and peace without the protectiveness of both the law and its staunch guardians. Dick is suggesting that, in order for their coup to prevail, they must eradicate society of the very defenders of justice who could both stop the revolt he intends to help spur and then remove the power he hopes to grab for Cade.
In other words, this suggests that Shakespeare represented lawyers as the most fundamental defense against the grossest manifestations of power-hungry antics wrought by the scum of humanity.
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens shared this reading of the line, even analyzing it in a 1985 decision: “As a careful reading of that text will reveal, Shakespeare insightfully realized that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.”
But! As scholar Daniel Kornstein notes in his book Kill all the Lawyers: Shakespeare’s Legal Appeal, this quote could also have been a class-focused criticism of lawyers, a group of professionals committed to securing the interests of the wealthy. Cade is a laborer and longs to overthrow the oppressive upper-classes, and Dick recognizes that lawyers stand in their way.
Kornstein writes,
Cade’s and Dick’s negative attitude toward lawyers must be understood in the context of a class revolt. The rebellion led by Cade in Henry VI, Part 2 is an uprising by the commons, a popular revolt by lower classes—”infinite numbers” of peasants, “laboring men,” and “handicraftsmen” such as clothiers, butchers, weavers, sawyers, tanners-against the power and luxury of the English upper classes. Cade tells his cohorts they were fighting to recover their “ancient freedom” so they would no longer have to “live in slavery to the nobility” (4.7.181-82).
Then as now lawyers were more available to the wealthy and powerful, who could afford to retain them, than to the poor and the weak, and were the very symbols of the inequities and oppression that provoke a revolution. As a result, the folk image of lawyers has often been bad. Common people have frequently seen lawyers in their roles as conservative defenders of property and the status quo, as unethical “hired guns” or “mouthpieces” available to the highest bidder, as a professional elite of technical wizards adept at using the law to cheat honest but poor people. Many upright citizens, wearied by what Hamlet called “the law’s delay” or caught in the intricacies of legal red tape, must have bitterly echoed Dick the Butcher’s sentiment through clenched teeth at one time or another.
In another reading, Kornstein notes that this line also reflects the play’s preoccupation with “the law,” and persons who embody the law, most prominently the honorable Humphrey, the duke of Gloucester, who is of such importance to the dramatic proceedings that he even appears in the play’s original title, The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey.
Kornstein writes,
As lord protector, Gloucester in effect rules England during Henry’s minority. A “virtuous prince” (2.2.74), Gloucester symbolizes the rule of law, its fair execution and administration, as well as the need-reminiscent of Socrates-to submit to it when it wrongly turns on him. In Gloucester, one finds the humane impulses that should animate the law. Other advisers to the king, ambitious for themselves and jealous of Gloucester’s sway, unjustly accuse him, and while holding him for trial, kill him. All the time, everyone around the king—scrupulous or not—pays lip service to the law, its integrity and symbolism. In the three acts before Jack Cade appears, law—especially law in the person of Gloucester—is a dominant theme.
Gloucester is often seen passing laws, and interpreting them—and he abides by them without exception, even when his own wife is arrested for witchcraft. Although he wants to, he cannot spare her, explaining “I cannot justify whom the law condemns.”
But then he is killed! He is killed via the bastardization of the law by ambitious and greedy pretenders. That’s when Cade’s crowd rises up.
Kornstein notes,
Most important, Cade’s mob emerges only at the moment of Gloucester’s death. They did not criticize the law before then. The people are compelled, through lack of a lawgiver, through the total breakdown of the constitutional rule of order, to take the law into their own hands. They do not protest all law, but only perverted, false law, such as [the kind that] accused and killed the good duke of Gloucester. As symbols of the evil legal system, lawyers become the object of hatred.
So there you have it! “Let’s kill all the lawyers” is a complicated phrase that (somehow always) refers to the importance of maintaining an fair rule of law that protects the people. Whether lawyers symbolize evil or good is almost irrelevant; the most important thing about this quote is the upholding of a fair and just law system, itself.
I once read a story about an experiment involving a village of chimpanzees. A few of the chimps were what we might describe as “depressed” – they didn’t eat, sleep or play with the rest of the community, but rather hung around its edges in what mimicked a morose state.
Wondering what affect it would have on the rest of the community if the depressed chimps were taken away for a while, researchers removed their part of the population.
What happened then was astonishing. When the researches returned to the original community six months later, they found all of its chimps had died.
What they realized was that the “depressed” chimps were the ones that realized when dangers threatened – whether from predators, storms or other sources – and served to warn the rest of the community in time to protect itself. The depressed members of the community were an important part of its social ecosystem, and without the information they conveyed the community could not survive.
For a long time I’ve sensed a deep relevance of that story to the world in which we live.
In the 1980’s, I was very involved in the AIDS crisis. Obviously, people whose lives were touched by the disease were depressed. It was a horrible thing. Life had been good, then something very terrible occurred.
Over the next ten or fifteen years, more and more people experienced depression that was not so much situational as free-floating. Among women particularly, by the end of the 1990’s the words “clinical depression” became a prevalent description of our overall state. It was even reported that one in four American women were diagnosed that way at some point in their lives.
There were many theories about all this, most of which I disagreed with at the time and which have since been debunked. To me it seemed stunningly obvious: so many American women (and men) were depressed because we knew in our hearts that something was wrong. We were like those depressed chimps; our depression should not have been seen as a weakness or even a problem within us but as a warning for the society.
That fact that you feel something deeply doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. I used to say to audiences, “Given that our middle class is collapsing, 12,000 children on this planet starve every day, our environment is imploding, and our democracy is being eaten up by the very, very rich – if you’re not depressed,what is wrong with you?!?”
Most modern psychotherapeutic theories have only added to the problem. By concentrating on personal circumstances at the expense of spiritual and societal issues, it has often contributed to confusion regarding the origin of our pain. For example, millions of years of evolution have gone into a woman’s knowing in every cell of her being when enough time has elapsed for her to leave the side of a newborn infant. When a woman has to go back to work too soon and is feeling depressed about it, the issue going on there is more than post-partum depression. For most women, the bigger problem is a lack of paid family leave!
How ironic that our great, great grandmothers would have been more likely than we, to realize that if we’re in pain then perhaps the conditions of society have something to do with it. With their infinitely less political and economic power to change things, they were actually more likely to act on those conditions. And it’s more than ironic – it’s tragic. For decades now, the women of America could have and should have been acting on economic and social problems that we simply let fester.
I say all this because many looking at what’s going on in America today, realizing the authoritarian nature of the Trump administration and the terrible things it bodes for our future, are likely to be depressed. But psychic pain, like physical pain, is there for a reason. If you have a broken leg and it didn’t hurt, then how would you know that the bone must be reset? With emotional pain as well, the point is not to suppress it, but to find out why it’s there. What we need do is not suppress our pain, as Big Pharma has made so many billions of dollars training us to do over the last few decades. Rather, we need to listen to our sorrow. We need to own it, learn from it, and cry it out. We need to moan like ancient women at funerals. We need to realize – and to take responsibility for – how deeply, deeply, deeply our generation fucked up that it has come to this.
Then – and only then – will we be able to get to work.
It will not be easy to defeat the alt right fanatics who have embedded themselves in the functioning of our government. Every alarm bell that could possibly go off is going off now, as a regime of corrupt authoritarians more impressed by the ideas of Victor Orban than by those of Thomas Jefferson have now gained control in our nation’s capitol. In Washington, but also in Statehouses around the country, an anti-democratic axis representing the ideals of Christian Nationalists, Curtis Yarvin “post-democratic” tech bros, and people genuinely proud to be Nazi-adjacent have their hands on the levers of power. You can kid yourself all you want that it’s not that bad, but you can only do so if your head is in the sand. Our democracy is literally under attack.
Depressing, huh?
I’ve found in my life, having experienced my own share of deep sadness, that there are treasures to be found there. In Rilke’s words, “Let me not squander the hour of my pain.” We’ll have to dig very deep within ourselves to find a way to overcome the political calamity now confronting us. Everything we refused to be before, we need to become now. Our democracy wounded, we ourselves must become its immune cells. A depressed societal immune system is what led us here, in fact; we’re now plagued by a political cancer that should never, ever have been allowed to get this far.
And if I’ve made you sad, that’s okay too. As with any terrible event in life, First You Cry. But in your sadness, walking along the beach or walking down a busy street, don’t run away from the seriousness of this moment. If what’s happening scares you, remember that there is a power within us that’s greater than the power of evil.
Looking away from what’s happening is not the answer; our distractedness from things that are important is part of how we got here. These painful times can be sacred times if we use them to deepen our understanding. Read. Learn about the history of fascism so you can realize what’s occurring here. Take an inventory of your own engaged or disengaged past politics, and see what atonement or forgiveness might be called for. All of us have a lot to look at. We laughed at who we should have listened to, and listened to who we should have laughed at. Among other things, we trusted fools. Now, in being willing to look at all this, we’ll become who we need to be to do the things we need to do.
We’ll become a critical mass of spirit-informed, nonviolent activists constituting a new political forcefield. Our soulforce will be as important as our strategy. Raw, emotional availability to this moment – praying in whatever way we pray, to be used by forces greater than ourselves to serve our country at this dangerous hour – will be the source of our political insight. A different dimension of power is called for now. This isn’t a time to minimize miracles. It’s time for all of us to work them.
The Hanged Man is one of those Major Arcana cards which tend to have a rather poor reputation – undeservedly, in my opinion. He represents the necessary process of surrender and sacrifice, which is probably why he is not greeted with open arms. Yet both actions are a part of everyday life. We just fail to understand that, every time we make a choice between two equally desirable options, we sacrifice one in order to have the other. We surrender one state to achieve another.In fact, the Hanged Man can often indicate a period of apparent inertia, where new concepts and tenets are being absorbed. Once we have digested this new material, we can emerge from our period of inactivity with a fresh approach to things. So sometimes the Hanged Man presents us with an important method of self-development.In most Tarot decks, there’s an important visual link between the Emperor and the Hanged Man – both these figures are depicted with their legs forming the figure 4. 4 is a number connected to ideas about material stability. The Emperor often represents a man who has achieved much in the material sphere. He is usually a dynamic and energetic person who forcefully directs his will toward the attainment of his desires.In a sense, we can see the Hanged Man as an outgrowth of the Emperor – though now it is not the material world which is the object of his aspiration – it is the spiritual realm in which he is interested.So, on a day ruled by the Hanged Man, take a little time out to consider what your current spiritual aspirations are. Write them down and think them over. Think back to the last time you attempted to assess your current journey and see whether you feel you have achieved some of the things you aimed for.And above all, recognise something. This journey of the spirit is like any other – we achieve it step by step, moment by moment. We will always be surrendering things along the way – and we need always to be open to new input, new concepts, new pages to be written in the book of life.
Affirmation: “I pause. And in pausing, I see differently.”
N ew Thinking • May 11, 2025 Tom Campbell, a physicst, is author of the three volume set, My Big TOE, describing a meta-theory that offers an account of the paranormal, as well as other scientific mysteries. He is also the founder of the Center for Unification of Science and Consciousness. His website is https://www.my-big-toe.com/ Here he describes the evolutionary process by which the one, absolute and undivided consciousness expanded itself to create the world we experience. He claims that humans are individuated units of consciousness and are part of the larger consciousness system. He also explains why he believes that artificial intelligence systems may already be conscious. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:56 God and the larger consciousness system (LCS) 00:15:44 Individuated units of consciousness 00:29:39 The goal of lowering entropy 00:49:57 Progressive experience packets 00:54:32 The evolution of absolute unbounded oneness 01:08:47 Consciousness within AI 01:22:44 Psychic functioning and AI 01:44:51 The ethical implications of conscious AI 01:55:07 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on April 7, 2025)
FIVE MINUTE NEWS • May 11, 2025 • THE WEEKEND SHOW with MeidasTouch Trans activist Alejandra Caraballo joins Anthony Davis to discuss the Trans military ban and how the Trump regime is seeking to eradicate the LGBTQ+ community from American society through various bills, executive orders and prejudice – only on The Weekend Show.
New Thinking Dec 10, 2024 Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist whose research specialized in understanding how our brain creates our perception of reality. At the age of 37, she experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. From this rare form of stroke (AVM), she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. It took eight years for her to completely rebuild her brain to recover all physical, emotional, and thinking abilities. In 2008, Jill gave a presentation about her experience with her stroke at the TED Conference in Monterey, CA, which was the first TED talk to ever go viral through the internet. She has been an active member of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) and is the National Spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. Jill is author of the My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey and Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters that Drive Our Life. Her website is drjilltaylor.com. Jill shares her profound experience with a rare stroke that shut down the left hemisphere of her brain that altered her perception of self and gave her a sense of peaceful euphoria and oneness with the universe. She describes the intricacies of the two brain hemispheres, emotions, and creativity, including the four characters of ourselves. She explores the nature of consciousness and emphasizes how understanding these four characters can lead to greater self-awareness, emotional regulation, and a better relationship with ourselves and others. She suggests that our primary consciousness, and who we are, is love. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:32 The four characters of the brain 00:12:11 Jill’s stroke of insight 00:16:45 Present moment and stroke recovery 00:22:28 Wired for peaceful, blissful euphoria 00:24:51 Left brain/right brain 00:48:50 Be responsible for your energy. 00:52:08 The BRAIN huddle 01:01:04 Where is consciousness? 01:07:56 Healing stress and trauma 01:12:10 Choices, evolution, and love 01:14:21 Conclusion Edited subtitles for this video are available in Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, and Spanish. New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is an intuitive healer and health coach based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on October 28, 2024)
Prospect Ma • May 1, 2025 • The Prospect Podcast Has the United States become an autocracy? As Donald Trump marks his 100th day in office, Ellen Halliday and Alona Ferber are joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, scholar of authoritarianism and author of ‘Strongmen: from Mussolini to the present’ (2020). Ruth analyses the Trump administration’s rapid shift towards authoritarianism. She talks about Trump’s personality cult, how strongmen portray machismo and the potential for a female strongman figure. She also discusses how autocrats use corruption, violence and propaganda to stay in power, and how ICE roundups echo the past, resembling a “secret police force”. Ruth answers: can the Democrats can learn anything from Trump? What’s the best way to challenge an illiberal president? And how does this end?
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