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Probaway – Life Hacks

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Condensed thoughts 2016

30 Friday Sep 2016

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Condensed thoughts

I woke up this morning thinking I might still do something.The Condensed thoughts of Probaway 2016 January – June 30

Condensed thoughts January 2016

01 January 2016 – Probaway Person of the Year Xi Jinping – Xi Jinping for taking China from a backward economy to the most powerful one on Earth.

02 January 2016 – How your appendix may be helping you live longer. – With appendicitis don’t take antibiotics or operate until you must.

03 January 2016 – You do have a choice – sometimes. – You do have free will, if and only if you have the time and opportunity to think.

04 January 2016 – Be it not do it. – Not ! – Meditation isn’t for sitting, it’s preparation for doing.

05 January 2016 – Why and how to approach a new situation with a smile. – Approach new and possibly dangerous situations with a smile, and you can generate your smile by first looking at people’s silly shoes.

06 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Growth only happens when you move on from your comfort zone.

07 January 2016 – The Better Angels of Our Nature – discussion – A new group of people is always a delight because they will inevitably bring ideas up in a new way.

08 January 2016 – How to make your skin more perfect. – Touch a bar of soap with your wet fingertip, touch the soapy tip to your blemishes, then rinse away the soap under a running tap, and then dry and massage the area.

09 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Happiness – Happiness is in the present moment of progress toward a worthwhile goal.

10 January 2016 – How are we hurting ourselves with self-deception? – There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one’s conscience.

11 January 2016 – Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) logarithmic chart update – 11 January 2016 – The best defense against diseases is by avoiding them as early as possible.

12 January 2016 – Once again we discuss happiness, but I have problems. – Give it your best, let it go, and intentionally walk away.

13 January 2016 – I want you to be happy – but at a higher level of consciousness – Happiness has higher levels that can be achieved.

14 January 2016 – Is happiness a behavior that can be learned? – A conscious pursuing of personal reality is the real path to happiness.

15 January 2016 – What things are stressing me this week? – Those were my stressors of the last two weeks; but I chose them, so they were pleasurable, not painful.

16 January 2016 – How to identify and avoid bad ideas. – Perhaps I’m being too harsh. — Avoid people who talk nonsense.

17 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Thoughts – Voluntarily change where you are placing your attention and you change your entire universe.

18 January 2016 – Steven Colbert has a cold. – Probaway – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully. As the title says, these posts have tried to help people live better lives.

19 January 2016 – Live long and prosper – upgrade – Live long and participate !!

20 January 2016 – New ideas are offensive !! – New ideas are dangerous and therefore offensive.

21 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Genius – When looking into the unknown it takes genius to know what is unusual and what is commonplace.

22 January 2016 – Mona Lisa has been restored for 3D – I have been working nearly nonstop since Christmas digitally restoring the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci.

23 January 2016 – I have done 3,000 posts at Probaway ! Whew !! Hm? !!! – Of course my daily question is what is important to blog about today?

24 January 2016 – How to expose better options to others? – You learn to expose yourself to better options by watching how others make choices.

25 January 2016 – A minor Mona Lisa setback – A good life isn’t found in lounging about with no problems and nothing to do, it’s finding important things that need doing, and doing them.

26 January 2016 – The Opening – To whom and to what is the Opening telling us to attend to?

27 January 2016 – My face is a jungle covered with bacteria. – Outside of our civil society we are living in a wild jungle and should behave in ways that fit our natural condition.

28 January 2016 – Irrational Man by Woody Allen – movie review – The Irrational Man shows yet another series of thoughts not to bother pursuing.

29 January 2016 – Some daylight in your eyes helps you focus better. – Go for a walk every day, smile at the sky and enjoy a friendly companion. Walking a mile to school or work would be perfect.

30 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Fear – The best amount of fear is that which goads you to your best efforts.

31 January 2016 – The EarthArk is shockingly uninteresting. – A child born today may live to see the irretrievable end of nearly all life as we know it.

Condensed thoughts Probaway February 2016

01 February 2016 – What to do when you come to a fork in the road – Of course if we were not on a road, but on a trail, I would recommend the A trail, and avoid the B trail.

02 February 2016 – We are the chosen ones. We chose ourselves. – Pay attention to your local environment and participate.

03 February 2016 – Argus Dome deep-space refrigerator – Once in place the EarthArk temperatures can be maintained at —100° F. for thousands of years without any human maintenance.

04 February 2016 – How to think better. – Thinking better means to help our minds to help everyone participate more fully in our world, and to do that requires clean signals from our world.

05 February 2016 – Teach what you most need to learn to do and sell it.– Any brilliant person can succeed if they get started early in life.

06 February 2016 – World population passes 7.4 billion humans. – Life is wonderful now because the Earth is supporting 7.4 billion people.

07 February 2016 – Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) logarithmic chart update – 07 February 2016 – We live in a dynamic and chaotic situation where every living thing is seeking food, and every other living thing is potentially a source of food, including YOU.

08 February 2016 – The 100 Greatest Atrocities of Human History – Modern humanity is doing just fine when compared to our past.

09 February 2016 – How to fix your distorted view of history. – Humans will eat voraciously, reproduce maximally and kill as needed, like every other predatory animal.

10 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Participate – Seeking to live long, and to participate with all that’s around you, is the route to a long and enjoyable life.

11 February 2016 – Black hole gravity waves detected near my old home. – I live a surprisingly tranquil life.

12 February 2016 – Wikipedia links to 100 Greatest Atrocities of History– This list adds up to 494.82 million homicides since 500 BCE.

13 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Evolution – Evolution isn’t a belief, it’s an observable fact.

14 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Love – Let my last breath be, “I love you!” and the last words I hear, too.

15 February 2016 – How people can move from maturity to sagehood – People grow in maturity when they are feeling expansive and take more responsibility for human welfare.

16 February 2016 – My Apatheism is pulling back the veil that obscures the obvious. – If I have anything that could be called a religion it is to pull back the veil so others can see what they previously did not see.

17 February 2016 – Learning to smell essential oils is difficult. – With huge industries based on smell and food odors, there must be some theoretical understanding of what is happening.

18 February 2016 – Mona Lisa comes to life in Bend, Oregon – Mona Lisa comes to life and will watch you move.

19 February 2016 – Mona Lisa and Charles Scamahorn in Bend, Oregon – That is why I spent so much time restoring the Mona Lisa. So you can see her magic too.

20 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Smile – Look at the sky and smile.

21 February 2016 – To grow you must be feeling emotionally positive. – Get yourself into a positive state of mind right before making decisions.

22 February 2016 – Do humans need a transcendent purpose for their lives? – If even Sartre can’t find a valid reason for his existence, what can the average man do?

23 February 2016 – The secret of Mona Lisa’s smile revealed. – Mona Lisa knows your secrets too!

24 February 2016 – Atrocities by Matthew White – book review – War is dangerous to your life and property, so choose leaders who will keep you out of war.

25 February 2016 – What is your ultimate value? – A personal ultimate value must be practiced and promoted to be valuable.

26 February 2016 – Mona Lisa in 3D big enough to see clearly. – When you cross your eyes it is possible to see her in three dimensions.

27 February 2016 – I try to stay healthy, but today I have a cold. – I’ve taken two baths today, and always feel better afterward, so I’m going in now.

28 February 2016 – “Bat shit crazy!” – If bat intestinal biota is as powerful as similar human biota, it may open a totally new field of medical practice.

29 February 2016 – EarthArk day went by without a hitch. – Rich people living in paradise refuse to take care of ugly things.

Condensed thoughts Probaway March 2016

01 March 2016 – My life with shamans. – Each shaman can be more productive if their stories are based on personal experience and analysis and conclusions.

02 March 2016 – People are incapable of thinking beyond their maturity level. – At the beginning of a conversation discover the interests of a person, and speak exclusively to those.

03 March 2016 – What is the good life? – The good life is right here when looked at that way, so why go wandering all over the world, like some of my friends do?

04 March 2016 – Why can’t people think for themselves? – I don’t claim to be any better at this than anyone else, and it is just a question of whom you choose to put your attention upon.

05 March 2016 – Hey kids! What are you going to do when the mountains run dry? – With accurate information there can be foresight and better actions.

06 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Fate – Our greatest personal freedom is choosing how we respond to events.

07 March 2016 – Philosophers Squared – Karl Jaspers – Only in those moments when I exercise my freedom am I fully myself.

08 March 2016 – Gracious receiving of a gift is the greatest gift of all. – Instantly returning something of value makes the original gift not a gift given in love, but more of an economic transaction, and that is not what is intended by the gift.

09 March 2016 – An easy experiment to improve your skin. – A healthy skin microbiome is a good defense against skin problems.

10 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Fear – Fear is a good thing when it prevents us from doing stupid things.

11 March 2016 – People need hopes based on achievable realities. – When you graduate from high school, if you can’t go to a top university become a small home owner.

12 March 2016 – Humans versus the future Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Humans being integrated into AI is a process of us living forever.

13 March 2016 – A cry of existential desperation? – Sometimes I trust other people’s opinions more than my own.

14 March 2016 – Emptiness is an empty goal. – Life expands in meaning as one progresses in their sustainable maturity.

15 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Anxiety – Anxiety confuses the mind and replaces meaningful action with dithering.

16 March 2016 – The Hidden Half of Nature by Montgomery and Bikle – review – The Hidden Half of Nature is an easy read backed up with twenty pages of fine-print scientific documentation.

17 March 2016 – Now is the time to seed the Universe. – The goal of sentient human beings is to help the Universe evolve into the fully conscious super-being that it is capable of becoming.

18 March 2016 – Avoid unnecessary risks. – If you think you are about to do something stupid, you certainly are, so don’t.

19 March 2016 – How to do quick personal introductions in a group. – A quick way to remember a person’s name is by linking it with an interest.

20 March 016 – Help in finding meaning for other people’s lives. – How do you create personal meaning in a Universe made of simple fundamental forces that have no inherent meaning?

21 March 2016 – A different Golden Rule for different levels of maturity.– The moral quality of humanity is still improving and humans are becoming more humane.

22 March 2016 – The world is surprisingly low on public homicide. – Isn’t it obvious that the world is improved by helping others improve their lives and not terrorizing them?

23 March 2016 – How can you choose the proper life path? – Always do the right thing at the right time, and avoid doing the wrong thing all the time.

24 March 2016 – How to pop the media bubble ! ? – Media must be made to pay in dollars for the harm they create with their stories.

25 March 2016 – The Tao Teh Ching – #22 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn – “The imperfect beckons perfecting.” It is through restoring that wholeness is achieved.

26 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Selfishness – It is impossible for a selfish person to be happy, because they always want more of what they don’t have, and they don’t have contentment with what they do have.

27 March 2016 – See risk before it becomes risky. – If you think someone is about to do something stupid, quietly move to where you can’t become involved.

28 March 2016 – And, still there is the wonder. – Try these words in a cartoon balloon of the president’s pointed finger about to be pressed down onto a big red button, “You’re fired!”

29 March 2016 – Paths through Maturity from Infant to Ourora – To maximize happiness behave at your highest maturity level.

30 March 2016 – DO NOT ENTER – “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
In the end as at the beginning it is better to heed the words – “DO NOT ENTER.“

31 March 2016 – Mona Lisa gets even weirder. – You can generate the Mona Lisa optical illusion in living people.

Condensed thoughts Probaway April 2016

01 April 2016 – The world runs on promises. – The middle way is freedom from too little money or too much money.

02 April 2016 – Moving our sentient life into the Universe. – It is possible for us to boldly go where no man has gone before, with the help of our intelligent machines.

03 April 2016 – Living well depends on how you reassemble your habits.– We are masters of our fate only when we consciously control our perceptions and our body’s expressions.

04 April 2016 – How to mature from Infantile to Sage and beyond. – People can grow when they are feeling good, and wither when they feel bad.

05 April 2016 – My life as a work of art – Perhaps every person’s own inner artwork is seen by others as bizarre and insane if the individual is foolish enough to expose themselves and IT.

06 April 2016 – Moving our sentient life into the Universe. #2 –https://probaway.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/moving-our-sentient-life-into-the-universe-2/

07 April 2016 – How do you know that? ??? – Science is based on testable ideas that are tested and challenged.

08 April 2016 – It’s easy to be loving when you feel good. – It’s easy to be loving when you feel good.

09 April 2016 – Look for universal problems. – To find universal problems we must: Look for universal problems!

10 April 2016 – Look at the surface and then beyond it. – If you are going to understand why things behave the way they do, you must ask the right questions.

11 April 2016 – Maturing our behavior from Infant thru Sage +. – The steps through these stages of maturity are where you place your attention when you are ready.

12 April 2016 – Today I heard a strange clapping sound. – The second clap was for my reciting my sonnet, The Goal of Marriage.

13 April 2016 – Experimenting with voice to Google docs transferred to WordPress – The same form of chaos soon becomes boring to a mind seeking novelty.

14 April 2016 – How pessimism and optimism affect human maturation – Intentionally get into an optimistic attitude when you approach a new situation.

15 April 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Pessimism – The pessimist looks at problems and grumbles; the optimist looks at them and works on a solution.

16 April 2016 – A meditation for maturity – Practicing all of the levels of human maturity shows one a way to go to a better place than where they presently are living.

17 April 2016 – J. Robert Oppenheimer and Vincent Van Gogh – A strange overlap between Vincent Van Gogh, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Charles Scamahorn.

18 April 2016 – Positing universal solutions for all humans isn’t difficult.– Treat others not as you would like them to treat you, but as they should treat you.

19 April 2016 – Some of my favorite Probaway posts. – What I am doing now always seems important; it’s always like that.

20 April 2016 – Dictionary of New Epigrams – Possessions – There is pain in getting, pain in having, and pain in losing possessions.

21 April 2016 – Kant’s Categorical Imperative empowered beyond humans. – Ourora’s Categorical Imperative is to manifest a law that maximizes the Universe’s well-being.

22 April 2016 – Is there an epidemic of self-adulation ? – People look at their billion heir, and identify with him, and ask why don’t I now have what he promises now.

23 April 2016 – Do the right thing ! – Life is made of a lot of motivated actions, so make your motivations to do the right things at the right times for the right reasons.

24 April 2016 – Camus to the rescue. – Choose to live life in this world the way you want to live it in this world.

25 April 2016 – The Tao Teh Ching – #23 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn – You can elicit anything from the voids around you.

26 April 2016 – This Mona Lisa looks into your secrets. – The eerie effect from the Paris Mona Lisa is that her eyes shift over to you as you walk toward her.

27 April 2016 – A problem with my hot bath cold cure. – If I take another hot bath tomorrow I will take the calcium and quinine a half hour before getting in.

28 April 2016 – What legacy do you wish to leave after you’re gone? – I can’t do everything but I can do what I can do, and do it well.

29 April 2016 – Live long and participate ! – When it comes to risk the goal is not to be smart but to avoid being stupid.

30 April 2016 – Why and how to learn to work with joy ! – Moving from an adolescent lifestyle to an adult one involves changing the focus of one’s attention from self-aggrandizement to self-production and ownership of value.

Condensed thoughts Probaway May 2016

01 May 2016 – Reasons to worry about death. – The best you can do for the world is to help your friends to realize their potentials.

02 May 2016 – Affirmations for personal growth – Adolescent to Adult – I happily perform actions that build my and my family’s measurable worth.

03 May 2016 – Affirmations for personal growth – Child to Adolescent – I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and choose its contents.

04 May 2016 – Both pain and pleasure will help you grow. – Both pain and pleasure can help you grow, or they can destroy you.

05 May 2016 – Love your life by the heartbeat. – Life is lived in the moments, and they can be measured by heartbeats more accurately than by decades.

06 May 2016 – My spider bite 7 years later is cancerous. – The spider bite 65 days after the bite. 2010/10/18 it still has soft dented tissue.

07 May 2016 – Most of my Bowen’s sarcoma removal trip was fun. – I hope this carcinoma removal was a happy day for me, but I won’t know for a year.

08 May 2016 – Affirmations for personal growth – Child to Mature – Doing things to help our community function well is what I work on.

09 May 2016 – Money is talking in ugly ways. – If the public can’t be provided with good information they can only make bad decisions.

10 May 2016 – STOP !!! What are you thinking? … NOW. – STOP !!! Pay attention to what’s happening and participate, and that includes participating with your inner self.

11 May 2016 – My writers’-group prompt “repair” went sadly sour for me. – Why? Why? Why? … Bend is so beautiful.

12 May 2016 – The Earth is capable of creating sentience. – It seems easier to state big ideas as questions rather than observations.

13 May 2016 – Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and now Me Day! – August 20, 2016 will be Me Day. Go forth and make it your Me Day.

14 May 2016 – Pandemic by Sonia Shah – book review – Sonia Shah is a boots-on-the-ground, feet-in-the-muck investigative reporter who goes where it’s dangerous to go in search of the truth.

15 May 2016 – Stay by Jennifer Hecht – book review – My living goal, and I recommend it to you: Live long and participate.

16 May 2016 – The Life Project by Helen Pearson – book review – To live a long healthy life it is best to live modestly and to be around kind, loving people from beginning to end.

17 May 2016 – What is enlightenment? – Seeking enlightenment sets you up for failure; “Get wisdom, and with all thy getting, get understanding!”

18 May 2016 – “Leave me the resources to live as long as you.” – Children of the world demand that your elders not destroy the resources you need to live as long as they have.

19 May 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Enlightenment – Converting well-considered enlightenments into functioning habits propels one along the paths of wisdom.

20 May 2016 – The Botox cure for depression. – If Botox were injected into the specific location where the problem arose it would block the problem without affecting the rest of the body.

21 May 2016 – Squamous cell carcinoma electrodessication, curettage removal. – The doctors say that squamous cell carcinoma is the least dangerous form of cancer; all the same it is probably best to have it removed before it grows larger.

22 May 2016 – Two billion years of evolution wasted on modern humans. – If you think you are about to do something stupid, you certainly are, so don’t.

23 May 2016 – My problem with hope. – A realistic goal with a realistic way to get there isn’t based on hope, it’s based on doing the right things.

24 May 2016 – Today we discussed destiny. – Most of the life we will live will be driven by the paths we choose to follow, and each of those paths has a built-in destiny that we can look along before we go.

25 May 2016 – The Tao Teh Ching – #24 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn – You may reside at the pinnacle by creating a void at the top.

26 May 2016 – A fine memorial service for a woman I called Mom. – I love my life in Bend, and the friendly people, and I fall back emotionally on my current motto – Live and participate. These two friends lived their lives that way.

27 May 2016 – My aspirations for humanity. – Live and participate.

28 May 2016 – The words associated with levels of maturity – infant thru sage. – Infantile, Childish, Adolescent, Adult, Mature, Sage, Ourora.

29 May 2016 – How do we encourage our political leadership to promote sustainability? – The problem for our political process is that most of our voting public has lost contact with reality and can not even select reasonable candidates.

30 May 2016 – A beautiful problem solved. – Queen Bess! You know, the wonderful queen who has that pretty sister who married, ahh, ahh … what’s his name?

31 May 2016 – My presentation of maturity was rejected. – When feeling good explore your options.

Condensed thoughts Probaway June 2016

01 June 2016 – The best Earth ever for humans is right now. – We are living in a time of great abundance and opportunity.

02 June 2016 – My VIA Character Strengths – Being in a very positive frame of mind is associated with growth toward greater maturity.

03 June 2016 – Americans have a sad problem and here is the fix. – Make the quality of your life better by making the quality of your work better.

04 June 2016 – Where would an atheist, a believer, and others reside in God’s opinion? – “Your wish is granted.”

05 June 2016 – Being 80 years old has disadvantages and advantages. – Being mature is helping others to live and participate with their opportunities.

06 June 2016 – Why didn’t you call? – Why haven’t you called them and claimed your rewards?

07 June 2016 – I am not your slave ! – I am not a slave to your desires, but your companion on the path to greater maturity and contentment.

08 June 2016 – Being witty isn’t always a helpful virtue. – Moving into more mature states of development means voluntarily taking risks.

09 June 2016 – What is a friend? – Live and participate by helping your friends live and participate.

10 June 2016 – I’m not spry at age eighty but I can act it. – It might save you some grief if as a youth you consider how an old person would approach your present problems.

11 June 2016 – We live in a world filled with denials of the obvious. – We live in a world filled with denials of the obvious, and one obvious fact is that we are headed into a world with fewer jobs and more stringent debt slavery.

12 June 2016 – How may I help you? – Now you understand why your kindness in helping others is a personal reward.

13 June 2016 – The communication of data precedes life. – If information is an arranged set of data, isn’t any unusual collection a form of information?

14 June 2016 – Our discussion group discussed fear. – Fear didn’t seem to be a deep issue with these people, and it’s just one of those things you live with.

15 June 2016 – A search for maturity-appropriate prayers. #1 – There are other ways to pray that can be made visible to everyone.

16 June 2016 – A search for maturity-appropriate prayers. #2 – I encourage them to choose their own paths, and to live within their own ideas of goodness and wisdom.

17 June 2016 – A discussion of the paths available through life. – Reveal the proper paths to us, that we may participate fully in life.

18 June 2016 – A discussion of the paths available through life. #4 – Those who look most carefully down their paths and choose most wisely will probably find the greatest happiness.

19 June 2016 – I grew a little today. – The remarkable thing for me was that I automatically went to the aid of a person who might, or might not, have been in trouble, when no one else even noticed.

20 June 2016 – Is anyone listening? – It’s Me! I’m listening!

21 June 2016 – Algorithms to Live By – by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths – We are usually better off trading off the costs of error against the costs of delay. Get it done!

22 June 2016 – Why go traveling when I live in Bend, Oregon? – Why leave?

23 June 2016 – Living responsibly and enjoying your life. – Live your life as if you are responsible for your every action, because you are.

24 June 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Advice – I often ask advice from a local concrete garden gnome Samumpsycle. He always gives good advice because he understands my problems. It’s Me! I’m listening!

25 June 2016 – The Tao Teh Ching – #25 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn – Heaven follows the way, and The way follows after the self-made void.

26 June 2016 – The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner – book review – The book The Power Paradox was too paradoxical for me.

27 June 2016 – It’s hard to say goodbye. – writing group prompt – It’s hard to say goodbye … when you know it’s final.

28 June 2016 – Magic and risk were discussed today. – When thinking and talking about really big things people prefer the supernatural explanations.

29 June 2016 – A memorial service at the UUFCO in Bend, Oregon. – Today I added another unusually beautiful rock to the piping around the front entrance. It was for Christine.

30 June 2016 – This isn’t working, so it’s time to find things that do. – The type of responsibility toward other people I’ve been proposing isn’t working, so it’s time to consider other options.

Condensed thoughts Probaway July 2016

01 July 2016 – The Seven Sages of Bendor – We are still stepping in the same river named Time, but into much different water.

02 July 2016 – It was suggested to me that I STOP writing this blog. – My friend suggested that I STOP

03 July 2016 – It was suggested to me that I STOP writing this blog.

03 July 2016 – I didn’t put a period after yesterday’s STOP. Here it is. – •

04 July 2016 – Yesterday’s period wasn’t big enough. Here’s a bigger one. – • •

05 July 2016 – Fireworks over Bend, Oregon. – Photos of fireworks over Pilot Butte, Bend, Oregon

06 July 2016 – Prompt – Stop. – At this moment I am still committed to not posting … but that makes me feel sad.

07 July 2016 – A fine day for me here in Bend. – This gives me some motivation to continue thinking and blogging and trying to find ways for all of us to live better lives. — Thank you •

08 July 2016 – Gut by Giulia Enders – book review – Whether you are or are not a nutritionist, you will enjoy reading Gut, and probably find things you will change about your relationship with your gut.

09 July 2016 – Perhaps a new look is needed for this Probaway site. – Perhaps this freaky photo will be more attractive to people than the more sane looking ones.

10 July 2016 – Things have never been better in this Best of All Possible Worlds! – Things have never been better than this current Best of All Possible Worlds!

11 July 2016 – “Remember the first time you were barefoot, and stepped on something?” prompt – We looked at each other for a few moments and went our separate ways, and we lived happily ever after. At least I did.

12 July 2016 – Bend, Oregon, is a wonderful place to own a house – For the time being Bend is a wonderful place to own and a terrible place to rent.

13 July 2016 – AHONU and Aingeal Rose interview Charles Scamahorn on YouTube – AHONU and Aingeal Rose interview Charles Scamahorn on YouTube

14 July 2016 – A long overdue epiphany – If you can’t sell something it’s not worth anything.

15 July 2016 – Another category of people here in Bend. – Certainly, I am growing worry warts! But, I can’t find any, so I think my analysis is right.

16 July 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Humility – Pontificating about humility is a sure sign of arrogance.

17 July 2016 – A strange day for me, of disappearing rocks. – Other than their decorative interest these rocks have no value, except to me.

18 July 2016 – Squamous cell carcinoma electrodessication, curettage removal 2 months later. – With medical problems just get good advice and do the right things.

19 July 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Happiness – The continual happiness of a sage is made possible by his habit of relishing everything.

20 July 2016 – UU 10 minute prompt – Motion – Totally stuck … stuck … I have no motion whatsoever!

21 July 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Adaptation – Position yourself so all the necessities of all adaptations support you.

22 July 2016 – The Longevity Project by Friedman and Martin – book review – Isn’t it obvious that living your life helping others live meaningful lives will bring longer and happier lives to both you and your companions?

23 July 2016 – A quiet day with friends, reading, hiking up Pilot Butte. – Oh, yes, having fine companions in all of these simple pleasures helps a lot.

24 July 2016 – A psychedelic day. – “Not to be smart, but to avoid being stupid.”

25 July 2016 – The Tao Teh Ching – #26 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn – The weighty is the foundation of the light, and The quiet are the touchstone of the active.

26 July 2016 – One more blank and I’ll blank. – Free at last, free at last, Oh, Thank God, we are free at last!

27 July 2016 – Tranquility is easy, if . . . – Tranquility is as easy as creating habits to see and react properly to the precursors.

28 July 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Thanksgiving – Be thankful for the invisible cloak of contentment.

29 July 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Smile (#2) – It’s easy to smile, just open your eyes, stretch your nose, and lift your lips :-)

30 July 2016 – Making your life easier. – Make each of your actions a completed task so you can give your full attention to your next task.

31 July 2016 – How do we make our personal reality work for us? – Real-world wisdom always seems to come back to foresight, and to live better means looking into the future, to see opportunities and avoid problems.

Condensed thoughts Probaway August 2016

01 August 2016 – A prayer to help us mature. – The maturity prayer helps a person cope with natural reality.

02 August 2016 – Our writers’ prompts are inside of the “quotation marks.” – “I never saw it that way.”

03 August 2016 – The Atomic bombs, Hydrogen bombs and me. – Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

04 August 2016 – How is it possible to find people of action? – As we explore the new ways available we can help others to choose their own best paths.

05 August 2016 – America must create opportunities for those it displaces. – When a governmental policy intentionally destroys people’s livelihoods, it must offer very special opportunities to those people.

06 August 2016 – Take on lots of little pleasures one second at a time. – Life is lived one second at a time, so why not enjoy your pleasures one second at a time?

07 August 2016 – Fear shrinks your options, terror eliminates them. – Help you grow rather than shrink in your personal maturity.

08 August 2016 – All living things were able to adapt to circumstances quicker than those around them. – All surviving species were able to adapt to circumstances quicker than those around them.

09 August 2016 – Do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way. – Do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way.

10 August 2016 – How will I feel when I get what I think I want? – How will I feel when I get what I think I want?

11 August 2016 – This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin – book review – “As a tool for activation of specific thoughts, music is not as good as language.”

12 August 2016 – Do the doable, and avoid the impossible. – Do the doable, and avoid the impossible.

13 August 2016 – How do you motivate yourself to practice for 10,000 hours? And then what? – The only 10,000 hour subject that I have to build upon is BS, so I will struggle on with BS.

14 August 2016 – Time is the dragon that eats everything. – To taper off the hungry habits of the time dragon.

15 August 2016 – We presently live in a wonderful world. – “Don’t you ever watch the news? Things are terrible!”

16 August 2016 – What is the meaning of life? Answered. – The action of participating in life is the meaning of life.

17 August 2016 – The adventure at Red Rock beach. – I am a slow learner, but I don’t go under falling rocks anymore.

18 August 2016 – Change the Story Change the Future by D. Korten – book review – MAKE MONEY !!!

19 August 2016 – I don’t expect impossible things to happen. – Believing in a spirit world would conflict with my reality and interfere with my living a tranquil life here and now in this world.

20 August 2016 – How to live forever. – How to live forever: Realize that “now is forever”, and enjoy it by participating in the moment.

21 August 2016 – Get emotionally up and explore your options. – You grow happier by discovering and practicing your more mature options.

22 August 2016 – Our American problem is lack of political foresight. – And now we must go one further and adapt to the coming situation or soon die.

23 August 2016 – What is your purpose in life? – My purpose in life is to participate in the opportunities available.

24 August 2016 – Where we should search for reality. – We find physical reality in the physical world and human reality in the human world.

25 August 2016 – The Tao Teh Ching – #27 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn – You do not need maps when walking about your home;

26 August 2016 – Your future begins right now. – Your future begins with choosing a goal and trying to reach it.

27 August 2016 – Look at reality squarely, seeking clear perception. – Each of our stages of life needs an adjustment to see our new reality clearly.

28 August 2016 – Sunsets over Bend, Oregon’s Cascade Mountains – August sunsets are spectacular in Bend, Oregon.

29 August 2016 – The function of a man’s life versus the meaning of life. – The purpose of a man’s life is to wisely participate in all his world’s needs, past, present and future.

30 August 2016 – Foolish people. – Five seconds of fun cost this man fifty years of potential fun.

31 August 2016 – Lava rocks under Bend, Oregon – Residing inside a lava rock? Somehow, that doesn’t appeal to me at the moment.

Condensed thoughts Probaway September 2016

01 September 2016 – Blink – by Malcolm Gladwell – book review – The thoughtless decisions recommended in Blink revert us to being prehuman animals, unless we’ve developed a well-informed unconscious.

02 September 2016 – First Friday Art Walk in Bend, Oregon – As the Ainu say after a great day: We lived and lived and nothing happened.

03 September 2016 – I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong – book review – Research science will probably discover amazing intestinal biota treatments in the next few years leading to better public health and greater life expectancy.

04 September 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Happiness – Happiness and unhappiness are alike in that the more we practice them the more skilled we get at living that way.

05 September 2016 – Philae needed a better landing system. – A future lander on a low gravity object would benefit from long stabilizing struts.

06 September 2016 – Predicting the future requires understanding the present. – Life is easier when you perceive your present and past accurately and base your future actions on probable outcomes.

07 September 2016 – Spend your money! Spend! Spend! Spend! A rant! – What will bring you happiness is doing lots of little kind things for your family and friends, and that is free.

08 September 2016 – Unprecedented by David Ray Griffin – book review – There is hope for humans for a few more years.

09 September 2016 – 7 year sequence of photos of spider bite, squamous cell carcinoma electrodessication, curettage. – Help your skin protect the inner you from the assaults of the world.

10 September 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – A catalog, index, list. – 72 Words with new epigrams

11 September 2016 – Your emotions are telling you something important. – Emotions are a major part of our lives and we should appreciate them to the fullest.

12 September 2016 – Just “Who will you be?” – “He was a man. Take him complete, with all his flagrant faults exposed, He was a man!”

13 September 2016 – “This was their finest hour”. Winston Churchill – if the British Empire and Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour’.

14 September 2016 – The Gift of the Gab – David Crystal – book review – It feels good to have a hearty response to a bit of writing from a group of writers.

15 September 2016 – When is the best time to choose your future goals? – Avoid making important decisions when in a bad mood, and wait for a good mood to arise naturally, or learn how to get into a positive mood.

16 September 2016 – Honesty, Integrity and Enthusiasm – I’ve led a life of cold sarcasm when I should have been filled with enthusiasm.

17 September 2016 – What is the most important idea that I can be promoting? – Some ideas are so obvious once stated clearly that they seem obvious from the beginning.

18 September 2016 – What will be the results of decisions based on anger? – The world is always a complex place and to let anger influence decisions will inevitably degrade the quality of one’s success.

19 September 2016 – How to create a Golden Rule for yourself. – The end value of choosing more mature activities at any stage of life is that you and your friends live longer more fulfilling lives.

20 September 016 – How to answer the big philosophical questions. – Often we are compelled to participate in life’s problems promptly or perish.

21 September 2016 – Our social groups generate divisive morality. – All men are equal, until they meet.

22 September 2016 – What will be the results of decisions based on disgust? – Get happy before making an important decision.

23 September 2016 – What emotion should precede action? – Some people claim that we are always in an ideal state for coping with the present moment.

24 September 2016 – What action does a baby’s emotion generate in its mother? – The infant must get proper attention with its communications or it will die and thus not leave its genes in the gene pool of human behavior. We are the living result of the infant’s successful communication.

25 September 2016 – The Tao Teh Ching – #28 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn – Broadcast and infuse this simplicity into understanding people.

26 September 2016 – A book fell off the shelf – Winston Churchillized line spacing for easy reading aloud.

27 September 2016 – Homage to Picasso, Duchamp and Warhol – None of the people who discussed these pictures with me found them offensive.

28 September 2016 – On the Meaning of Life by Will Durant – book review – Even our greatest people are like journeymen workers, just doing the jobs they are destined to do.

29 September 2016 – Debate cheaters must be penalized. – The unfair advantage of overshoots and interruptions should be corrected by taking double that time away from future presentations.

30 September 2016 – The impossible strikes. – Helping people grow is a worthwhile task to pursue for a couple of years.

Condensed thoughts Probaway October 2016

01 October 2016 – Be prepared for the unexpected. – Be prepared for the future by learning from other people’s mistakes.

02 October 2016 – Have I learned anything in 81 years? – Look around and find the next great thing and participate.

03 October 2016 – What I might have done but didn’t. – I’m still on that trip and like my friend Mark says about his life, “So far it’s working.”

04 October 2016 – How much warning of an impending catastrophe can we expect? – Until now all living creatures came into adulthood equipped to survive in their environment.

05 October 2016 – How to upgrade humanity. – Do unto others a kindness that will help them to be kind to others.

06 October 2016 – Rejection is annoying! – I love living in Bend, but it does have its challenges.

07 October 2016 – What should I do? – What I should do is to create more mature habits when I have the chance to do so.

08 October 2016 – Cure for Catastrophe by Robert Muir-Wood – book review & quotes – Most risks are avoidable, but you must make the necessary efforts to avoid them.

09 October 2016 – How to direct what is called growth toward maturity. – Create more mature habits when you have the chance to do so.

10 October 2016 – The best risk analysis you are ever likely to see. – It’s easy to avoid problems when they are far away, and hard to cope with them when they are close.

11 October 2016 – The Trolley Problem by Thomas Cathcart – book review – The Trolley Problem is a fun book to read, and will provoke you to thought and to laughter.

12 October 2016 – List of things that are getting better. – You presently have the opportunity to live a wonderful life. Don’t waste it by wallowing in the despair that is being generated by the media.

13 October 2016 – The function of truth is to avoid problems and pain and to bring pleasure. – Take in all information from the point of view that makes it true, and then make your evaluations of what truth is for the task at hand.

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Condensed thoughts Probaway November 2016

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Condensed thoughts Probaway December 2016

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Condensed thoughts Probaway January 2017

We presently live in a wonderful world.

15 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by probaway in policy, psychology, survival

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

A wonderful world, Too much false news, Too much peace, Very few combat deaths

What motivates people to action? It would appear that the first thing would be seeing, desiring and seeking some goal, and that goal might be either a positive one and moving toward it, or a negative one and fleeing from it. There must be some route to follow to get to any goal, unless you are already there, and then defending what you already possess. When the situation is distant it is easy to waffle and pretend that no goal exists, or that it isn’t valuable, or it isn’t worth the trouble, or it is risky and trying to get it might result in loss of what you already possess.

If the danger is close, and there is a clear and present danger, then an external danger creates a unifying force that will bind people together into a unified group that is easily organized to defend itself. This situation combines the two great motivators of mankind, the fear of loss of property and of life of those dear to you, and the hope of capturing the property of the hostile enemy.

The situation demands a leader, that is, one who can unify the people and create the hope of a victory over the dangers he has made obvious. He must create fear and simultaneously create the belief that he, and probably he alone, can solve the problems. People are easily convinced of absurd hopes if they are filled with absurd fears. Thus a potentially successful leader will create multidimensional fears that will appeal to the intellect of rational people, the emotions of emotional people, and fantasies of irrational people. A great leader feeds the hopes and fears of all his people.

In a country that has lived in peace for a generation or two, or three, the people have no fears and begin to feel that peace is the natural state of man and of nature, and will begin finding grievous faults in relatively minor problems. Major civil turmoil can be created over unpleasant social issues where few if any people have been killed, and little property destroyed. In times of major wars these same problems would be so insignificant as to be ignored. There wouldn’t be any disturbance of this size even reported in the newspapers.

I have brought up this problem of our present beautiful situation many times in the last few months. It is a problem because it seems the whole United States is in a stressful time. My contention is that things have never been better for humanity in the entire history of humanity, especially in this country. My friends practically boo me when I say that, and I assert that, “Between the years 1900 and 2000 over two hundred million people were killed in armed combat and mass atrocities. That is a rate of two million people killed per year. During Obama’s administration several millions have been displaced from Syria to Europe, but relatively few people have been killed, and those were mostly outside of American control. But even with those horrors, the death rate at present is very low, when compared to the average of two million per year, which is the comparison number for the previous hundred years. By the rate of the previous century, two million per year, Obama’s eight-year administration typically would have witnessed some sixteen million combat deaths and atrocities. Perhaps we should note that there are now three times as many people as the average world population during the last century, and by that multiple it would be three times sixteen million or forty-eight million. There is a movement to have a monument erected alongside the Viet Nam Memorial in DC for the five hundred people accidentally killed in the Middle East, because they were too near the five thousand known terrorists that were killed.” People mock me when I make those assertions, even if they are reasonably accurate. My friends say,

“Don’t you ever watch the news? Things are terrible!”

 

 

Some of my favorite Probaway posts.

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by probaway in Condensed thoughts, research

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ngrams of philosophers, Philosophers Squared, World Heritage Sites

People sometimes ask me what is my favorite Probaway Post? To which I answer as Pablo Picasso did, “I love them all, they are all Picasso’s.” But the simple fact is that with 3,087 posts, “I don’t remember.”

On the left of this Probaway blog there is an automatically updated list of the current TOP 10 posts, as WordPress measures and posts. Below that is a chronological list of the Recent 50 posts. There were 148 Philosophers Squared, that I go back and look at, and enjoy, and 1,000 World Heritage Sites, which have lots of useful links. It’s a real time sump because so many of the places when visited in YouTube, and Wikipedia are so very interesting. The comparisons of things on Google Ngrams like philosophy and the Golden Rule give a fascinating commentary on how human morality has changed over the last 200 years. Adverse Childhood Experiences versus Positive Childhood Experiences, gives specific dos and dont’s about behavior. Ebola Virus Disease had a monthly series of logarithmic charts and analysis. A logarithmic chart of 100 deadliest wars.

I feel The EarthArk Project for saving plant seeds and digital information to save the Earth’s environment by restoration for as long as 10,000 years is important, and The Life Haven Project for saving the human genome past a World War Three Doomsday is essential for the human species. These projects are not to save individuals, but to save humanity and the earth’s living environment.

At the top border of every Probaway post is a list of dates,

  • DAILY THOUGHTS — 2008
  • 2009
  • 2010
  • 2011
  • 2012
  • 2013
  • 2014
  • 2015

Clicking on one of these years will list all of the 365 days of that year by title with a single line quote for each date. That compresses my “wisdom” into indigestible morsels, but they are fun to read, and they link you back to those days for the full treatment.

I began this blog in 2008 with The Probaway Person of the Year. It was my estimate of people whom it seems possible will be remembered in 500 years. It was a response to TIME magazine’s Person of the Year, which is intended to commemorate their estimate of the most significant person of that year, even if that person is soon forgotten. They didn’t choose Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first humans to set foot on an extraterrestrial body, the Moon, but did choose some other astronauts (Apollo 8) whose names are already forgotten.

As of the moment the Probaway WordPress blog statistics are 3,087 posts – 1,351,677 views – 357,414 visitors – 3,405 most views per day, July 17, 2012. Perhaps the most commented on post was You can’t cure stupid, especially Detroit stupid. That was a January 11, 2009 commentary on Detroit’s promotion of powerful gas-guzzling cars, while begging Washington DC to bail them out of debt. It offended people when I said, Give stupid people power and they will do stupid things with it. Well, that was eight years ago and cars are consuming far more gas now than ever.

My interest since beginning these daily posts eight and a half years ago has been to help people and all humanity to self-actualize their potential. This last month there have been several posts that carry this idea to the ultimate, to help self-actualize the entire Universe, as in – Maturing our behavior from Infant thru Sage +.

So, to answer the original question, “What is my favorite post?”

What I am doing now always seems important; it’s always like that.

Condensed thoughts 2016 through April 1, 2016

01 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by probaway in Condensed thoughts

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Condensed thoughts 2016

The Condensed thoughts of Probaway 2016

Condensed thoughts January 2016

01 January 2016 – Probaway Person of the Year Xi Jinping – Xi Jinping for taking China from a backward economy to the most powerful one on Earth.

02 January 2016 – How your appendix may be helping you live longer. – With appendicitis don’t take antibiotics or operate until you must.

03 January 2016 – You do have a choice – sometimes. – You do have free will, if and only if you have the time and opportunity to think.

04 January 2016 – Be it not do it. – Not ! – Meditation isn’t for sitting, it’s preparation for doing.

05 January 2016 – Why and how to approach a new situation with a smile. – Approach new and possibly dangerous situations with a smile, and you can generate your smile by first looking at people’s silly shoes.

06 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Growth only happens when you move on from your comfort zone.

07 January 2016 – The Better Angels of Our Nature – discussion – A new group of people is always a delight because they will inevitably bring ideas up in a new way.

08 January 2016 – How to make your skin more perfect. – Touch a bar of soap with your wet fingertip, touch the soapy tip to your blemishes, then rinse away the soap under a running tap, and then dry and massage the area.

09 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Happiness – Happiness is in the present moment of progress toward a worthwhile goal.

10 January 2016 – How are we hurting ourselves with self-deception? – There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one’s conscience.

11 January 2016 – Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) logarithmic chart update – 11 January 2016 – The best defense against diseases is by avoiding them as early as possible.

12 January 2016 – Once again we discuss happiness, but I have problems. – Give it your best, let it go, and intentionally walk away.

13 January 2016 – I want you to be happy – but at a higher level of consciousness – Happiness has higher levels that can be achieved.

14 January 2016 – Is happiness a behavior that can be learned? – A conscious pursuing of personal reality is the real path to happiness.

15 January 2016 – What things are stressing me this week? – Those were my stressors of the last two weeks; but I chose them, so they were pleasurable, not painful.

16 January 2016 – How to identify and avoid bad ideas. – Perhaps I’m being too harsh. — Avoid people who talk nonsense.

17 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Thoughts – Voluntarily change where you are placing your attention and you change your entire universe.

18 January 2016 – Steven Colbert has a cold. – Probaway – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully. As the title says, these posts have tried to help people live better lives.

19 January 2016 – Live long and prosper – upgrade – Live long and participate !!

20 January 2016 – New ideas are offensive !! – New ideas are dangerous and therefore offensive.

21 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Genius – When looking into the unknown it takes genius to know what is unusual and what is commonplace.

22 January 2016 – Mona Lisa has been restored for 3D – I have been working nearly nonstop since Christmas digitally restoring the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci.

23 January 2016 – I have done 3,000 posts at Probaway ! Whew !! Hm? !!! – Of course my daily question is what is important to blog about today?

24 January 2016 – How to expose better options to others? – You learn to expose yourself to better options by watching how others make choices.

25 January 2016 – A minor Mona Lisa setback – A good life isn’t found in lounging about with no problems and nothing to do, it’s finding important things that need doing, and doing them.

26 January 2016 – The Opening – To whom and to what is the Opening telling us to attend to?

27 January 2016 – My face is a jungle covered with bacteria. – Outside of our civil society we are living in a wild jungle and should behave in ways that fit our natural condition.

28 January 2016 – Irrational Man by Woody Allen – movie review – The Irrational Man shows yet another series of thoughts not to bother pursuing.

29 January 2016 – Some daylight in your eyes helps you focus better. – Go for a walk every day, smile at the sky and enjoy a friendly companion. Walking a mile to school or work would be perfect.

30 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Fear – The best amount of fear is that which goads you to your best efforts.

31 January 2016 – The EarthArk is shockingly uninteresting. – A child born today may live to see the irretrievable end of nearly all life as we know it.

Condensed thoughts Probaway February 2016

01 February 2016 – What to do when you come to a fork in the road – Of course if we were not on a road, but on a trail, I would recommend the A trail, and avoid the B trail.

02 February 2016 – We are the chosen ones. We chose ourselves. – Pay attention to your local environment and participate.

03 February 2016 – Argus Dome deep-space refrigerator – Once in place the EarthArk temperatures can be maintained at —100° F. for thousands of years without any human maintenance.

04 February 2016 – How to think better. – Thinking better means to help our minds to help everyone participate more fully in our world, and to do that requires clean signals from our world.

05 February 2016 – Teach what you most need to learn to do and sell it. – Any brilliant person can succeed if they get started early in life.

06 February 2016 – World population passes 7.4 billion humans. – Life is wonderful now because the Earth is supporting 7.4 billion people.

07 February 2016 – Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) logarithmic chart update – 07 February 2016 – We live in a dynamic and chaotic situation where every living thing is seeking food, and every other living thing is potentially a source of food, including YOU.

08 February 2016 – The 100 Greatest Atrocities of Human History – Modern humanity is doing just fine when compared to our past.

09 February 2016 – How to fix your distorted view of history. – Humans will eat voraciously, reproduce maximally and kill as needed, like every other predatory animal.

10 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Participate – Seeking to live long, and to participate with all that’s around you, is the route to a long and enjoyable life.

11 February 2016 – Black hole gravity waves detected near my old home. – I live a surprisingly tranquil life.

12 February 2016 – Wikipedia links to 100 Greatest Atrocities of History – This list adds up to 494.82 million homicides since 500 BCE.

13 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Evolution – Evolution isn’t a belief, it’s an observable fact.

14 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Love – Let my last breath be, “I love you!” and the last words I hear, too.

15 February 2016 – How people can move from maturity to sagehood – People grow in maturity when they are feeling expansive and take more responsibility for human welfare.

16 February 2016 – My Apatheism is pulling back the veil that obscures the obvious. – If I have anything that could be called a religion it is to pull back the veil so others can see what they previously did not see.

17 February 2016 – Learning to smell essential oils is difficult. – With huge industries based on smell and food odors, there must be some theoretical understanding of what is happening.

18 February 2016 – Mona Lisa comes to life in Bend, Oregon – Mona Lisa comes to life and will watch you move.

19 February 2016 – Mona Lisa and Charles Scamahorn in Bend, Oregon – That is why I spent so much time restoring the Mona Lisa. So you can see her magic too.

20 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Smile – Look at the sky and smile.

21 February 2016 – To grow you must be feeling emotionally positive. – Get yourself into a positive state of mind right before making decisions.

22 February 2016 – Do humans need a transcendent purpose for their lives? – If even Sartre can’t find a valid reason for his existence, what can the average man do?

23 February 2016 – The secret of Mona Lisa’s smile revealed. – Mona Lisa knows your secrets too!

24 February 2016 – Atrocities by Matthew White – book review – War is dangerous to your life and property, so choose leaders who will keep you out of war.

25 February 2016 – What is your ultimate value? – A personal ultimate value must be practiced and promoted to be valuable.

26 February 2016 – Mona Lisa in 3D big enough to see clearly. – When you cross your eyes it is possible to see her in three dimensions.

27 February 2016 – I try to stay healthy, but today I have a cold. – I’ve taken two baths today, and always feel better afterward, so I’m going in now.

28 February 2016 – “Bat shit crazy!” – If bat intestinal biota is as powerful as similar human biota, it may open a totally new field of medical practice.

29 February 2016 – EarthArk day went by without a hitch. – Rich people living in paradise refuse to take care of ugly things.

Condensed thoughts Probaway March 2016

01 March 2016 – My life with shamans. – Each shaman can be more productive if their stories are based on personal experience and analysis and conclusions.

02 March 2016 – People are incapable of thinking beyond their maturity level. – At the beginning of a conversation discover the interests of a person, and speak exclusively to those.

03 March 2016 – What is the good life? – The good life is right here when looked at that way, so why go wandering all over the world, like some of my friends do?

04 March 2016 – Why can’t people think for themselves? – I don’t claim to be any better at this than anyone else, and it is just a question of whom you choose to put your attention upon.

05 March 2016 – Hey kids! What are you going to do when the mountains run dry? – With accurate information there can be foresight and better actions.

06 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Fate – Our greatest personal freedom is choosing how we respond to events.

07 March 2016 – Philosophers Squared – Karl Jaspers – Only in those moments when I exercise my freedom am I fully myself.

08 March 2016 – Gracious receiving of a gift is the greatest gift of all. – Instantly returning something of value makes the original gift not a gift given in love, but more of an economic transaction, and that is not what is intended by the gift.

09 March 2016 – An easy experiment to improve your skin. – A healthy skin microbiome is a good defense against skin problems.

10 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Fear – Fear is a good thing when it prevents us from doing stupid things.

11 March 2016 – People need hopes based on achievable realities. – When you graduate from high school, if you can’t go to a top university become a small home owner.

12 March 2016 – Humans versus the future Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Humans being integrated into AI is a process of us living forever.

13 March 2016 – A cry of existential desperation? – Sometimes I trust other people’s opinions more than my own.

14 March 2016 – Emptiness is an empty goal. – Life expands in meaning as one progresses in their sustainable maturity.

15 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Anxiety – Anxiety confuses the mind and replaces meaningful action with dithering.

16 March 2016 – The Hidden Half of Nature by Montgomery and Bikle – review – The Hidden Half of Nature is an easy read backed up with twenty pages of fine-print scientific documentation.

17 March 2016 – Now is the time to seed the Universe. – The goal of sentient human beings is to help the Universe evolve into the fully conscious super-being that it is capable of becoming.

18 March 2016 – Avoid unnecessary risks. – If you think you are about to do something stupid, you certainly are, so don’t.

19 March 2016 – How to do quick personal introductions in a group. – A quick way to remember a person’s name is by linking it with an interest.

20 March 016 – Help in finding meaning for other people’s lives. – How do you create personal meaning in a Universe made of simple fundamental forces that have no inherent meaning?

21 March 2016 – A different Golden Rule for different levels of maturity. – The moral quality of humanity is still improving and humans are becoming more humane.

22 March 2016 – The world is surprisingly low on public homicide. – Isn’t it obvious that the world is improved by helping others improve their lives and not terrorizing them?

23 March 2016 – How can you choose the proper life path? – Always do the right thing at the right time, and avoid doing the wrong thing all the time.

24 March 2016 – How to pop the media bubble ! ? – Media must be made to pay in dollars for the harm they create with their stories.

25 March 2016 – The Tao Teh Ching – #22 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn – “The imperfect beckons perfecting.” It is through restoring that wholeness is achieved.

26 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Selfishness – It is impossible for a selfish person to be happy, because they always want more of what they don’t have, and they don’t have contentment with what they do have.

27 March 2016 – See risk before it becomes risky. – If you think someone is about to do something stupid, quietly move to where you can’t become involved.

28 March 2016 – And, still there is the wonder. – Try these words in a cartoon balloon of the president’s pointed finger about to be pressed down onto a big red button, “You’re fired!”

29 March 2016 – Paths through Maturity from Infant to Ourora – To maximize happiness behave at your highest maturity level.

30 March 2016 – DO NOT ENTER – “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
In the end as at the beginning it is better to heed the words – “DO NOT ENTER.“

31 March 2016 – Mona Lisa gets even weirder. – You can generate the Mona Lisa optical illusion in living people.

Condensed thoughts Probaway April 2016

01 April 2016 – The world runs on promises. – The middle way is freedom from too little money or too much money.

02 April 2016 – Moving our sentient life into the Universe. – It is possible for us to boldly go where no man has gone before, with the help of our intelligent machines.

03 April 2016 – Living well depends on how you reassemble your habits. – We are masters of our fate only when we consciously control our perceptions and our body’s expressions.

04 April 2016 – How to mature from Infantile to Sage and beyond. – People can grow when they are feeling good, and wither when they feel bad.

05 April 2016 – My life as a work of art – Perhaps every person’s own inner artwork is seen by others as bizarre and insane if the individual is foolish enough to expose themselves and IT.

06 April 2016 – Moving our sentient life into the Universe. #2 – https://probaway.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/moving-our-sentient-life-into-the-universe-2/

07 April 2016 – How do you know that? ??? – Science is based on testable ideas that are tested and challenged.

08 April 2016 – It’s easy to be loving when you feel good. – It’s easy to be loving when you feel good.

09 April 2016 – Look for universal problems. – To find universal problems we must: Look for universal problems!

10 April 2016 – Look at the surface and then beyond it. – If you are going to understand why things behave the way they do, you must ask the right questions.

11 April 2016 – Maturing our behavior from Infant thru Sage +. – The steps through these stages of maturity are where you place your attention when you are ready.

12 April 2016 – Today I heard a strange clapping sound. – The second clap was for my reciting my sonnet, The Goal of Marriage.

13 April 2016 – Experimenting with voice to Google docs transferred to WordPress – The same form of chaos soon becomes boring to a mind seeking novelty.

14 April 2016 – How pessimism and optimism affect human maturation – Intentionally get into an optimistic attitude when you approach a new situation.

15 April 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Pessimism – The pessimist looks at problems and grumbles; the optimist looks at them and works on a solution.

16 April 2016 – A meditation for maturity – Practicing all of the levels of human maturity shows one a way to go to a better place than where they presently are living.

17 April 2016 – J. Robert Oppenheimer and Vincent Van Gogh – A strange overlap between Vincent Van Gogh, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Charles Scamahorn.

18 April 2016 – Positing universal solutions for all humans isn’t difficult. – Treat others not as you would like them to treat you, but as they should treat you.

19 April 2016 – Some of my favorite Probaway posts. – What I am doing now always seems important; it’s always like that.

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xxx

How to fix your distorted view of history.

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by probaway in policy, survival

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Observing history, Population conflicts, Population growth, What do humans actually do?

We like to think we understand our world, and I do too, so it came as a shock when I viewed the World Population History web site. By about 1980 I had read Atlas of World Population History by Colin McEvedy, and felt that I had a reasonable understanding of how many people there were at various times and locations, and that’s why viewing World Population History was such a shock. I recommend you go now and click that site. Pick out some places you feel familiar with and watch them grow. I often quote world population when in conversation with friends, and did so today, when some of them were getting morbid about the hunger in the world. But, what hunger is there? During the lifetime of these older folks the population had gone from two billion to seven point four billion, an increase of over three times. That means the planet Earth is now creating three times as much food as when we were born, and if there is any shortage, which there isn’t, then it is because the people have reproduced too frequently.

Yesterday’s post was about The 100 Greatest Atrocities of Human History, and when reading about those tragedies it became apparent that most of them were not in Western societies. That seemed strange because our Western media are  always talking about our tragedies, and because they don’t report those other ones we think things are okay elsewhere. Americans are still worried about terrorism because three people were killed in a pipe-bomb explosion near the finish line of the Boston Marathon April 15, 2013. And yet they seem totally oblivious that since WW2 tens of millions died in China under Mao Zedong, and shortly before tens of millions died of famine in India. The ratio here shows that a million of “them” doesn’t create as much angst as one American. It’s not like we knew any of those three Americans, and so why do their deaths bother so many people? The answer is simply it’s the distorted media presentation. Do the ongoing Congo wars mean anything to Americans, even though it is reported that nearly four million people have died there between 1998-2002? If you feel you get an accurate report of what’s happening in the world go to Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century. That will clarify what actually happened and probably gives a better idea of what’s presently happening than the daily news.

Okay, if you clicked those sites you will have a better orientation to what humans have done and are probably still doing today, and what they are going to do for a long time to come. Basically, …

Humans will eat voraciously, reproduce maximally and kill as needed, like every other predatory animal.

Republican Presidential candidates would kill baby Hitler

08 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by probaway in reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

August Kubizek, Hitler

A couple of weeks ago—I don’t want to bother looking it up and linking to it because it’s too ugly—some of the presidential candidates had an incredible face-off deciding what they would do if they could go back in time to Adolph Hitler’s birth. It seemed each contender was trying to think up the most hideous thing they could do to that baby. They seemed to believe that the atrocities that he later caused to be perpetrated were built into that child at the moment of his birth, and that if they killed him the 20th century would have been a bliss-filled century.

At that time I mentioned in one of my discussion groups that if I had the power to go back to those times, and had such powers, I would choose to ease the demons that brought about those ugly acts. That discussion didn’t go anywhere, but later I thought I would look at Hitler through the psychological analytic tool called the ACE TEST (Adverse Childhood Experience test), and its derivative that I created, named the PCE TEST (Positive Childhood Experience test). Fortunately, there is available an excellent personality study done by his one and only friend, concerning the time when they were both sixteen years old to the age of twenty. This was a period of time when Hitler was still living at home, his personality had been formed, and he was cultivating his adult relationship to his world to come. His conversations with his friend have a dreamlike quality, populated with Germanic heroes and Wagnerian bombast that he presents as a continuous speech to his quiet and adoring, musically inclined friend.

The Young Hitler I Knew, by August Kubizek, is available at Amazon. During their late adolescence and young adulthood together they visited their small city Linz’s opera frequently and talked endlessly about Wagner, and art, and city architecture, while walking constantly about their Danube river locality, discussing its beauty and bridges. Then they roomed together for a year in Vienna, while Kubizek did well in the music conservatory, and Adolph wandered and studied the architecture of that great city. Hitler left and they never met again … until thirty-five years later when Kubizek received an invitation from the then Chancellor of Germany, his adolescent friend Adolph Hitler, to accompany him at the week-long Bayreuth Wagner Festival. This event was an extravagant dream for a small town bureaucrat and local music conductor, but it had become real life for his childhood friend.

Some strange counter-intuitive events came about in their years together; for example, when Kubizek was drafted into the Austrian military Hitler recommended that they abscond to a foreign country. Even with all of their Wagnerian bravado about battle and glory, young Adolph thought it was unacceptable to be drafted, as a German-speaking youth, into the Austrian army, even though that was the country of their birth and constant living. Another strange quality of Hitler’s was his constant concern for the underprivileged classes, and trying to develop ways for them to live better lives, and yet he refused to have any personal contact with them, and lived in abject poverty himself.

Hitler didn’t seem to have a high Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score, and was apparently well treated by his middle-level Austrian bureaucrat father, and truly loved by his mother. He did well in his first few years of school, but dropped out before graduating. That proved a disaster because it prevented him from getting into art school or architecture school, and that was his fondest desire. He wanted to create monumental buildings and beautiful bridges, but couldn’t even get into school, because he lacked a common credential, even though he did have a spectacular portfolio of his drawings and a fabulous knowledge of architecture. His positive PCE score was probably quite high because he did have at least one person who supported him emotionally to the limit, and cultivated his ability to think spontaneously while under pressure and to present his new ideas verbally in a convincing way. This book will give you a much clearer view than the popular media of the most hated man of the 20th century.

Read this book if you have any strong positive or negative feelings about Hitler.

Philosophers Squared – Steven Pinker

24 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by probaway in Philosophers Squared

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Philosophers Squared, Steven Pinker

Go to the Index of Philosophers Squared

Steven Pinker (1954 – ) is a Canadian-born American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, now at Harvard University. The faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker


Quotations from Steven Pinker

1. Challenge a person’s beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them–or worse, who credibly rebut them–they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.

2. The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendancy of skepticism and reason.

3. It’s natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naïve impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.

4. Much of what is today called “social criticism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.

5. The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals.

6. Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

7. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.

8. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire’s quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

9. The ultimate goal of natural selection is to propagate genes, but that does not mean that the ultimate goal of people is to propagate genes.

10. We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.

11. Not speaking the same language is a virtual synonym for incommensurability, but to a psycholinguist, it is a superficial difference. Knowing about the ubiquity of complex language across individuals and cultures and the single mental design underlying them all, no speech seems foreign to me, even when I cannot understand a word.

12. Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

Sources of the quotes – GoodReads, Google


COMMENTS

Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful. When a society is dominated by a single belief system an individual may not raise his voice in opposition without risking ostracism and death. Therefore, it is essential to maintain a multiplicity of different and opposing sub-groups to maintain a basic freedom of speech. This will result in endless sub-lethal conflict, but it will maintain the health of the greater society.

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendancy of skepticism and reason. In my decades of living in Berkeley, California I never heard anyone, except some Scientologists, talk seriously about believing in permanent souls, but here in Bend, Oregon it is not an uncommon statement. I agree with Pinker that it is a malignant belief, because it cuts a person off from relating directly with the reality they physically live within, and they suffer a lesser level of happiness in this physical world.

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. The classic religious stories have an appalling amount of ugly violence, and people who subject themselves to reading an abundance of these stories can’t help but integrate them into their living habits. Those horrible stories embedded in their subconscious can’t help but generate fear and thus a shutting down of flexibility of thought, and thus these stories promote an inflexible relationship with their world.

CENTURY by Bruce Bernard – book review

14 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by probaway in photography

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

How humanity survives., Photographs of real life, The 20th century

Century by Bruce Bernard may well be the saddest book you will ever read. It is a history of our 20th century done in photographs, brief commentaries and quotations. It is sad because it shows how seemingly positive well-intentioned people committed the most horrendous atrocities imaginable. It is a graphic description of the periphery of humanity’s need to express their sovereignty and their heart-felt desires for personal survival.

There are 1,072 photos in CENTURY and every one of them is soul-rending, if you pause to project your self into the moment portrayed and its consequences. Photos of dead and dying people are easy to be horrified with, and there are plenty of those; but what is even more disturbing, when you pause and ponder, are the images of the joyous politicians and their crowds of supporters. Those are the beautiful moments, in those social groups and those individuals’ lives, that set up the communal contagion of righteousness for the mass murders that follow. When people are in a group that believes they are absolutely right in their beliefs they become capable of unlimited evil. I have posted that idea before because I have observed the finest people I have known preparing for the worst that reality has to bring upon their fellow human beings.

As a consequence of humans’ super success for using the potentials that the Universe has provided us, our population has grown to the point that we will strip the Earth bare of what sustains us within the lifetimes of children now living. But before that consumption is total there will be shortfalls of the essentials of life, such as water and soil, that will trigger widespread famines and thus wars. Sadly the weapons we have possessed for half a century, when used, are sufficient to destroy civilization a hundred times over.

If this book CENTURY is redone for the year 2100 a sovereign global law will be in force, or it won’t, and if it isn’t that book will be even sadder, but it will not exist because everyone is against a world sovereignty that would limit their national sovereignty and prevent their national vendettas.

By 2100 there will be a sovereign global law, or there won’t be any laws.

 

Philosophers Squared – Denis Diderot

05 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by probaway in Philosophers Squared

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, Enlightenment, Philosophers Squared

Go to the Index of 120 Philosophers Squared

Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784) was a French Enlightenment philosopher and author of the Encyclopédie, the first published summation of Western knowledge. All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings. 

Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot, philosopher

Sources of quotes of Denis Diderot; WikiQuote, GoodReads, BrainyQuote, EGS,

Quotations  of Denis Diderot

1.- All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.

2.- There are things I can’t force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

3. There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

4. Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

5. I am indeed familiar with self-contempt, that torment of the conscience you suffer if you fail to use those talents Providence bestowed on you; it’s the cruelest of all torments. One almost feels it would have been better not to have been born.

6. Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.

7. To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!

8. We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man’s afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures … But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered … and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

9. Once the sun has been extinguished what will be the result? Plants will perish, animals will perish, the earth will become desolate and silent. Light up that star once more, and you immediately restore the necessary cause whereby an infinite number of new species will be generated, among which I cannot swear whether, in the course of centuries, the plants and animals we know to-day will or will not be reproduced

10. Grace causes the Christian to act, reason the philosopher. Other men are carried away by their passions, their actions not being preceded by reflection: these are the men who walk in darkness. On the other hand, the philosopher, even in his passions, acts only after reflection; he walks in the dark, but by a torch.

11. Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: “My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.” This stranger is a theologian.

12. There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.

13. We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

14. We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

15. A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

16. The number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.

17. The man of genius who discredits a commonly held error, or who upholds truth, is a man worthy of our veneration. Such a person might possibly be victimized by prejudice, or by the law; but there are two kinds of laws, laws whose equity and universality is absolute, and other, capricious laws, that owe their authority purely to blindness or to the constraints of circumstance. The latter bring only a passing ignominy upon the man who contravenes them.

18. A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

19. The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. … He does not confuse truth with plausibility; he takes for truth what is true, for forgery what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. … The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy.

20. The philosopher forms his principles from an infinity of particular observations. Most people adopt principles without thinking of the observations that have produced them, they believe the maxims exist, so to speak, by themselves. But the philosopher takes maxims from their source; he examines their origin; he knows their proper value, and he makes use of them only in so far as they suit him.
Truth is not for the philosopher a mistress who corrupts his imagination and whom he believes to be found everywhere; he contents himself with being able to unravel it where he can perceive it. He does not confound it with probability; he takes for true what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is only probable. He does more, and here you have a great perfection of the philosopher: when he has no reason by which to judge, he knows how to live in suspension of judgment.
The philosophical spirit is, then, a spirit of observation and exactness, which relates everything to true principles.

21. The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!

22. Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

23. One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it.

24. In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

25. There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

26. Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.

27. Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.

28. The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!

29. It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.

30. Listen, my philosopher friend, it strikes me that physics will always be a weakling science, a drop of water from the vast ocean caught up on the point of a needle, a grain of dust from off the Alps; and then, what about the causes of phenomena – truly, it would be better to know nothing than to know so little, so imperfectly.

31. Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

32. A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.

33. In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don’t have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

34. The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and … people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.There is not a Musselman alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side.

35. It seemed quite odd to me that the same thing could come from either God or the devil, depending on how they chose to look at it. There are many other similar cases in religious matters, and those who consoled me often said that my thoughts were either prompted by Satan or inspired by God. The same ill comes either from God who tests us or from the devil who tempts us.

36. Thank God I was made to read all that nonsense which the religious churn out about their way of life, which they know so well but which they hate, and all of it written to attack the world, which they love, but which they tear to shreds without actually knowing what it is like.

37. I believe in God, although I live very happily with atheists… It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God.

38. Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others.

39. The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.
Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

40. If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

41. I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to follow any idea, wise or mad that may present itself. … My ideas are my harlots.

42. Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

43. No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

44. The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.

45. The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.

46. As to all the outward signs that awaken within us feelings of sympathy and compassion, the blind are only affected by crying; I suspect them in general of lacking humanity. What difference is there for a blind man, between a man who is urinating, and man who, without crying out, is bleeding? And we ourselves, do we not cease to commiserate, when the distance or the smallness of the objects in question produce the same effect on us as the lack of sight produces in the blind man? All our virtues depend on the faculty of the senses, and on the degree to which external things affect us. Thus I do not doubt that, except for the fear of punishment, many people would not feel any remorse for killing a man from a distance at which he appeared no larger than a swallow. No more, at any rate, than they would for slaughtering a cow up close. If we feel compassion for a horse that suffers, but if we squash an ant without any scruple, isn’t the same principle at work?

47. The philosopher speaks very Ill of the priest; the priest speaks very Ill of the philosopher. But the philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

48. Unless you know everything, you really know nothing. You don’t know where one thing’s going; where another comes from; where this or that one should be put; which one should come first or would be better placed second. Can you teach something properly without a method? And a method, where does that originate?

49. I am wholly yours – you are everything to me; we will sustain each other in all the ills of life it may please fate to inflict upon us; you will soothe my troubles; I will comfort you in yours.

50. Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

51. Every man has his dignity. I’m willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

52. There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

53. For me, my thoughts are my prostitutes.

54. You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained.

55. Only one step separates fanaticism from barbarism

56. The best order of things, as I see it, is the one that includes me; to hell with the most perfect of worlds, if I’m not part of it.

57. Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.

58. What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.

59. Nothing is duller than a progression of common chords. One wants some contrast, which breaks up the clear white light and makes it iridescent.

60. The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

61. The genius acknowledges no rules; yet he never strays far from them when his efforts succeed. Philosophy knows only rules that are grounded in the nature of things, and this nature is eternal and immutable. Let the last century establish examples of genius; it is for our own age to prescribe the rules.

62. Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

63. Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man — it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.

64. The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

65. Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

66. How old the world is! I walk between two eternities… What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!

67. What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you, as you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant. Yet the insect is the more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an immeasurable tradition! Yet shall we all pass away, without the possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in space, or the precise time that we shall have endured. Time, matter, space—all, it may be, are no more than a point.

COMMENTS on Diderot

68.> A great perfection of the philosopher is when he has no reason by which to judge, he knows how to live in suspension of judgment. This is a wonderful ability and is probably only available to the philosopher and the scientist within his own field of expertise. Likely as not outside of that field he is as susceptible to seeking for absolutes as are other people of his association. The great power of the religious potentates is their ability to conjure truths out of the purest of speculations. It is easy for them to do so because all they need to do is present a beautiful picture to a desperate person, and claim it’s true. For someone in need of certainty, a fantastic hope is much better than a suspension of judgment with its continuing anxiety.

69.> All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings. This examination would include religious subjects, but it can not be done with them, because the tests of their truth are tests of the supernatural, and the supernatural is outside of nature, and therefore can not be tested. Thus there is no limit on the speculations that a religious person might apply his faith to and set his hopes on. There is proof positive that it works because billions of people follow their leaders.

70.> Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things. Action in a complex moral situation requires the shutting out of conflicting ideas, and this is effectively done by having a great passion. And yet, at the same time to be effective a person must have a cool analysis of the situation. Adapting to this conflict is probably why a near psychopathic personality is needed to do what are called great deeds.

Philosophers Squared – Voltaire

09 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by probaway in Philosophers Squared

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Human rights, I will defend your rights, Inequality, Internal security, Philosophers Squared, Voltaire

Go to the Index of 120 Philosophers Squared

Voltaire (1694 – 1778) was a French philosopher of freedom of expression. I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.

Voltaire

Voltaire

Quotations from Voltaire sourced from – WikiQuotes, GoodReads, BrainyQuote,


1. In this post I have made many comments between the [bracket] marks.

2. I had once some liking for his philosophical works; but when I found he doubted everything, I thought I knew as much as himself, and had no need of a guide to learn ignorance. [Once one is comfortable with their wisdom life is easier. Ask any child.]

3. I hold firmly to my original views! After all I am now a philosopher. [It’s as easy to become an honest philosopher as to become a fish. We need external inputs to maintain our orientations.]

4. The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important aims of philosophy. [Even Jesus stood mute, when Pontius Pilate asked him, What is Truth? And, he never got around to, what is good?]

5. Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect. If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing. [Why worry over mastery when simple competence will do in life’s situations?]

6. Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time. [Perfection? Even a perfect diamond has imperfections.]

7. The perfect is the enemy of the good. [Why seek the good when good enough is good enough.]

8. Dare to think for yourself. [If you are thinking with words, you are already dependent on the world of other people’s vision. They created those words to make their environment comprehensible.]

9. No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking. [This is an assertion that requires only a single example to prove it false, and people are incapable of infinite sustained thinking.]

10. I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it. [A slightly softer statement and more applicable statement would be more legitimate – I will defend my right to contradict you, and I will argue for your right to disagree with me. – Thus stated, I need not defend your right to presently violate me.]

11. Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too. [A modern way of saying that would be, THINK and empower others to THINK.]

12. The greatest consolation in life is to say what one thinks. [And, the great reward for saying what one thinks is other people’s understanding and appreciation.]

13. Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it. [Truth like infinity depends on what is being measured, and the ultimate undefinability of what that might be.]

14. Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road. [They are throwing stones because there current path is what is working for them and a new path isn’t better and obviously doesn’t work – until it does.]

15. Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all. [The modern American cliché of madness perpetrated on the youth is, You can do anything you want to if you just try hard enough.]

16. God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well. [Nature gave us life, and we have a responsibility to Nature of living our lives well. But, of course, nature has no motives and doesn’t care what we do so our responsibility is only to our socially significant others.]

17. Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. [One part in a hundred billion is mine, the rest was humanities, so I should cultivate appreciation of what has been created that I can use, if I want tranquility.]

18. Common sense is not so common. [Seeking the common sense of verifiable wisdom seems quite rare.]

19. Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. [Faith is believing in the unknowable and basing actions upon it, but if something is knowable you don’t need faith and can act with confidence of success.]

20. I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it. [The media makes every effort to make the public into ridiculous debt ridden consumers. They seek to form us into self created fools and slaves to the system of voluntary debt.]

21. Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game. [Everyone loses the game by that standard, but we can have the tranquility of controlling our essential needs.]

22. Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do. [Do what good you can and avoid what bad you can and be kind to others.]

23. It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. [That is they kill with their social groups consent, and avoid the other groups similar inclinations.]

24. Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers. [Unfortunately the best questions will be absurd until answered.]

25. Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us. [Dwelling on the negative prevents action, action is found exclusively in attending to the positive outcomes. Race care drivers intentionally look where you want to go.]

26. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. [The media bathes the modern public in absurdities, especially that violence solves problems.] [The only way a sane man can commit atrocities is by believing absurdities.]

27. God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. [God must be laughing at us humans because he gave us no plausible reason for believing in him.] To believe in God is impossible, not to believe in Him is absurd.

28. It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. [Read the book – Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. It’s about self-imposed chains, and how to shed them.]

29. Stand upright, speak thy thoughts, declare The truth thou hast, that all may share; Be bold, proclaim it everywhere: They only live who dare. [This isn’t Stoic tranquility!] There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable. [Stoics only live once so they avoid problems when possible.]

30. Of all religions, the Christian should of course inspire the most tolerance, but until now Christians have been the most intolerant of all men. [Monotheism is absolute and thus generates intolerance of the slightest deviation.] Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it. — What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature. [If you observe carefully the others persons understanding of the situation it is easier to be tolerant of them.]

31. It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. [Established authorities are common people with the support of the common people or they wouldn’t be their authorities. They are thus as dangerous as the common person.]

32. Love truth, but pardon error. [Who can know what is truth and what is error? It seems a better general policy to treat everyone with kindness and respect.]

33. The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing. [That is clearly overstated because everyone knows something, he might have said he isn’t so sure about the relative value of various things.]

34. Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow, every day. [People consume what they believe fits their life and what they like. It is a bit snotty for a super-rich dude, like Voltaire, to tell poverty-stricken ones what they should like.]

35. I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way. [There are so many ideas he could offer about where to be headed. Places the public could reach like tranquility.]

36. God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh. [After being ruled by the constant mental and moral pummeling by the church, for a thousand years, how can any community laugh. We haven’t recovered from the beating yet.]

37. Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies. [These may have been Voltaire’s dying words, at refusing communion and the implication was that he didn’t want to offend his new companions in Hell and Satan.]

38. Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one. [I agree with that sentiment, but most people are more comfortable with certainty, especially so when it is given by apparently respectable authorities. The unfortunate result is that they lose there personal freedom to think for themselves.]

39. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. [This is obviously intended as an ironic joke, but the implication, for this aristocrat, is that God is helpful in controlling masses of people who can’t control themselves.]

40. The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.  [This is a snide comment, and its that attitude that got much of the snooty French upper class beheaded a few years later.]

41. It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce. [This is the eternal conflict between the sword and the pen.]

42. The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe. [The function of the brain is to justify what the heart wants. And, what is the heart but the summation of learned mental behaviors.]

43. Prejudices are what fools use for reason. [Prejudice is just another name for the other guys careful reasoning from past experience.]

44. It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one. [That precept sounds good, but wouldn’t, “Minimize the suffering of the innocent” be a better general legal strategy.]

45. Man is free at the instant he wants to be. [We mustn’t forget Voltaire was a close friend with the aristocrats of Europe, and he lived among the most privileged people, and thus his ideas are tinged with that glow.]

46. Optimism,” said Cacambo, “What is that?” “Alas!” replied Candide, “It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst. [This is the best of all possible worlds because it is the only possible world we can inhabit. It is also the worst, and for the same reasons.]

47. It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part. [The question becomes, what books will function best in your coming life. To some extent that can be known, but it is doubtful that mass media and trashy novels and other such distortions of reality will be helpful.]

48. We never live; we are always in the expectation of living. [That was 250 years ago and now we have mass media advertising making our lives better tomorrow, if only we buy their stuff. Back then it was still the church selling impossible dreams.]

49. Let us cultivate our garden. [Live our own lives and attend to our basic needs. That sounds like the Classic Roman ideal of the Stoics, and they said it a lot better.]

50. Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden. [Perhaps treating other people kindly would be a great way to avoid their thorns. But, Voltaire never got the knack of treating people kindly, and he became a foundation stone for the French Reign of Terror.]

51. Liberty of thought is the life of the soul. [Without liberty of thought and freedom of action a man is a slave dependent upon his masters whims. Modern Americans in deep debt are voluntary slaves, and today’s kids heading off to college and a huge debt are aware of their impending status as debt slaves.]

52. Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference. [This is the ultimate hypocrisy for an aristocrat to write.]

53. I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fé, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley — in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered — or simply to sit here and do nothing?’ [Near the conclusion of Voltaire’s book Candid. The implication that doing nothing is agonizing. Thus personal tranquility if the worst of punishments.]

54. Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time. [People live in their time and place and with the people and opportunities that are available to them, so why should they worry about things which they will never encounter. Why inflict one’s self with needless suffering?]

55. If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others? [We are living in the world we live in whether it is good, bad or indifferent, but we can control our attitude toward our personal world.]

56. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us. [This quote doesn’t feel like Voltaire in attitude, but it’s true that we must turn away from the negative, because action must come from positive actions, and they come from positive attitudes toward our chosen options.]

57. One great use of words is to hide our thoughts. [Hiding our thoughts with words is possible but revealing them so others and ourselves may profit from them is a better use.]

58. The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude. [This is a testable hypothesis, but I doubt that it’s true. Most people prefer being with other people a lot of their time.]

59. Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours. [It isn’t the opinions that cause the trouble, it is the attempt to force other people to our opinion that creates the havoc. The opinion that – what you now possess is mine, is a cause of contention, but my ideas are absolutely right is the greatest killer of the other people.]

60. If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other’s throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace. [Religion is the purest of opinion, because it is based on the purest of speculation, and of the speculation of that religious type there are no limiting constraints.]

61. Minds differ still more than faces. [This is a testable hypothesis, and it is probably true. It depends upon how these things are measured and compared.]

62. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence. [There is a current myth that the proximity of monetarily rich and poor people causes unhappiness.]

63. If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it. [There is no greater discrepancy in dependence that the relationship between God and man. It would seem therefore that believers in God would be the most unhappy.]

64. Injustice in the end produces independence. [This is probably false, and is true only in the sense that injustice causes revolution. France had a devastating one shortly after Voltaire died.]

65. To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. [That is probably accurate, and I should observe it more carefully. Are we being ruled over when we sit quietly listening to loud talkers?]

66. If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new. [This is the hope when one picks up a book, opens a door or gets out of bed in the morning.]

67. Paradise is where I am. [Voltaire could equally have said, Hell is where I am, or Purgatory or consciousness; we are the center of our personal universe.]

68. Is politics nothing other than the art of deliberately lying? [Successful politics and religion is telling people what they want to hear, even if it is clearly false.]

69. What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he’s certain he’ll go to heaven if he cuts your throat? [It is obvious that you don’t have a choice as to what you must do.]

70. Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you. [This is the law of Nature, and those who don’t obey it are soon gone.]

71. Beware of the words “internal security,” for they are the eternal cry of the oppressor. [When we become too demanding of security we soon lose our freedoms, and security isn’t found in slavery but it can be approached in freedom and liberty.]

72. Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts. [Let us hope this isn’t true, and when it is found to be accurate those people must be cleared from positions of power and especially public office.]

73. A man loved by a beautiful woman will always get out of trouble. [I hope this is true, because then my life will continue to be trouble-free.]

74. Anything too stupid to be said is sung. [This is the reason I have so much trouble with music, but I never put it into such eloquently short statement.]

75. He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. “We do not pray to him at all,” said the reverend sage. “We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually. [Perhaps this suggestion should be made to the local atheists as a question of debate.]

76. Theology is to religion what poisons are to food. [Poison is only dangerous because of concentration, and by that reasoning theology is only poisonous because of its over-concentration.]

77. We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton’s intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence. [I agree with this in the sense that our ancestral women chose intelligence as a factor in the choice of mates. It is 10,000 generations of gossiping women who are the selective intelligence behind Newton and the rest of us. It is a positive feedback process creating intelligence and our other human qualities.]

77. I have chosen to be happy because it is good for my health. [If a person can create enough slack in their desperate lives, then they can choose to be happy.]

78. The pursuit of pleasure must be the goal of every rational person. [To maximize pleasure is very similar to maximizing tranquility. That choice eliminates the extremes of pleasure sought by the short-sighted pleasure seeker.]

79. I have no morals, yet I am a very moral person. [Where did your morals come from? From your ancestral mothers choosing moral men for mates.]

80. Men argue. Nature acts. [The more that men can make adjustments to each others needs with argument the less their physical nature needs to act.]


COMMENTS

The comments in this post were made after each quote. [inside brackets] Below are some further thoughts.

Voltaire’s famous statement, I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it, is a wonderful polemic. It gives every person the right to speak, but also gives every person the right not to agree, and implies the right not to listen. However, words not heard have no impact on the world and are felt to be wasted energy, but now everyone has the opportunity to publish to the internet, and although they might not be heard at the moment their thoughts are there and available to everyone.

It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence. This is a profound observation. In the modern world there is considerable research on economic inequality in a community, and unhappiness is greatest where inequality is greatest. But, that may not be the real factor; it may be dependence and the following loss of personal freedom that is the cause. It has been shown that after basic monetary needs have been met further wealth doesn’t improve happiness much. At any level of wealth a person might still be dependent on factors outside of their control, and it is the lack of personal control of significant factors that create unhappiness. The most felt of these is liberty to think and speak as one chooses.  Liberty of thought is the life of the soul. 

Beware of the words “internal security,” for they are the eternal cry of the oppressor. This unfortunately, the very phrase “internal security,” that is the current theme of our government, and with modern surveillance and control techniques available to our government, and we, in the form of the NSA (National Security Agency) are astonishingly intrusive. Unfortunately at present those organizations are opaque to any form of public oversight, observation and control. We must keep the groups of those inside people, mutually conflicted by independent motives. Those at the helms of our powerful institutions must be permanently split by independent routes to their power, and each with independent group, independent means of observing the NSA. That can possibly be done by maintaining a high degree of transparency toward the government as well as toward the people occupying those positions. The Second Amendment includes the words right to bear arms, but these days the right to bear free cell phone access is more protective of the public’s liberties.

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  • Measuring the Unmeasurable: Counterproductive
  • Measuring the Unmeasurable: Compounding
  • Measuring the Unmeasurable: Change
  • Measuring the Unmeasurable: Chance
  • Measuring the Unmeasurable: Calm
  • Measuring the Unmeasurable: Avoidance
  • Measuring the Unmeasurable: Ambition
  • Measuring the unmeasurable: Accident
  • Measuring the unmeasurable: Acknowledgement
  • Measuring the unmeasurable: Happiness
  • Measuring the unmeasurable: A list of possible unmeasurable subjects
  • Measuring the Unmeasurable: Putting numbers on things.
  • What did you do about your procrastination today?
  • So, what are you going to do about it?
  • How to enjoy getting old.
  • Put permanent, good information into your mind.
  • Just want less, and you will be happier.

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