Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

Carroll was eleven years old when he saw The Haunting in The Oregon Theater. He had gone with his cousins, but when the lights went down, his companions were swallowed by the dark and Carroll found himself essentially alone, shut tight into his own suffocating cabinet of shadows. At times, it required all his will not to hide his eyes, yet his insides churned with a nervous-sick frisson of pleasure. When the lights finally came up, his nerve endings were ringing, as if he had for a moment grabbed a copper wire with live current in it. It was a sensation for which he had developed a compulsion.Later, when he was a professional and it was his business, his feelings were more muted - not gone, but experienced distantly, more like the memory of an emotion than the thing itself. More recently, even the memory had fled, and in its place was a deadening amnesia, a numb disinterest when he looked at the piles of magazines on his coffee table. Or no - he was overcome with dread, but the wrong kind of dread.("Best New Horror")

All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism.Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.

Viewed in this light, life itself appears as a dynamics of integration that is equipped with auto-therapeutic or 'endo-clinical' competencies and refers to a species-specific space of surprise. It has an equally innate and - in higher organisms - adaptively acquired responsibility for the injuries and invasions it regularly encounters in its permanently allocated environment or conquered surroundings. Such immune systems could equally be described as organismic early forms of a feeling for transcendence: thanks to the efficiency of these devices, which are constantly at the ready, the organism actively confronts the potential bringers of its death, opposing them with its endogenous capacity to overcome the lethal. Such functions have earned immune systems of this type comparisons to a 'body police' or border patrol. But as the concern, already at this level, is to work out a modus vivendi with foreign and invisible powers - and, in so far as these can bring death, 'higher' and 'supernatural' ones - this is a preliminary stage to the behaviour one is accustomed to terming religious or spiritual in human contexts. For every organism, its environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears.

I was thinking not very long ago about the difference between the people we "grew up" with vs. the people we're "growing old" with - not always being one and the same - and how time (and the memories we forge together) really does strengthen pretty much all of our relationships/friendships (whether they had started on the right foot or not). And I guess what I've mostly learned (by moving to NZ especially) is that the more Significant people you have in your life, the more 'manageable' the idea of loss, losing a loved-one, can become - not because you can replace them (obviously you can't) or because they're interchangeable (no one is), but because like a foundation to a house the more pillars you have (people you love) holding it up (loving you) the more solid/resilient you become - and from there, I find you're better equipped to overcome whatever life throws your way. That said time does pass us by very quickly. I find it much more noticeable through our growing kids than ever before.

Should IToday I am in search of a light,that can show me a way bright,Today I am trying to find a reason,For why my life feels like a prison,I am trying to find a way,So that, even just for a day,my seldom happiness could stay,I am trying to find a reason of pain,to know why it hurts and sometimes eyes rain,Today looking back at life and planning for future,I cannot forget those people and miss ventures,Should I stay, wait or move on,Or should I believe that, they moved on,Should i forget that old house and small streets,Or can I forget the faces, lanes and their good deeds,Its been a while and they are changed,Should I forget them or remember them as a tale,I feel so big, heavy and old,Should i take some decisions bold,Life being so rude and cold,But always i found a reason to stay and take hold,I hope for a light, reason and rain,Hope to overcome darkness, treason and pain.

Hegel represents history as the self-realization of spirit (Geist) or God. The fundamental scheme of his theory is as follows. Spirit is self-creative energy imbued with a drive to become fully conscious of itself as spirit. Nature is spirit in its self-objectification in space; history is spirit in its self-objectification as culture—the succession of world-dominant civilizations from the ancient Orient to modern Europe. Spirit actualizes its nature as self-conscious being by the process of knowing. Through the mind of man, philosophical man in particular, the world achieves consciousness of itself as spirit. This process involves the repeated overcoming of spirit's alienation (Entfremdung) from itself, which takes place when spirit as the knowing mind confronts a world that appears, albeit falsely, as objective, i.e. as other than spirit. Knowing is recognition, whereby spirit destroys the illusory otherness of the objective world and recognizes it as actually subjective or selbstisch. The process terminates at the stage of "absolute knowledge," when spirit is finally and fully "at home with itself in its otherness," having recognized the whole of creation as spirit—Hegelianism itself being the scientific form of this ultimate self-knowledge on spirit's part.

What is the future of men who havelost sight of the past?Earl Hollsopple lived on the edge of civilization in a deserted shack for nearly forty years. His life was one beautiful night of stargazing after another, until a helicopter flies overhead, and exposing his meager world. It is a sign; it is time for him to return to civilization.Unknowingly, Earl’s journey parallels another he had deeply repressed, and that is his return from the Vietnam War. The lone survivor of a plane crash, Earl waits for rescue that never came. He is left to find his way home alone.On both his quests, old Earl and young Earl learn lessons of survival, overcoming isolation and handling conflicts; his travels teach him not just about himself, but humankind. Reaching pivotal points in both journeys, Earl meets fateful loves, leading to destinies that are ultimately intertwined.Everything in life circles until we are able to answer the riddles that plaque man and humanity. Only until we take the journey, solve the problems of our own existence, do we find our way home.

“I was thinking not very long ago about the difference between the people we "grew up" with vs. the people we're "growing old" with - not always being one and the same - and how time (and the memories we forge together) really does strengthen pretty much all of our relationships/friendships (whether they had started on the right foot or not). And I guess what I've mostly learned (by moving to NZ especially) is that the more Significant people you have in your life, the more 'manageable' the idea of loss, losing a loved-one, can become - not because you can replace them (obviously you can't) or because they're interchangeable (no one is), but because like a foundation to a house the more pillars you have (people you love) holding it up (loving you) the more solid/resilient you become - and from there, I find you're better equipped to overcome whatever life throws your way. That said time does pass us by very quickly. I find it much more noticeable through our growing kids than ever before.”

Cultural criticism always attacks the mass media. I don't think that makes sense. We should look more closely at the work of deformation that starts deeper down, especially because it involves so much demoralization. Something gets destroyed there that should not be destroyed under any circumstances - THE AWARENESS THAT KNOWLEDGE IS BORN OUT OF EUPHORIA AND THAT INTELLIGENCE IS A RELATIONSHIP OF THE HAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS WITH ITSELF. And that intelligence partly consists in the ability to find our own ways of overcoming the boredom that develops in an under-used brain. Across society as a whole, the most disturbing symptom is that people are no longer ambitious enough to plumb the limits of understanding within themselves. INTELLIGENCE IS THE LAST UTOPIAN POTENTIAL. THE ONLY TERRA INCOGNITA HUMANKIND STILL OWNS ARE THE GALAXIES OF THE BRAIN, THE MILKY WAYS OF INTELLIGENCE. And there is hardly any any convincing space travel in them. Incidentally, this internal astronautics is the only alternative to a consumerist perspective. It is the only thing that could explain to people in the future that their intelligence space is so immense that they can experiment with themselves for millennia without becoming exhausted. The really good news is that there is something breathtakingly great that is called intelligence and is uncharted. ARE YOU WILLING TO VOLUNTEER ?