Pride is one's response to one's power to achieve values, the pleasure one takes in one's own efficacy. And it is this that mystics hold as evil.
But if doubt, not confidence, is man's proper moral state, if self-distrust, not self-reliance, is the proof of his virtue; if fear, not self-esteem, is the mark of perfection; if guilt not pride, is his goal–then mental illness is a moral ideal, the neurotics and psychotics are the highest exponents of morality, and the thinkers, the achievers, are the sinners those who are too corrupt and too arrogant to seek virtue and psychological well-being through the belief that they are unfit to exist.
Humility is, of necessity, the basic virtue of a mystical morality; it is the only virtue possible to men who have renounced the mind.
Sayfa 44Kitabı okudu
Prenatally, the spleen is a hematopoietic (blood-forming) organ, but after birth, it is involved primarily in identifying, removing, and destroying expended red blood cells (RBCs) and broken-down platelets and in recycling iron and globin. The spleen serves as a blood reservoir, storing RBCs and platelets, and, to a limited degree, can provide a sort of "self-transfusion" as a response to the stress imposed by hemorrhage. In spite of its size and the many useful and important functions ot provides, it is not a vital organ (not necessary to sustain life).
Sayfa 487
I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give. So I renamed myself Ari. If I switched the letter, my name was Air. I thought it might be a great thing to be the air. I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
From the beginning social ideology was riven by two contradictory codes of behavior and two contradictory value systems: aggression and the killer instincts were necessary for the hunt, but threatened to destroy the very social order that made the hunt possible. Aggression therefore had to be encouraged, but so had quiescence, compliance, and all those qualities which lead to peaceable social cohesion.
Cultural evolution required the suppression of "selfish genes." Human society would not have survived if culture had not exerted every means to block aggression when directed toward the detriment of the community while at the same time fostering the aggression that worked to its benefit.
Historical research plus an act of imagination is now necessary for Plato’s Protagoras to have its proper shock: Protagoras, widely held by his contem-poraries to be the wisest man in Greece, honored and trusted enough to have been invited by Pericles himself to draft the laws of the pan-Hellenic colony of Thurii, old enough now to be father of anyone present at Plato’s Protagoras, appealing enough to be the main attraction to ambitious young Athenians drawn that day to the house of the richest man in Athens to hear him—that fabled man is defeated in argument by a relatively young Athenian and defeated so soundly that he is reduced at the end to pro-claiming his victor his proper successor.
Sayfa 28Kitabı okuyacak
