Category: Thought Leader
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Re-orient life
The individual soul has to realize its identity with the Supreme Universal Soul with full consciousness.
Men shall have re-orientation of life in the light of this Ancient Truth; and they will readjust their attitude towards their neighbours in everyday life.
To perceive the spiritual value of oneness is to promote real unity and cooperation; brotherhood then becomes a spontaneous outcome of true perception.
——-AVATAR MEHER BABA
[GEMS FROM THE DISCOURSES OF MEHER BABA By Meher Baba. An Avatar Meher Baba Trust eBook June 2011. Copyright © 1945 by Circle Productions, Inc. (a New York Corporation), Copyright © Adi K. Irani, 1967 Copyright © 2007, Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust, Ahmednagar, India.]
Provoke like a mentor – Quotes collected via Goodreads.com
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“Say ‘provoking’ again. Your mouth looks provocative when you do.”
— Becca Fitzpatrick (Hush, Hush (Hush, Hush, #1)) |
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“These are the few ways we can practice humility:
To speak as little as possible of one’s self. To mind one’s own business. Not to want to manage other people’s affairs. To avoid curiosity. To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully. To pass over the mistakes of others. To accept insults and injuries. To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked. To be kind and gentle even under provocation. Never to stand on one’s dignity. To choose always the hardest.” |
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“The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.”
— Søren Kierkegaard (Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard) |
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“There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.”
— William S. Burroughs (The Place of Dead Roads) |
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“Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth.
Anger is the demand of accountability, It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It’s a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It’s a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope. How much anger is too much? Certainly not the anger that, for many of us, is a remembering of a self we learned to hide and quiet. It is willful and disobedient. It is survival, liberation, creativity, urgency, and vibrancy. It is a statement of need. An insistence of acknowledgment. Anger is a boundary. Anger is boundless. An opportunity for contemplation and self-awareness. It is commitment. Empathy. Self-love. Social responsibility. If it is poison, it is also the antidote. The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination. Angry women burn brighter than the sun. In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure. Women, especially, will be told to set our anger aside in favor of a kinder, gentler approach to change. This is a false juxtaposition. Reenvisioned, anger can be the most feminine of virtues: compassionate, fierce, wise, and powerful. The women I admire most—those who have looked to themselves and the limitations and adversities that come with our bodies and the expectations that come with them—have all found ways to transform their anger into meaningful change. In them, anger has moved from debilitation to liberation. Your anger is a gift you give to yourself and the world that is yours. In anger, I have lived more fully, freely, intensely, sensitively, and politically. If ever there was a time not to silence yourself, to channel your anger into healthy places and choices, this is it.” |
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“Because we cannot discover God’s throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are “not true.” I would rather say that they are not “true” enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation.
Modern man may assert that he can dispose with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. Or he may even regret the loss of his convictions. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no means of proving immortality), why should we bother about evidence? Even if we did not know by reason our need for salt in our food, we should nonetheless profit from its use. We might argue that the use of salt is a mere illusion of taste or a superstition; but it would still contribute to our well-being. Why, then, should we deprive ourselves of views that would prove helpful in crises and would give a meaning to our existence? And how do we know that such ideas are not true? Many people would agree with me if I stated flatly that such ideas are probably illusions. What they fail to realize is that the denial is as impossible to “prove” as the assertion of religious belief. We are entirely free to choose which point of view we take; it will in any case be an arbitrary decision. There is, however, a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful. Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced that they make sense; he is crushed when, on top of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he is taking part in a “tale told by an idiot.” It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man. The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. It gives them ample space for the unfolding of personality and permits them a full life as complete persons. Their plight is infinitely more satisfactory than that of a man in our own civilization who knows that he is (and will remain) nothing more than an underdog with no inner meaning to his life.” |
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“But it’s a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.”
— Paul Harding (Enon) |
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“Enigma, positive confusion (delirium), problematic, pain, whatever we want to call it; the torment of the philosophers in any case, is the stimulus to ecstatic creation, to an interminable “resolution” into the enhanced provocations of art. What the philosophers have never understood is this: it is the unintelligibility of the world alone that gives it worth. “Inertia needs unity (monism); plurality of interpretations a sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and enigmatic character”. Not, then, to oppose pain to the absence of pain as metaphysical pessimism does, but, rather, to differentiate the ecstatic overcoming of pain from weariness and inertia, to exult in new and more terrible agonies, fears, burning perplexities as the resource of becoming, overcoming, triumph, the great libidinal oscillations that break up stabilized systems and intoxicate on intensity; that is Dionysian pessimism -“refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic”; “the effect of the work of art is to excite the state that creates art -intoxication”.”
— Nick Land (Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987-2007) |
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“She turned now, facing him, as if she hand only been waiting until she became warm, the rich coat open upon the fragile glitter of her dress; there was a quality actually beautiful about her now-not of the face whose impeccable replica looks out from the covers of a thousand magazines each month, nor of the figure, the shape of deliberately epicene provocation into which the miles of celluloid film have constricted the female body of an entire race; but a quality completely female, in the old eternal fashion, primitive, assured and ruthless as she approched him … . “She said at once, now. So we can go. You see? Do you understand? We can leave now. Give her the money, let her have it all. We won’t care. …”
— William Faulkner (Collected Stories) |
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“It’s people running around looking for anything to generate volume: Oh, teenage girls are taking their clothes off? And that’s getting a lot of hits? Then let’s turn a blind eye to the consequences. Oh, your daughter’s on Tinder? Well, she’s just meeting friends. It’s all about high-volume usage. I don’t think it’s necessarily a cynical, let’s destroy women thing – it’s how can I get my next quarter’s bonus?
And I think to the extent that the digital social media society normalizes impulses- think it, post it,” Roberts says, “we’ve also created a context for more and more provocative propositions, whatever they are: Look at my boobs. Do you want to hook up? It’s moved the bar for what’s normal and normalized extreme behavior; everything outrageous becomes normalized so rapidly. You realize how insane things are today when you think about the relative rate of change. When I was in high school, if I had gone around saying, Here’s a picture of me, like me, I would have gotten punched. If a girl went around passing out naked pictures of herself, people would have thought she needed therapy. Now that’s just Selfie Sunday.” (— Paul Roberts quoted from the book)” |
How humble Quaker origins inspire James Turrell’s otherworldly light art | Aeon Videos
Decoding Chinese Strategic Intent!
Interesting Newsletter from Nik
Would They Miss You If You Were Gone?
A simple definition for doing work that matters
Four years ago, after six months of hard work, I finally did it: My email list reached 10,000 subscribers. I was ecstatic.
10,000 people. That’s a small stadium. Imagine a sold out arena, waiting for you — just for you — to share your latest work. This would be my big break. I was sure of it. With 10,000 people marching behind me, nothing I make would ever fall flat again.
You can see where this is going. I’m about to swallow a bitter pill here.
Later that year, I heard Seth Godin define permission marketing:
If that email you were going to send to 10,000 people tomorrow — if it didn’t go out — how many of the 10,000 people would say: “Where is the email?!” If the answer is none, then you don’t have permission. You’re just being tolerated.
Convinced that my dedicated subscribers loved me, I decided to run an experiment: That week, I didn’t send out my newsletter. No announcement. No warning. I just skipped one email. What would happen? Who would ask for it? How many people? Would they be concerned? What would they say?
I woke up the next morning to a sobering realization: No one had emailed me. No one had asked for the newsletter. I waited. One day. Two. Three. Nothing. Crickets. No one missed me when I was gone. Ouch.
The all-important question in marketing, art, and doing great work is this: “What does it mean to matter?” According to Seth, there is a simple answer:
Would they miss you if you were gone? I don’t know who they are, I don’t know what gone means, but those people that you’re seeking to have an impact on, would they miss you if you didn’t show up tomorrow?
In my case, people didn’t. Maybe, they thought my newsletter was nice. Maybe, they enjoyed an article or two of mine. Clearly, however, none of my readers considered my work essential. They could easily do without it.
It hurts to find out that the tribe you’ve assembled with your blood, sweat, and tears will disband the second you stop talking to them, but the message it sends is clear: You never formed a real tribe in the first place. You just talked enough people into following along. You convinced them to take the flyer, to try the free sample, to sign up for the trial subscription — but you didn’t do the hard work of building a loyal relationship.
You just did “the hustle dance,” as Seth calls it:
Would they miss you if this new product, this new project didn’t come to the world? Or do you have to do that whole hustle dance, “Look at me, look at me,” jump up and down, offer for a limited time, bla bla bla… To game it so they’ll actually transact with you. That work doesn’t feel like it matters to me.
It’s easy to think you’re doing work that matters. That, somehow, your marketing is different. You have good intentions. You really want your audience to succeed. But you might still cut corners. We all succumb to the temptation sometimes.
Clickbait is still clickbait, even if you deliver on your promise. Selling is still selfish if your main goal is to make money. Giving gifts is not generous if it comes with expectations. In many ways, reciprocity has been corrupted.
If what you’re doing feels like playing a game, chances are, not many will miss you when you’re gone. You’re just another player who dropped out. Fine. Less competition. Less hassle. Less clutter in my inbox.
Here’s another question: Where is the sacrifice? How much are you really sweating? If we can’t see your effort in what you make for us, how can we know you mean what you say?
The only way to show people you have their best interest at heart is to actually do. You can’t fake it. You either do something selfless, or you don’t. It’s one of the few things in life that are surprisingly black and white and, most of the time, plain to see — at least on a long enough timeline.
When I didn’t hear back from my fans, when no one missed me when I was gone, I was devastated. I questioned everything I was doing. I changed things. I tried to do better.
Last year, I started another newsletter. I put in hard work. Real work. It grew fast. It was free. I sent it every day. I came up with themes. I wanted to help so badly. I really tried.
To this day, it’s not as big as my first one. It has about 5,000 subscribers. But, often, when I missed a day or didn’t share something in a while, a few people checked in. “Hey, Nik, are you okay?” “Hey Nik, where are the emails?”
It’s great to see you’re moving in the right direction. It feels good to be missed when you’re gone.
It’s okay. You’re not perfect. Take your time. Learn to stop dancing. Start making. Take your ego out of the equation. Not for a while. Not for this one thing. Completely.
Watch what happens. Watch how, slowly, the magic unfolds. Watch them start to miss you when you’re gone.
Write like a pro,
-Nik
PS: Want to take your writing game to the next level? Check out Write Like A Pro.
Surrender yourself to the cause of God.
Divine Love will make men selfless and helpful in their mutual relations and it will bring about the final solution of all problems. The new brotherhood on earth shall be a fulfilled fact and nations will be united in the fraternity of Love and Truth.
My existence is for this Love and this Truth; and to suffering humanity I say: Have hope.
I have come to help you in surrendering yourselves to the cause of God and in accepting His Grace of Love and Truth.
I have come to help you in winning the one Victory of all victories—to win your self.
——-AVATAR MEHER BABA
[GEMS FROM THE DISCOURSES OF MEHER BABA By Meher Baba. An Avatar Meher Baba Trust eBook June 2011. Copyright © 1945 by Circle Productions, Inc. (a New York Corporation), Copyright © Adi K. Irani, 1967 Copyright © 2007, Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust, Ahmednagar, India.]
Word List: Isms
via Word List: Isms
Rumi Quotes (Author of The Essential Rumi) | Goodreads
via Rumi Quotes (Author of The Essential Rumi) | Goodreads
Rumi > Quotes
Rumi quotes Showing 1-30 of 2,076
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
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“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
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“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
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“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
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“What you seek is seeking you.”
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“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
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“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.”
― The Illuminated Rumi
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.”
― The Illuminated Rumi
“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
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“Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.”
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“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”
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“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
― The Essential Rumi
― The Essential Rumi
“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”
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“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”
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Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”
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“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
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“Knock, And He’ll open the door
Vanish, And He’ll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He’ll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He’ll turn you into everything.”
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Vanish, And He’ll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He’ll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He’ll turn you into everything.”
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“When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.
Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.”
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When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.
Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.”
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“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
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“My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
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“I want to see you.
Know your voice.
Recognize you when you
first come ’round the corner.
Sense your scent when I come
into a room you’ve just left.
Know the lift of your heel,
the glide of your foot.
Become familiar with the way
you purse your lips
then let them part,
just the slightest bit,
when I lean in to your space
and kiss you.
I want to know the joy
of how you whisper
“more”
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“silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation.”
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all else is poor translation.”
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“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
― Masnavi i Man’avi, the spiritual couplets of Maula
― Masnavi i Man’avi, the spiritual couplets of Maula
“Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.”
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“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
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“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
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“لا تجزع من جرحك، وإلا فكيف للنور أن يتسلل إلى باطنك؟”
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“Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.”
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“Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”
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“Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.”
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“I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.”
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“Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
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