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I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (book)

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Humanity tends to scapegoat individuals or groups to water the thirst for collective violence or to resolve tensions and angst. The scapegoating mechanism is at the heart of the Western canon: both Socrates and Jesus were put to death to appease the inflamed crowd. According to French American thinker Ren é  Girard, these are extreme, archetypal versions of a phenomena that plays out in lesser forms throughout human life. Girard sits at the crossroads of various traditions but is uniquely brilliant when discussing the role collective violence has in human communities. At the heart of Girard’s work is the notion of mimetic decision-making. By this he means that humans by nature imitate what they see, hear, and read, including in what they desire. The imitators inevitably begin to go after the same things in a world of scarce resources, which increases tensions in the community. Eventually, the tension becomes too great, and the individual or group is selected for scapegoating, whereby t
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The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (book)

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History rhymes: it moves in cycles of growth, destruction and then further growth; we see intense conflict followed by loving peace, leading to complacency and the withering of what brought the beauty and success to begin with, only to give birth to something greater. Another common historical rhyme is that each age has a wealthy establishment which attempts to suppress information or people that threatens its control: Emperors, Tsars and tycoons. Any serious student of world history, mythology and ideas knows these things to be true.                                                                                                               The Nag Hammadi Scriptures have captured the imagination of seekers around the world because their story and content exemplify the points raised above. In brief, they represent a type of Christianity that flourished between approximately 70 AD to 400 AD but ceased to exist thereafter. They are called gnostic which generally means a direct knowledg
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J. G. Bennett on Gurdjieff (book)

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There are two ways in which the ascension (spiritual liberation) argument typically occurs. The first is that humans were once grand or at least at a relatively decent level of peace and stability, but have fallen, and to ascend is to take our rightful place by being and acting in accordance with our designed nature (leaving aside the question of the designer). The other is that we act in alignment with the lowly state we are by nature, and ascension is rising above our lot. Gurdjieff sits in the second category, with the general purpose of human life being to act as an energetic resource for planetary forces in the same way as sheep and cows are resources for humanity; however, just as some animals may avoid capture for food and materials or death by another animal, an individual human may escape their bondage by separating psychologically from the herd.    Gurdjieff states that human beings are in a type of hypnosis, with the added suggestion that this is by design:    "It must
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The Secret of Light (book)

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One of the most beautifully written and accessible mystical texts of our time is The Secret of Light by Walter Russell. It captures the truths of esoteric Christianity (such as that found in the sermons of Meister Eckhart), and the Hindu Upanishads, without getting bogged down in unapproachable terminology or culturally-specific mythology.                                                                                                                                                                                                    The essence of Russell’s text is that each human is an eternal consciousness that both experiences and is the manifestation of a single, eternal God-Mind. A human being is a conscious mind that experiences separate physical forms via waves and pulses of light which create the electrical charges governing her body and thoughts. As Russell puts it, “Electricity expresses the desire in the God-Mind for creative expression by seemingly dividing the One still ligh
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Aristotle's Ethics (book)

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A curious fact about the history of ethical theory is that the ancient Greeks did not have a word for happiness; it made no sense for them to speak about the final goal of human action as individual or general human happiness. The Greeks used the word eudaimonia , which is generally translated as flourishing. To flourish, in the eyes of Aristotle, is to fulfil one’s potential as a human being, or to be excellent at being what one truly is.                                                                                                                                                                                                            For Aristotle, in order to know what it means to flourish, it is essential to have a view of human nature. This means, that to know if an individual has flourished as a human, we must have a notion of what it means to be a human so we can determine what kind of things an exemplar human being would do. Aristotle believed that this answer had to be foun
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Erving Goffman on Stigma (book)

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Erving Goffman established the groundwork for the analysis of the relationship between mental illness and social control in his classic texts Stigma and Asylums. For Goffman, humans live in, and emerge from, interconnected social networks; moreover, individuals within these social networks hold shared expectations about how people will act. Goffman notes that we do not merely expect individuals to live in accordance with these assumptions, but we demand that they do: "We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands."  In this way humans transfer conventions or conveniences into implicit behavioural demands, and thereby regulate each other’s conduct.                                                                                                                                For Goffman, when we meet someone we assume that they are going to be a certain way. The group of attributes that we expect pe
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Self-Reliance (book)

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Ralph Waldo Emerson always struck me as cutting to the heart of human weakness: the tendency to ignore the advice coming from our hearts due to the desire to obtain the approval of other people. We are here for a reason, and it is our intuitive voice that will guide us towards our rightful destiny, not the judgements or demands of other people: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”                                                                                                                                                                          Many of my favourite writers talk about the importance of trusting our intuition, and the messages and feelings that support it and which we can pick up on when our eyes are open and our minds are alive. Each of these writers emphasises a different aspect of this. For example, Florence Scovel Shinn wrote extensively on following the leads that one's higher self provides in practical affairs: “The Divine Plan
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