What society thinks of as reality today is the hypnosis of social conditioning, an induced fiction in which we are all collectively participating. It is the melodrama of existence, filled with obsessions & pursuits, wherein our only fate is to be born and grow old.
–Deepak Chopra
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.
Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs & peaks.
If you watch carefully, you will see this undulation in every department of his life – his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up & down.
As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness & poverty.
Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S.LEWIS
A thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs.
Mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue & senility.
Most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books — no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930.
Tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.
And, most fatally & abysmally, men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.
It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis
Peace, entrepreneurial opportunity, struggling democracy, and technological superiority are what come to mind when I think of the USA.
Tweet by G.Garchar (2024)
Mitochondria supply the energy in the cell.
Heart muscle cells have the most mitochondria, thousands per cell.
High-intensity interval training in aerobic exercises such as biking and walking cause cells to make more proteins for their energy-producing mitochondria, effectively stopping aging at the cellular level.
What would happen if all the mitochondria in your body released all their energy at once?
The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well.
They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness & power & beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow.
When the world was in darkness & wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it.
But when the world became bright with reason & riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.
Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they – this garden Earth, civilized & knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us. We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Seneca
Feedback mechanisms as anticipatory anxiety trigger symptoms which in turn, reinforce the phobia. Paradoxical intention consists of a reversal of attitude. Fear is replaced by a paradoxical wish to experience the anxiety fully, and the wind is taken out of the sails. ~Logotherapy by Victor Frankl
