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Ehsan Sehgaj

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“And sure we may The same too of the Present say, If Past, and Future Times do thee obey. Thou stopst this Current, and dost make This running River settle like a Lake, Thy certain hand holds fast this slippery Snake. The Fruit which does so quickly wast, Men scarce can see it, much less tast, Thou Comfitest in Sweets to make it last. This shining piece of Ice Which melts so soon away With the Suns ray, Thy Verse does solidate and Chrystallize. Till it a lasting Mirror be; Nay thy Immortal Rhyme Makes this one short Point of Time, To fill up half the Orb of Round Eternity.”

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Author:Abraham Cowley
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“I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience. You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.”

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Book:Into the Wild
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“The scientific method liberates us to pursue truth regardless of who we are. Similarly, evolutionary psychology, a discipline viscerally despised by many progressives, is expressly anti-racist in that it recognizes that underneath many of our surface differences, human minds were borne of the same evolutionary forces irrespective of our racial or ethnic backgrounds. Environmental forces (or culture) do affect our thinking styles, reasoning, and decision making, but these effects are not immutable elements of one’s race or ethnicity. There is no “black mind” or “white mind,” no “white male way of knowing” or “indigenous way of knowing,” there is only one truth, and we find it through the scientific method.”

ReasonEvolutionary PsychologyScientific Method
Book:Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense
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“What rationalism from d’Alembert to Dawkins is loath to acknowledge is that human rationality is a corporeal one. We think as we do roughly because of the kind of bodies we have, as Thomas Aquinas noted. Reason is authentically rational only when it is rooted in what lies beyond itself. It must find its home in what is other than reason, which is not to say in what is inimical to it. Any form of reason which grasps itself purely in terms of ideas, and then fumbles for some less cerebral way in which to connect with the sensory world, is debilitated from the outset.”

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Book:Culture and the Death of God
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“The divine life does indeed grow in us even on earth, but we never reach full maturity; we never dispense with faith until we actually see God face to face. Now the question is: what is the relation between this divine life (and divine knowledge that we call faith) and human life (and human knowledge)? Some people have held that they are actually opposed to each other. You know that kind of person who thinks that you can't be a saint unless you're very slightly ill; this sort of person tends also to think that you can't have faith unless what you believe is humanly incredible. They think of faith not as a matter of knowing or of learning, but rather as a matter of courage, a leap into the unknown, a quixotic championing of the absurd. Now faith is certainly a leap into the unknown in the sense that what you believe is something that cannot be known by ordinary human power. But it is a leap which precisely tries to make this known. It is not a rejection of knowledge, it is an effort to know more - to get to know more by trusting in a teacher.”

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Book:Faith Within Reason
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“Thomas Paine invented the name of the Age of Reason; and he was one of those sincere but curiously simple men who really did think that the age of reason was beginning, at about the time when it was really ending. Being a secularist of the most simple-minded sort, he naturally aroused angry passions at the moment, as does any poor fellow who stands on a chair and tries to heckle heaven in Hyde Park. But considering him in retrospect, the modern world will be more disposed to wonder at his belief than at his unbelief. The denial of Christianity is as old as Christianity; we might well say older. The anti-clerical will probably last as long as the Church, which will last as long as the world. But it is doubtful when we shall see again the positive side of Paine's philosophy; the part that was at once credulous and creative. It is impossible, alas, for us to believe that a Republic will put everything right, that elections everywhere will ensure equality for all. For him the Church was at best a beautiful dream and the Republic a human reality today it is his Republic that is the beautiful dream. There was in that liberalism much of the leisure of the eighteenth-century aristocrats who invented it; and much of the sheltered seclusion also. The garden which Voltaire told a man to cultivate was really almost as innocent as the garden of Eden. But the young men who saw such visions were none the less seeing visions of paradise, though it was an earthly paradise. Rationalism is a romance of youth. There is nothing very much the matter with the age of reason; except, alas, that it comes before the age of discretion.”

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Book:William Cobbett
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“We may, then, summarize the complex character of myth in the following words: Myth is a form of poetry which transcends poetry in that it proclaims a truth; a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning in that it wants to bring about the truth it proclaims; a form of action, of ritual behaviour, which does not find its fulfilment in the act but must proclaim and elaborate a poetic form of truth.”

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Book:Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man
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“« Reason, l’esprit, the intellect of the writing and reasoning nation, is constantly fighting against the darkness of « illiteracy ». You must know how to read and write to be a real member of a civilized nation.(…) In clearing up the underbrush of the privilege and prejudice, liberalism or rationalism was convinced that it held in its hand the naked truth, undisguised, unstained by dogma or tradition. Reason discovering nature can test everything by experiment. There is no room for traditional habits: Fashion takes the place of habit. But it is precisly Fashion which enslave Reason. The Philosophizing mind had its prison of sensuality and drudgery exactly like a pupil of the Jesuits or a child in a backwoods village. Its fairy-tale and its prejudice are not dependent upon miracles or dogmas or incenses or witchcraft, but the apparatus of Reason is subject to the same laws of sensuous disguise as any other part of the human soul. Superstition sends us to the medicine man, physical pain to the physician. We have a native sense that urges us on toward Reason and Philosophy: this sense is curiosity. Without a sense for novelty, no thinker can succeed or affect the life of the community. The self-indulgence of Reason is its predilection for the new. »”

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Book:Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
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