“The Great Way is not difficult, for those who have no preferences"

-Xinxin Ming, Tang Dynasty Chan Buddhist Poem

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https://www.consciousness-light.com/

Check out Astika's Book:

https://a.co/d/7jXvINK

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinxin_Ming

https://zenmoments.org/hsin-hsin-ming-the-great-way

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“The [music of the] Blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history.”
-Cornel West, Democracy Matters, 2004

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Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/k5ydesBadno

Published March 2022 by The New School:

https://www.youtube.com/@thenewschool

“Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed—even preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.”

-Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 2003

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Philosophy could be characterized with only a bit of irony as what is left if you begin with the sum total of human thought and subtract those areas in which clear progress has been made.
-Talbot Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, 2009

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Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/geBkIGDEU-k

Published February 2017 by the University of Chicago

https://www.youtube.com/@UChicago

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"Human civilization is the result of ten million years of striving after the unspeakable"

-Terence McKenna

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“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Interview with the Guardian, October 2014

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Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/lorX77nu3Jk

Published April 2024 by Seton Hall University

https://www.youtube.com/@setonhall

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“We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct, she has little chance of evolving another.”

-James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 2009

Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/JtBuJbCwdyo

Recorded 2011, Published October 2016 by CSUMB.https://www.youtube.com/@digitalcommonscsumb2306

“If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.”

-Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 2003

Original YouTube:

https://youtu.be/FAHUyHDTphQ

Provided by the Departments of History and Art History at the University of Otago, October 2017:

https://www.youtube.com/@OtagoHumanities

How did the Nazis conceive of war? In this lecture, Professor Evans—a world authority on Nazi Germany—argues that Hitler's belief that war was necessary for the fitness and survival of the German race led him to promote the indoctrination of German society at every level with a will to wage war and the preparedness to do so. Perpetual conflict was the aim, and the idea that World War II would have ended had the Nazis won is an illusion; it would have been followed by other conflicts, principally with America. In this way, defeat was built in to the Nazi war effort from the beginning.