Seduced

The mass of men focus on what they know. A small but growing number have been seduced by what they don’t know. You are among the few.

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Power

No one has power to ruin my life. Am I ruined? Then I ruined myself. This is the realization that allowed Socrates to say, “You can kill me but you cannot hurt me.”

The face of a man

It was said of Socrates that he always wore the same expression.

Man as disciple

Discipline has nothing to do with subjugation, suppression or standing at attention. It does not mean replacing one pattern of behaviour with another. It means “to learn.”

We must be completely free in order to learn. Freedom begins with the realization of how trapped we are.

The least free are the most conventional.

Man as actor

The ego is who I think I am. It is a limited, temporary and entirely mind-based sense of self. So men say: “I am a millwright.” Or, “I am a stay-at-home dad.” But we are not the roles we play. Marlon Brando did not tell people he was a mafia don. On examination, we find that the question “Who am I?” can only be answered in the negative, e.g., not this, not that. We concede one all-purpose exception to a blinking list of negative statements: “I am an actor.”