When a concern for the common good overtakes our longstanding preoccupation with me and mine, peace will prevail. In the meantime, war is inevitable. We strive to hold individuals and agencies accountable for war, but in fact no one is responsible. Unless everyone is.
A peculiarity of our species is its reflexive need to make one individual responsible for what happens: Smith’s slap, Putin’s war. The concept of personal responsibility contests the truth that we are not in control, things happen as they must, and everything causes everything
Kindness is not personal. It’s like health—an activity of consciousness.
Consciousness is not personal. Love is not personal. We are individual expressions of the same consciousness. If we are ‘in love’, we are in love with ourselves.
Is there a concept more sterile and tome-ish than that of a family tree?
The tribal mind is what takes us to war. It’s why humans kill humans.
Dr. Susan Brind Morrow, the eminent Egyptologist, includes in her new book this extraordinary assertion: Poetry pre-dates prose. Buttressed with all of the usual scholarly scaffolding, of course.
I guess we needed a woman to penetrate the living heart of those ancient hieroglyphs. It is reckoned that before the pre-historical Fall, some 4,000 years ago, the world’s great cultures were matriarchal. There was no war. A non-compete clause rested over everything. So it’s no wonder that when we read something like ‘Poetry pre-dates prose,’ the left side of a guy’s brain feels like it’s having a mushroom attack.
Men's Work 