/tag/choice

24 quotes tagged 'choice'

Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

224-225

But the problem of responsibility is seen under a different light when one refers to the traditional doctrine that we saw to have been more or less confusedly shadowed by existentialism itself: if one holds on to the idea that whatever one is as a person in the human condition proceeds from an original, prenatal, and pretemporal choice, wherein one willed, in terms of an 'original project' (as Sartre calls it), everything that would define the contents of one's existence. In this case, it is no longer a matter of answering to a Creator, but to something referring to the very dimension of being or transcendence in oneself. The course of existence, though not attributable to the more exterior and already human will of the individual (the person), follows, in principle, a line that has significance for the I, even though still latent or concealed: as an entirety of experiences important not in themselves but for the reactions that they provoke in us, reactions through which that being that one wished to be can be realized. In that case, life in this world cannot be considered as something that one can arbitrarily throw away, nor can it be considered simply as a bad situation in which the only choice is faith or fatalistic resignation (we have seen that, at best, the horizons of modern existentialism end there), or else being locked into a continuous trial of resistance (as happens along the lines of a dark Stoicism, devoid of the background of transcendence). As in an adventure, a mission, a trial, an election, or an experiment, earthly life appears to be something to which one committed oneself before finding oneself in the human condition, accepting in anticipation whatever difficult, miserable, or dramatic aspects it might bring, aspects that are especially likely in an epoch like the present.

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush

Author: John Michael Greer

Publisher: Founders House (2015)

225-226

Grandiose visions of vast renewable-energy buildouts and geoengineering projects on a global scale, of the kind being hawked so ebulliently these days by the prophets of eternal business as usual, fit awkwardly with the reality that a great many industrial nations can no longer afford to maintain basic infrastructures or to keep large and growing fractions of their populations from sliding into desperate poverty. The choice that I discussed in last week's post, reduced to its hard economic bones, was whether we were going to put what remained of our stock of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources into maintaining our current standard of living for a while longer, or whether we were going to put it into building a livable world for our grandchildren. \nThe great majority of us chose the first option, and insisting at the top of our lungs that of course we could have both did nothing to keep the second from slipping away into the realm of might-have-beens. The political will to make the changes and accept the sacrifices that would be required to do anything else went missing in action in the 1980s and hasn't been seen since. That's the trap that was hidden in the crisis of our age: while the costs of transition were still small enough that we could have met them without major sacrifice, the consequences of inaction were still far enough in the future that most people could pretend they weren't there; by the time the consequences were hard to ignore, the costs of transition had become too great for most people to accept - and not too longer after that, they had become too great to be met at all.

63-64

Consider, as one example out of many, the way that protecting children turned from a reasonable human concern to an obsessive-compulsive fixation. Raised under the frantic surveillance of helicopter moms, forbidden from playing outside or even visiting another child's home except on the basis of a prearranged and parentally approved play date, a generation of American children were held hostage by a galaxy of parental terrors that have only the most distorted relationship to reality, but serve to distract attention from the fact that the lifestyles chose by these same parents were condemning their children to a troubled and dangerous life in a depleted, polluted and impoverished world. \n The irony reached a dizzying intensity as tens of thousands of American parents rushed out to buy SUVs to transport their children to places every previous generation of American children proved perfectly capable of reaching by themselves on foot or on bike. It became the conventional wisdom, during the peak of the SUV craze, that the safety provided to young passengers by these massive rolling fortresses justified their purchase. No one wanted to deal with the fact that it was precisely the lifestyle exemplified by the SUV that was, and remains, the single most pressing threat to children's long-term safety and welfare. \n A great many of the flailings and posturings that have defined American culture from the Eighties to the present, in other words, unfolded from what Jean-Paul Sartre called 'bad faith' - the unspoken awareness, however frantically denied or repressed, that the things that actually mattered were not things anyone was willing to talk about, and that the solutions everyone wanted to discuss were not actually aimed at their putative targets. The lie at the heart of that bad faith was the desperate attempt to avoid facing the implications of the plain and utterly unwelcome fact that there is no way to make a middle class American lifestyle sustainable. \n Let's repeat that, just for the sake of emphasis: there is no way to make a middle class American lifestyle sustainable.

During the Seventies, a great many Americans came face to face with the hard fact that they could have the comfortable and privileged lifestyles they were used to having, or they could guarantee a livable world for their grandchildren, but they couldn't do both. The vast majority of them - or, more precisely, of us - chose the first option and closed their eyes to the consequences. That mistake was made for understandable and profoundly human reasons, but it was still a mistake, and it haunts the American imagination to this day.

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: kindle import (0)

It seems almost as if to be is to quarrel, or at least to differ, to be in contrast with something else. If so, whoever does not put up a fight has no identity; whoever is not selfish has no self. Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet, in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity. Therefore larger societies require larger enemies, bringing us in due course to the perilous point of our present situation, where the world is virtually divided into two huge camps. But if high officers on both sides have any intelligence at all, they make a secret agreement to contain the conflict: to call each other the worst names, but to refrain from dropping bombs. Or, if they insist that there must be some fighting to keep armies in trim, they restrict it to local conflicts in 'unimportant' countries. Voltaire should have said that if the Devil did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Nevertheless, the more it becomes clear that to be is to quarrel and to pursue self-interest, the more you are compelled to recognize your need for enemies to support you. In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question 'Who or what am I?'—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else. Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure. This understanding is at first paralyzing. You are in a trap—in the worst of all double-binds—seeing that any direction you may take will imply, and so evoke, its opposite. Decide to be a Christ, and there will be a Judas to betray you and a mob to crucify you. Decide to be a devil, and men will unite against you in the closest brotherly love. Your first reaction may be simply, 'To hell with it!' The only course may seem to be to forget the whole effort and become absorbed in trivialities, or to check out of the game by suicide or psychosis, and spend the rest of your days blabbering in an asylum. But there is another possibility. Instead of checking out, let us ask what the trap means. What is implied in finding yourself paralyzed, unable to escape from a game in which all the rules are double-binds and all moves self-defeating? Surely this is a deep and intense experience of the same double-bind that was placed upon you in infancy, when the community told you that you must be free, responsible, and loving, and when you were helplessly defined as an independent agent. The sense of paralysis is therefore the dawning realization that this is nonsense and that your independent ego is a fiction. It simply isn't there, either to do anything or to be pushed around by external forces, to change things or to submit to change. The sense of 'I,' which should have been identified with the whole universe of your experience, was instead cut off and isolated as a detached observer of that universe. In the preceding chapter we saw that this unity of organism and environment is a physical fact. But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Each organism experiences this from a different standpoint and in a different way, for each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety. One need not, then, fall into the trap which this experience holds for believers in an external, all-powerful God—the temptation to feel 'I am God' in that sense, and to expect to be worshipped and obeyed by all other organisms. Remember, above all, that an experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious 'will,' except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Don't try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process—like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of one's ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is. This is why I am not overly enthusiastic about the various 'spiritual exercises' in meditation or yoga which some consider essential for release from the ego. For when practiced in order to 'get' some kind of spiritual illumination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug at its own bootstraps. But there is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to 'get culture' or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost. If, then, you ask me how to get beyond the ego-feeling, I shall ask you why you want to get there. If you give me the honest answer, which is that your ego will feel better in the 'higher spiritual status' of self-transcendence, you will thus realize that you—as ego—are a fake. You will feel like an onion: skin after skin, subterfuge after subterfuge, is pulled off to find no kernel at the center. Which is the whole point: to find out that the ego is indeed a fake—a wall of defense around a wall of defense ... around nothing. You can't even want to get rid of it, nor yet want to want to. Understanding this, you will see that the ego is exactly what it pretends it isn't. Far from being the free center of personality, it is an automatic mechanism implanted since childhood by social authority, with—perhaps—a touch of heredity thrown in. This may give you the temporary feeling of being a zombie or a puppet dancing irresponsibly on strings that lead away to unknown forces. At this point, the ego may reassert itself with the insidious 'I-can't-help-myself' play in which the ego splits itself in two and pretends that it is its own victim. 'See, I'm only a bundle of conditioned reflexes, so you mustn't get angry with me for acting just as I feel.' (To which the answer could be, 'Well, we're just zombies too, so you shouldn't complain if we get angry.') But who is it that mustn't get angry or shouldn't complain, as if there were still some choice in the matter? The ego is still surviving as the 'I' which must passively endure the automatic behavior of 'myself' and others—again, as if there were some choice which the witnessing self can make between putting up with things and attacking them violently. What has happened is that the frustrated ego has withdrawn into its last stronghold of independence, retaining its identity as a mere watcher, or sufferer, of all that goes on. Here it pities itself or consoles itself as a puppet of fate. But if this is seen as yet another subterfuge, we are close to the final showdown. A line of separation is now drawn between everything that happens to me, including my own feelings, on the one side, and on the other, I myself as the conscious witness. Isn't it easy to see that this line is imaginary, and that it, and the witness behind it, are the same old faking process automatically learned in childhood? The same old cleft between the knower and the known? The same old split between the organism/environment and the organism's feedback, or self-conscious mechanism? If, then, there is no choice in what happens to me, on one side of the line, there is equally no choice on the other, on the witnessing side, as to whether I should accept what happens or reject it. I accept, I reject, I witness just as automatically as things happen or as my emotions reflect my physiological chemistry. Yet in this moment when one seems about to become a really total zombie, the whole thing blows up. For there is not fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily is known only by contrast with that of behaving voluntarily. Thus when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious.

It seems that we notice through a double process in which the first factor is a choice of what is interesting or important. The second factor, working simultaneously with the first, is that we need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed. Notation is a system of symbols— words, numbers, signs, simple images (like squares and triangles), musical notes, letters, ideographs (as in Chinese), and scales for dividing and distinguishing variations of color or of tones. Such symbols enable us to classify our bits of perception. They are the labels on the pigeonholes into which memory sorts them, but it is most difficult to notice any bit for which there is no label. Eskimos have five words for different kinds of snow, because they live with it and it is important to them. But the Aztec language has but one word for snow, rain, and hail. What governs what we choose to notice? The first (which we shall have to qualify later) is whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos. The second, again working simultaneously with the first, is the pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description.

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallucinations are similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply stress. In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold for release of hallucinations is extremely high ; most of us need to be over our heads in trouble before we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl I described, only anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary. This is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of breakdown products of stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for genetical reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a normal person. During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary because of some novelty in a situation. Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination. It has now been clearly established that decision-making (and I would like to remove every trace of conscious connotation from the word 'decision') is precisely what stress is. If rats have to 94 The Mind of Man cross an electric grid each time they wish to get food and water, such rats develop ulcers.11 Just shocking the rats does not do this to them. There has to be the pause of conflict or the decision-making stress of whether to cross a grid or not to produce this effect. If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys' feet, within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey will have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not.12 It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. For if the experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an effective response and receive immediate feedback of his success, executive ulcers, as they are often called, do not occur.13

If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallunications are similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply stress. In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold for release of hallucinations is extremely high; most of us need to be oever our heads in trouble before we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl I described, only anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary. This is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of a breakdown products of stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for gentical reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a normal person.\n\n During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary becuase of some novelty in a situation. Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination.\n\n It has now been clearly established that decision-making (and I would like to remove every trace of conscious connotation from the word 'decision') is precisely what stress is. If rats have to cross an electric grid each time they wish to get food and water, such rats develop ulcers*. Just shocking the rats does not do this to them. There has to be the pause of conflict or the decision-making stress of whether to cross a grid or not to produce this effect. If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys' feet, within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey will have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not*. It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. For if the experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an effective response and receive immediate feedback of his success, executive ulcers, as there are often called, do not occur*.'\n\n *W.L. Sawrey and J.D. Weisz, 'An experimental method of producing gastic ulcers,' Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1956, 49:269-270.\n **J.V. Brady, R.W. Porter, D.G. Conrad, and J.W. Mason, 'Avoidance behavior and the development of gastro-duodenal ulcers,' Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1958, I:69-72.\n **J.M. Weiss, 'Psychological Factors in Stress and Disease,' Scientific American, 1972, 226:106.\n\n\n

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

632

DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS FREE MARKET: That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without coercion. THE STATE: That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion). TAX: That form of coercion or interference with the Free Market in which the State collects tribute (the tax), allowing it to hire armed forces to practice coercion in defense of privilege, and also to engage in such wars, adventures, experiments, 'reforms,' etc., as it pleases, not at its own cost, but at the cost of 'its' subjects. PRIVILEGE: From the Latin privi, private, and lege, law. An advantage granted by the State and protected by its powers of coercion. A law for private benefit. USURY: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which one State-supported group monopolizes the coinage and thereby takes tribute (interest), direct or indirect, on all or most economic transactions. LANDLORDISM: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which one State-supported group 'owns' the land and thereby takes tribute (rent) from those who live, work, or produce on the land. TARIFF: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which commodities produced outside the State are not allowed to compete equally with those produced inside the State. CAPITALISM: That organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism, and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it. Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 357 von 470 CONSERVATISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which claims allegiance to the Free Market while actually supporting usury, landlordism, tariff, and sometimes taxation. LIBERALISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which attempts to correct the injustices of capitalism by adding new laws to the existing laws. Each time conservatives pass a law creating privilege, liberals pass another law modifying privilege, leading conservatives to pass a more subtle law recreating privilege, etc., until 'everything not forbidden is compulsory' and 'everything not compulsory is forbidden.' SOCIALISM: The attempted abolition of all privilege by restoring power entirely to the coercive agent behind privilege, the State, thereby converting capitalist oligarchy into Statist monopoly. Whitewashing a wall by painting it black. ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. RIGHT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate. LEFT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete.

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

313

Psychotherapy can allow people to affirm themselves, to smash idols that constrict the self-esteem, to lift the load of neurotic guilt—the extra guilt piled on top of natural existential guilt. It can clear away neurotic despair—the despair that comes from a too-constricted focus for one’s safety and satisfactions. When a person becomes less fragmented, less blocked and bottled up, he does experience real joy: the joy of finding more of himself, of the release from armor and binding reflexes, of throwing off the chains of uncritical and self-defeating dependency, of controlling his own energies, of discovering aspects of the world, intense experience in the present moment that is now freer of prefixed perceptions, new possibilities of choice and action, and so on. Yes, psychotherapy can do all these things, but there are many things it cannot do, and they have not been aired widely enough. Often psychotherapy seems to promise the moon: a more constant joy, delight, celebration of life, perfect love, and perfect freedom. It seems to promise that these things are easy to come by, once self-knowledge is achieved, that they are things that should and could characterize one’s whole waking awareness. As one patient said, who had just undergone a course in “primal scream” therapy: “I feel so fantastic and wonderful, but this is only a beginning—wait till you see me in five years, it’ll be tremendous!” We can only hope that she won’t be too unhappy. Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life. Only angels know unrelieved joy—or are able to stand it. Yet we see the books by the mind-healers with their garish titles: “Joy!” “Awakening,” and the like; we see them in person in lecture halls or in groups, beaming their peculiar brand of inward, confident well-being, so that it communicates its unmistakable message: we can do this for you, too, if you will only let us. I have never seen or heard them communicate the dangers of the total liberation that they claim to offer; say, to put up a small sign next to the one advertising joy, carrying some inscription like “Danger: real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there is no turning back.” It would be honest and would also relieve them of some of the guilt of the occasional suicide that takes place in therapy. But it would also be most difficult to take the straightforward prescription for paradise on earth and make it ambiguous; one cannot be a functioning prophet with a message that he half takes back, especially if he needs paying customers and devoted admirers. The psychotherapists are caught up in contemporary culture and are forced to be a part of it. Commercial industrialism promised Western man a paradise on earth, described in great detail by the Hollywood Myth, that replaced the paradise in heaven of the Christian myth. And now psychology must replace them both with the myth of paradise through self-knowledge. This is the promise of psychology, and for the most part the psychotherapists are obliged to live it and embody it. But it was Rank who saw how false this claim is. “Psychology as self-knowledge is self-deception,” he said, because it does not give what men want, which is immortality. Nothing could be plainer. When the patient emerges from his protective cocoon he gives up the reflexive immortality ideology that he has lived under—both in its personal-parental form (living in the protective powers of the parents or their surrogates) and in its cultural causa-sui form (living by the opinions of others and in the symbolic role-dramatization of the society). What new immortality ideology can the self-knowledge of psychotherapy provide to replace this? Obviously, none from psychology—unless, said Rank, psychology itself becomes the new belief system.

251

The depressed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyze it or be able to move out of it and transcend it. Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility, especially when the choice comes too late in life for one to be able to start over again. Better guilt and self-punishment when you cannot punish the other—when you cannot even dare to accuse him, as he represents the immortality ideology with which you have identified. If your god is discredited, you yourself die; the evil must be in yourself and not in your god, so that you may live. With guilt you lose some of your life but avoid the greater evil of death.7 The depressed person exaggerates his guilt because it unblocks his dilemma in the safest and easiest way.8 He also, as Adler pointed out, gets the people around him to respond to him, to pity him, and to value him and take care of him. He controls them and heightens his own personality by his very self-pity and self-hatred.9 All these things, then, make obsessive guilt prominent in the depression syndrome.

104

Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude—even dishonor and betrayal—to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self-effacement, surrender to the “others,” disavowal of any personal dignity or freedom—on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties—on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces and that he avoids partly by his guilty self-accusation. The answer is not far to seek: the depressed person avoids the possibility of independence and more life precisely because these are what threaten him with destruction and death. He holds on to the people who have enslaved him in a network of crushing obligations, belittling interaction, precisely because these people are his shelter, his strength, his protection against the world. Like most everyone else the depressed person is a coward who will not stand alone on his own center, who cannot draw from within himself the necessary strength to face up to life. So he embeds himself in others; he is sheltered by the necessary and willingly accepts it. But now his tragedy is plain to see: his necessity has become trivial, and so his slavish, dependent, depersonalized life has lost its meaning. It is frightening to be in such a bind. One chooses slavery because it is safe and meaningful; then one loses the meaning of it, but fears to move out of it. One has literally died to life but must remain physically in this world. And thus the torture of depressive psychosis: to remain steeped in one’s failure and yet to justify it, to continue to draw a sense of worthwhileness out of it.‡

The Role of Logo Design in Creating Brand Emotion

Author: Aslı Biricik

Publisher: İzmir Institute of Technology (2006)

Visually, attractive packaging using bright colours and clean designs mesmerises people, captivating them and enhancing their brand relationship. Unmistakable Absolut 14 Vodka, Apple iMac, and Gillette razors are brands that are focused on constantly introducing the fresh shapes and sensory experiences that consumers appreciate. 'Colour is a sensation and not a substance.' (Friedman 1947) And sensation runs within us, unlike products that run without. Products that transform into appealing sensations are the ones that win. Every emotional branding strategy must consider the effect (or the absence) colours will have on the brand. Colour is about conveying crucial information to consumers. “Colours trigger very specific responses in the central nervous system and celebral cortex. Once they affect the celebral cortex, colours can activate thoughts, memories, and particular modes of perception. This arousal prompts an increase in consumers’ ability to process information.” (Gobé 2001) Properly chosen colours obtain a more accurate understanding of the brand and provide consumers a better recall of the brand. The effect of colours arises both from cultural connections and physiology, and these influences are enforced by one another. Colours with long wavelengths are arousing. Red is the most stimulating colour that will attract the eye faster than any other. Colours with short wavelengths are soothing. Blue actually lowers blood pressure, pulse, and respiration rates. Yellow is in the middle of wavelengths detectable by the human eye. Therefore it is the brightest and easily attracts attention. This is the original reason for making the Yellow Pages yellow. Colour often sets the mood of a brand through logos and packaging. Generally, it is desirable to select a colour that is easily associated with the product. For example John Deere uses green for its tractors. Green implies nature. IBM has a solid blue that communicates stability and reliability. However as Al Ries and Jack Trout note in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, “it is more important to create a separate brand identity than it is to use the right symbolic colour. Hertz, the first car-rental brand, picked yellow. So Avis, the second brand, picked red. National went with green.” (Ries and Trout 1998) The role colour choice can play in brand identity is not to be underestimated. Colours can demand attention, provoke responses. An orange, translucent, curvaceous iMac screams, “fun” and “different”. Contrast that with a typical, gray, rectangular desktop that communicates a “utilitarian” and “standard” identity. Neither computer is necessarily functionally superior, but the iMac is distinguished. It is an emotional brand.

The Mind's I

Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

Publisher: Bantam Books (1982)

The Fourth Way

Author: P.D. Ouspensky

Publisher: Vintage (1971)

257

You must remember that when it was said that things happen to all people and that people cannot 'do' anything, that referred to ordinary conditions in ordinary life—what is called normal life. But in this work we are trying to get out of this 'normal' life, so we already must 'do'. Only we must first learn what we can 'do', because in our present conditions many things will continue to happen; but in certain things we can already have choice, we can show our preference, our will, as much as we can have will. So 'us' cannot be used in the same way as before. But you must understand that at first, the difference is not between 'doing' and 'not doing', but between trying to 'do' and trying to understand, and at present all your energy must be concentrated on trying to understand. What you can try to 'do' has been explained. We are trying to find things we can control in ourselves, and if we work on them, we will acquire control. This is all the 'doing' that is possible at the moment. \r\n\r\nQ. Is the full realization that we cannot 'do' anything already a long step on the way to 'doing'? \r\n\r\nA. Sometimes the step is too long, because every idea prolonged too far becomes its own opposite. So if you persuade yourself too seriously that you can do nothing, you will find that you really can do nothing. It is a question of relativity. As I said, not being able to 'do' refers to people without any possibility of school-work.

250

Q. Why is it that I cannot give up the idea of being able to 'do'? I have proved to myself so often that I cannot. \r\n\r\nA. This is the most difficult and the most necessary thing to realize with your whole being, because so long as we think that we can 'do' we shall always put off the things that we actually can do if we work. As I said, we can 'do' things only in relation to ourselves—these are the things we have to begin with. But we shall never begin to study ourselves so long as we think we can 'do'. This is one of our greatest illusions. \r\n\r\nQ. I can see that I have no choice in larger things, but it seems to me that I can do small things. \r\n\r\nA. These small things happen according to certain definite circumstances which control them. You think you control them, but in reality they happen. We cannot 'do' because we are asleep. How can sleeping people 'do'? It is necessary to be awake; when one is awake, one can 'do'. 'Doing' is magic.

219

Q. How do these hydrogens connect with man? A. For instance, hydrogen 768 represents all the food we eat; the air we breathe is hydrogen 192, and our impressions can be 48, 24, 12 and even 6. We have an enormous range of impressions, but we have no choice of air or food. We cannot inhale, for instance, hydrogen 96, for it is fire, incandescent gases. We cannot eat H 384, for it is water, and we cannot live on water. You will see that this Table answers all our requirements; it enables us to speak of all the matters in the human machine and to see their interrelation; and it makes it possible to connect man with the universe, because we can know from which level each matter comes. This Table of hydrogens shows not only the density of each of thembut also the place of origin of these different layers of matter which are under different laws, as it was explained. Hydrogens which come from planes under a very small number of laws, near the Will of the Absolute, have an enormous power and enormous potential energy. Thus we have a scale of twelve densities on which can be placed all matter known to or conceivable by man. For the lower densities we may find examples both in man and in the world around him. Up to the level of H 96 or even 48, these may be studied physically by chemistry, biology and other sciences. Above H 48 we can only study psychological effects of their presence or absence— knowing the level of hydrogens with which different centres work. Still higher hydrogens are only potential in man or exist in such small quantities that they are impossible to study. The study of these higher hydrogens in the surrounding world is also beyond the powers of perception of man No. 1, 2 and 3

Q. What is meant by the law of accident? \r\n \r\nA. The life of man-machine, of man who cannot 'do', who has no will or choice, is controlled by accident, for things in ordinary life happen mechanically, accidentally; there is no reason in them. And just as man's external life is controlled by accidental external influences, so is his inner life also controlled by both internal and external influences which are equally accidental. You will understand that, if you realize what it means that man is asleep, that he cannot 'do', cannot remember himself; when you think of the constant unconscious flow of thoughts in man, of day-dreaming, of identifying and considering, of mental conversations that go on in him, of his constant deviation towards the line of least resistance. People think that accidents are rare, but in actual fact most things that happen to them are accidental. What does accident mean? It means a combination of circumstances which is not dependent on the will of the man himself nor the will of another person, nor on fate, as do, for instance, conditions of birth and upbringing, nor on the preceding actions of the man himself. An accident happens when two lines of events cross one another. Suppose a man stands under the roof of a house, sheltering from rain, and a brick falls and hits him on the head. This would be an accident. There are two separate lines of cause and effect. Take the line of the man's movements and the fact that he happened to stop under the roof of that particular house; every small thing in it had a cause, but the brick did not enter into this line of cause and effect. Suppose the brick was negligently set and the rain made it loose and at a certain moment it fell. There is nothing in the life of the man or the life of the brick to connect them. The two lines of cause and effect meet accidentally.

Mere Christianity

Author: C.S. Lewis

Publisher: HarperOne (2001)

This Is It

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: Vintage (1973)

Lost in the Cosmos

Author: Walker Percy

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (1983)

The only cure for depression is suicide.

This is not meant as a bad joke, but as the serious proposal of suicide as a valid option. Unless the option is entertained seriously, its therapeutic value is lost. No threat is credible unless the threatener means it.

This treatment of depression requires a reversal of the usual therapeutic rationale. The therapeutic rationale, which has never been questioned, is that depression is a symptom. A symptom implies an illness; there is something wrong with you. An illness should be treated.

Suppose you are depressed. You may be mildly or seriously depressed, clinically depressed, or suicidal. What do you usually do? Do nothing or something. If something, what is done is always based on the premise that something is wrong with you and therefore it should be remedied. You are treated. You apply to friend, counselor, physician, minister, group. You take a trip, take anti-depressant drugs, change jobs, change wife or husband or 'sexual partner.'

Now, call into question the unspoken assumption: something is wrong with you. Like Copernicus and Einstein, turn the universe upside down and begin with a new assumption.

Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth - and who are luckily exempt from depression - would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you'd be deranged if you were not depressed. Consider the only adults who are never depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians who believe they have had a personal encounter with Jesus and are saved for once and all. Would you trade your depression to become any of these?

Now consider, not the usual therapeutic approach, but a more ancient and honorable alternative, the Roman option. I do not care for life in this deranged world, it is not an honorable way to live; therefore, like Cato, I take my leave. Or, as Ivan said to God in The Brothers Karamazov: If you exist, I respectfully return my ticket. Now notice that as soon as suicide is taken as a serious alternative, a curious thing happens. To be or not to be becomes a true choice, where before you were stuck with to be. Your only choice was how to be least painfully, either by counseling, narcotizing, boozing, groupizing, womanizing, man-hopping, or changing your sexual preference.

If you are serious about the choice, certain consequences follow. Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide. Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable, after all. You are not even a black hole in the Cosmos. All that stress and anxiety was for nothing. Your fellow townsmen will have something to talk about for a few days. Your neighbors will profess shock and enjoy it. One or two might miss you, perhaps your family, who will also resent the disgrace. Your creditors will resent the inconvenience. Your lawyers will be pleased. Your psychiatrist will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbi will say a few words over you and down you will go on the green tapes and that's the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed.

Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are free to do so. You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the door to the cell is ajar and that the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining.

Suddenly you feel like a castaway on an island. You can't believe your good fortune. You feel for broken bones. You are in one piece, sole survivor of a foundered ship who captain and crew had worried themselves into a fatal funk. And here you are, cast up on a beach and taken in by islanders who, it turns out, are themselves worried sick - over what? Over status, saving face, self-esteem, national rivalries, boredom, anxiety, depression from which they seek relief mainly in wars and the natural catastrophes which regularly overtake their neighbors.

And you, an ex-suicide, lying on the beach? In what way have you been freed by the serious entertainment of your hypothetical suicide? Are you not free for the first time in your life to consider the folly of man, the most absurd of all the species, and to contemplate the comic mystery of your own existence? And even to consider which is the more absurd state of affairs, the manifest absurdity of your predicament: lost in the Cosmos and no news of how you got into such a fix or how to get out - or the even more preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your ridiculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something.

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

The Drowned and the Saved

Author: Primo Levi

Publisher: Vintage (1989)