Broadly speaking, working with the immune system and our inner worlds means paying more attention to the bounty of sensations that are available to us. This includes the five main senses—sight, smell, touch, taste and sound—but also the interoceptive sense that we develop when we quiet the outside world and look inward.
As T.S. Eliot famously wrote, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”
As industrial civilization begins to implode, we will witness an upsurge of prophecy of all kinds—fantastic, salvational, millenarian, apocalyptic, and reactionary.
Under English law, the House of Commons took the term “misdemeanor” to refer to distinctly public misconduct, including but not limited to actual crimes. Thus “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the standard basis for impeachment, represented “a category of political crimes against the state.”
“Undermine guerrilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of people – rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.” And the footnote: “If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides!”
When we read writing aloud it increases our chance of noticing any mismatches or friction between the outer physical experience of hearing the sound of our words and the inner mental or cognitive experience of feeling the meaning. After practicing the activity of reading aloud to revise, we begin to learn to notice when the fit is not so good between words and meaning—a sense of our feet swimming a bit in shoes that are too large—a sense of sounds sort of flapping around a bit and slightly muffling the meaning.
The image of human excellence I would like to offer as a counterweight to freedom thus understood is that of a powerful, independent mind working at full song. Such independence is won through disciplined attention, in the kind of action that joins us to the world. And-this is important-it is precisely those constraining circumstances that provide the discipline.
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