Even though they [the subtlest discursive thoughts, mental dialogues, images, memories, desires, and emotions] go undetected, they may strongly influence our minds and behavior. Unconscious mental processes, as Freud discovered centuries after Buddhist contemplatives, can actually exert deep and lasting influences in our mental lives. This practice is a path of self-knowledge, as subconscious influences are gradually identified via increasingly refined qualitative vividness.
History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially enlist. Intellectuals and artists rose as a class for the first time to lend a hand in the making of history, and locate the meaning of life in politics and art rather than traditional religion. The balance in European culture shifted from the religious to the secular – a momentous process that is still ongoing in many parts of the world.
For whatever the historian calls an end, the end of a period or a tradition or a whole civilization, is a new beginning for those who are alive.
From the beginning, the clear, decisive, directed thinking that we associate with rationality is linked to aggression and force.
The tricky part . . . is how to do two very difficult things: one, to reasonably decide just what are the major differences between the male and female value spheres (à la Gilligan), and then, two, to learn ways to value them more or less equally. Not to make them the same, but to value them equally.
