Join 📚 Jim's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jim's read, .
The affirmation of dignity is equally important: There’s a difference between inclusion and pity. The sinners damned to eternal torment in Dante’s Inferno thank the narrator for his pity. He swoons at their agony, but his intensity of feeling does nothing to change their position, which is structurally inferior. They are trapped in hell and he can leave for heaven. A demand for inclusion, on the other hand, is a claim to joint-ownership on the basis of equal dignity: I am just as worthy of heaven as you.
How to Build a Society for All to Enjoy - Issue 107
nautil.us
If we want to appreciate the mystery of life, it is essential to evade the compulsion of our desires by understanding that there does not need to be anything else in our current situations. There is no greater feeling, state, or condition that we have to achieve. There is no lesser or more limited feeling, state, or condition that we have to be liberated from. This is it. And this poignancy is always here. We can give ourselves permission to experience it; to be right here with it. To be available to it. To be available to the mystery of life is to be free.
Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are
J Jennifer Matthews
You probably found that after putting it to music, your thought isn’t hooking you as much. And notice you haven’t challenged the thought; you haven’t tried to get rid of it, debated whether it’s true or false, or tried to push it away and replace it with a positive thought. So what happened? By taking the thought and putting it to music, you saw its “true nature”; you realized that, like the lyrics of a song, it is nothing more or less than a string of words.
The Happiness Trap
Harris, Russ
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise