Competence

There is no substitute for competence.
Howard Roak (Ayn Rand)

Everybody's cryin' peace on earth---just as soon as we win this war

Non-rational creatures do not look before or after, but live in the animal eterity of a perpetual present; instinct is their animal grace and constant inspiration; and they are never tempted to live otherwise than in accord with their own animal dharma, or immanent law. Thanks to his reasoning powers and to the instrument of reason, language, man (in his merely human condition) lives nostalgically, apprehensively and hopefully in the past and future as well as in the present; has no instincts to tell him what to do; must rely on personal cleverness, rather than on inspiration from the divine Nature of Things; finds himself in a condition of chronic civil war between passion and prudence and, on a higher level of awareness and ethical sensibility, between egotism and dawning spirtuality. But this "wearisome condition of humanity" is the indispensable prerequisite of enlightenment and diliverance. Man must live in time in order to be able to advance into eternity, no longer on the animal, but on the spirtual level; he must be conscious of himself as a separate ego in order to be able consciously to transcend separate selfhood; he must do battle with the lower self in order that he may become identified with that higher Self within him, which is akin to the divine Not-Self; and finally he must make use of his cleverness in order to pass beyond cleverness to the intellectual vision of Truth, the immediate, unitive knowledge of the divine Ground. Reason and its works "are not and cannot be a proximate means of union with God." The proximate means is "intellect," in the scholastic sense of the word, or spirit. In the last analysis the use and purpose of reason is to create the internal and external conditions favourable to its own transfiguration by and into spirit. It is the lamp by which it finds the way to go beyond itself. We see, then, that as a means to a proximate means to a End, discursive reasoning is of enormous value. But if, in our pride and madness, we treat it as a proximate means to the divine End (as so many religious people have done and still do), or if, denying the existence of an eternal End, we regard it as at once the means to Progress and its ever-receding goal in time, cleverness becomes the enemy, a source of spiritual blindness, moral evil and social disaster. At no period in history has cleverness been so highly valued or, in certain directions, so widely and efficiently trained as at the present time. And at no time have intellectual vision and spirituality been less esteemed, or the End to which they are proximate means less widely and less earnestly sought for. Because technology advances, we fancy that we are making corresponding progress all along the line; because we have considerable power over inanimate nature, we are convinced that we are the self-sufficient masters of our fate and captains of our souls; and because cleverness has given us technology and power, we beleive, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that we have only to go on being yet cleverer in a yet more systematic way to achieve social order, international peace and personal happiness.------This is a direct quote of Aldous Huxley from his book " The Perennial Philosophy" published in 1945

Vince the Prophet is Now on the Web

Today, I finally was able to get the Vince the Prophet web site up and running.

After years of delay there is finally a place where the writings and philosophies of The Millboure Millennium Master will be assembled for the "people of planet earth", outside the West Philadelphia Italian Ghetto where he spent most of his life, to learn about the Poet, Prophet, Phoenix of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I am sure that Vince would have been gratified that his message was now available to millions of people on the web, although I am not sure that he could have ever comprehended what the web is. Vince was a simple man, who shunned technology and passed before concepts like the computer and the world wide web were widely understood or available.

He did tell my friend Bobby and I that we should be his publicity agents. And now we are able to spread the word, 21st Century style.

I had always felt that Vince was born for www distribution.

As we are able to post more Vince content in the coming weeks, I encourage everyone and anyone to check out the site.

www.vincetheprophet.com

All the world is a cage.

Jeanne Phillips

Interesting POV

John Perry Barlow on intellectual property rights and the entetainment industry:

"These are aging industries run by aging men, and they're up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices. And I don't have a question about who's going to win that one eventually.”

“But you know the problem is - the bad news is that you're up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter than you are and will be alive when you're dead. You're 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they're just smarter than you. So you're gonna lose that one.”

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FreeDumb

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
German poet
(1749 - 1832)