inner peace quotes, time quotes,zen quotes

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This moment is all there is. Rumi

The next message you need is always right where you are. Ram Dass

He who is filled with love is filled with God himself. Saint Augustine

At any moment, you have a choice, that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it. Thich Nhat Hanh

The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and the acceptance of love. Marianne Williamson

Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself. Hermann Hesse

When you connect to the silence within you, that is when you can make sense of the disturbance going on around you. Stephen Richards

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul. Swami Vivekananda

Only if we understand, will we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help shall all be saved. Jane Goodall

When you realize there is no lacking, the whole world belongs to you. Lao Tzu

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars. Elbert Hubbard

It is in our wild nature that we best recover from our un-nature, our spirituality. Friedrich Nietzsche

I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer. Martin Luther

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear. Daniel Defoe

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. Henry Miller

I choose gentleness Nothing is won by force. I choose to be gentle. If I raise my voice may it be only in praise. If I clench my fist, may it be only in prayer. If I make a demand, may it be only of myself. Max Lucado

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from. Elizabeth Kbler-Ross

Realisation is not acquisition of anything new nor is it a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage. Ramana Maharshi

If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit. Thomas Merton

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it. Henri J.M. Nouwen

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the now the primary focus of your life. Eckhart Tolle

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you. Eckhart Tolle

Nurture great thoughts, for you will never go higher than your thoughts. Benjamin Disraeli (This is one of my favorite spiritual quote. Leave a reply hereand let me know whats yours!)

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The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Albert Einstein

Equanimity arises when we accept the way things are. Jack Kornfield

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself. Anais Nin

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Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. Carl Jung

The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. Ludwig van Beethoven

The Way is not in the sky; the Way is in the heart. Buddha

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves. Dalai Lama

It isnt until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within that you can begin to take control. Oprah Winfrey

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this. Henry David Thoreau

Nothing is, unless our thinking makes it so. William Shakespeare

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves. William Shakespeare

It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart. Mahatma Gandhi

Physical strength can never permanently withstand the impact of spiritual force. Franklin D. Roosevelt

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. John Lennon

When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love. Marcus Aurelius

This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in eternal awareness or pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity. Voltaire

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind. Albert Einstein

The greater the doubt, the greater the awakening. Albert Einstein

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself. Michel de Montaigne

Awakening is not changing who you are, but discarding who you are not. Deepak Chopra

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One liners, short spiritual quotes, thoughts and captions for your bio, social status, self-talk, motto, mantra, signs, posters, wallpapers, backgrounds, tattoos, SMS, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.

I close my eyes in order to see. Paul Gauguin

Forever is composed of nows. Emily Dickinson

Wake up and live. Bob Marley

Let the breath lead the way. Sharon Salzberg

I am realistic I expect miracles. Wayne Dyer

Do anything, but let it produce joy. Walt Whitman

The Holy Land is everywhere. Black Elk (Native American)

Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be guided by spirit and not driven by ego. Unknown

There is nothing more important than this moment. Unknown (Submitted by the Wisdom Quotes Community)

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. Francis of Assisi

For it is in giving that we receive. Francis of Assisi

Everything in the world was my Guru. Ramana Maharshi

Quiet the mind and the soul will speak. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati

Spiritual progress is like a detoxification. Marianne Williamson

Reach for a thought that feels better. Abraham Hicks

Your thoughts become things. Rhonda Byrne

Your thoughts are the primary cause of everything. Rhonda Byrne

Be here, now! Ram Dass

When you make a choice, you change the future. Deepak Chopra

Dont try to steer the river. Deepak Chopra

God finds himself by creating. Rabindranath Tagore

More short quotes

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You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible. Deepak Chopra

When a man is willing and eager, the Gods join in. Aeschylus

Arise, awake, stop not till the goal is reached. Swami Vivekananda

And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Anais Nin

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. W.B. Yeats

Be tolerant of those who are lost on their path. Ignorance, conceit, anger, jealousy and greed stem from a lost soul. Pray that they will find guidance. Elder Wisdom

Be not afraid of anything. You will do marvelous work. It is fearlessness that brings Heaven even in a moment. Swami Vivekananda

I have seen that in any great undertaking it is not enough for a man to depend simply upon himself. Shooter Teton Sioux (Native American)

One of the most spiritual things you can do is embrace your humanity. Connect with those around you today. Say, I love you, Im sorry, I appreciate you, Im proud of youwhatever youre feeling. Send random texts, write a cute note, embrace your truth and share itcause a smile today for someone elseand give plenty of hugs. Steve Maraboli

You and your purpose in life are the same thing. Your purpose is to be you. George Alexiou

I am convinced that the jealous, the angry, the bitter and the egotistical are the first to race to the top of mountains. A confident person enjoys the journey, the people they meet along the way and sees life not as a competition. They reach the summit last because they know God isnt at the top waiting for them. He is down below helping his followers to understand that the view is glorious where ever you stand. Shannon L. Alder

You must not let your life run in the ordinary way; do something that nobody else has done, something that will dazzle the world. Show that Gods creative principle works in you. Paramahansa Yogananda

Bring into play the almighty power within you, so that on the stage of life you can fulfill your high destined role. Paramahansa Yogananda

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are. Carl Jung

If your intention is powerful, your action will be powerful. If your action is powerful, your results will be powerful. Unknown

The real spiritual progress of the aspirant is measured by the extent to which he achieves inner tranquility. Swami Sivananda

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350 Best Spiritual Quotes That Will Enrich Your Life

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I am lying on a mat, looking up at the bright blue of the skylight above me. I exhale purposefully, then let my lungs reinflate of their own accord. I am trying hard to concentrate on this slightly counterintuitive way of breathing, but the voices in my head are distracting me. They are telling me about business regulation, specifically about the inhibitory effect of hairdresser licensing in Utah.

I do not, as a rule, make New Year resolutions. As an anxious person, the 12 months that lie ahead of New Years Eve do not fill me with excitement or anticipation. I just wonder what else could go wrong. I am as susceptible as the next person to notions of promise, to the idea that, with the right effort, I could become fitter, smarter, happier, better. But each new December, as I coast towards the end of the year on squeaky wheels, I find myself feeling the same way: older, wiser, worse.

Its the time and effort involved that puts me off most kinds of self-improvement. Many years ago, I signed up for an online life-coaching course, and when I complained about the difficulty of one of the exercises Id been sent I was meant to make a list of my qualities, keeping to the strict format I am (quality) the instructor immediately replied by email, saying, Yes, this is REAL WORK, isnt it? I thought: I already have a job, thanks.

I am drawn to the quick fix. Could it be possible to cram a years self-improvement into a few minutes of effort a day?

In recent years, however, a new school of selfimprovement has sprung up, one that seems to recognise that, frankly, most of us are too busy to be better. Books with titles such as The 10-Minute Millionaire, The 5-Minute Healer, 10 Minutes To Better Health and 10 Minutes A Day To A Better Marriage represent, if not a global revolution in self-improvement, at least a reliable publishing trend.

I am ineluctably drawn to the quick fix. Could it be possible to cram a years self-improvement into a few minutes of effort a day, to get the whole business out of the way before the end of January? It cant do any harm to try, can it?

***

My first self-improvement guide is a new book called 15 Minutes To Happiness by Richard Nicholls. My first thought is that 15 minutes sounds a lot, especially when somebody else is promising to make me a millionaire in 10, but Nicholls book is full of quick exercises interspersed with longer explanations of why and how they work. Some of the exercises are designed to fix problems I dont think I have, so Im pretty sure I can skip ahead.

Nicholls posits a model for happiness that I find reassuring. He stresses the value of negative thinking. He says that actively seeking happiness can often end up making people feel less happy. On page 49 he writes: Be open to the possibility that you bought this book and you dont actually need it. This, I think, is my kind of self-help.

Here and there Nicholls inserts a quick happiness boosting idea, designed to give you an injection of contentment as and when you need it. In the chapter on gratitude, for example, he suggests you take a moment or two to send a text message to someone thanking them for being a part of your life. I embarked on a preliminary challenge: trying to find someone anyone in my list of contacts I could send a text like that, without having to send an immediate follow-up apology text: Sorry about that I was only following orders.

Heres another: Put your town name into JustGiving.com and see who is raising money for a good cause in your local area. Even if you dont donate anything to anyone, spending time looking at the good thats going on in your town will dilute any doom and gloom youve picked up from elsewhere.

I tried this one it was incredibly easy, and it did make me feel slightly happier. It ended up costing me 30 (donated anonymously, because thats the kind of person I am now), but the feeling lasted for almost four hours.

A dozen years ago, I had an hour-long session with a yoga instructor, and when I asked what sort of benefits I could expect, he promised that yoga would bring me joy. I hadnt even considered this possibility, but I liked the sound of it. I will try this yoga, I thought. And when I get my joy, everyone else can go to hell.

Then I went to one of his classes in a London studio, full of supple people in leggings, and found the whole experience nerve-racking and humiliating. It wasnt relaxing at all. It was like auditioning for Cats.

So Im done doing yoga in front of people, but a book called The 10 Minute Yoga Solution raises the possibility that I could get my joy in the privacy of my home, quietly and quickly. The author, Ira Trivedi, makes a lot of bold claims: she says that 10 minutes of yoga a day will not just make me calmer and more physically fit, it will improve my eyesight, control unhealthy eating habits and cure a multitude of hair problems (its all about blood flow to the scalp). She also mentions joy, if only in passing.

The book itself has very few words in it. It is simply a collection of illustrated poses or asanas with instructions, grouped into workouts tailored to specific requirements. Again, I find myself in a position to skip bits: yoga for women, for kids, for weight loss, for fasting, for binge-eating. I like the sound of yoga for lazy people and yoga for hangovers, but for the moment I am concentrating on yoga for beginners: eight poses, 10 minutes in all.

I wasnt sure what to expect from a basic, self-administered yoga programme, but I hadnt expected it to hurt quite so much. Sitting cross-legged hurts. The seated spinal twist hurts. Even the shavasana, the so-called corpse pose lying flat on your back, arms and legs spread, palms up, toes pointing out hurts. I am, I discover, a collection of small aches. As instructed, I contract the muscles in my feet and then relax them. My toes refuse to uncurl. Ten minutes begins to seem like an age.

***

There are, of course, a lot of self-improvement podcasts available I found one titled simply You Suck: Be Better. Another, created by a former lawyer, suggested that I think of my time as if it were broken down into billable hours, so I learn to prize it more. Id rather use my headphone time to acquire some actual information. Ive got the happy book and the yoga routine already. What I really require is a little knowledge.

There is a solution: it turns out you can just speed a podcast up. At first I thought: who would do this?

Ive always resisted the idea of learning more about economics. It was a passive resistance I just wasnt that interested in the subject but maybe, armed with the right podcast and a decent set of headphones, I could enter into a new phase of passive learning. By common consent, NPRs Planet Money is one of the best economics podcasts going. I havent listened to many well, any but Planet Money is entertaining, informative and aimed squarely at the layman. Its not a primer, but more of a fun way to engage with what for many remains an off-putting subject. I encounter no mathematics.

But theres a lot of it: two years worth, with a new episode posted every couple of days. Where to begin? Whats more, the average length of each instalment is close to 20 minutes, which, in todays self-improvement environment, is positively leisurely. There is a solution: it turns out you can just speed a podcast up. At first I thought: who would do this? But lots of people do it. My own children, it transpires, routinely listen to sped-up recordings of their university lectures in order to save time. I had to download a new app to acquire the facility, but I can now listen to Planet Money at three times the original speed. Actually, I cant its pretty well unintelligible at that clip but I soon find that if I spend a few minutes trying to keep up with the podcast at double speed, it then sounds perfectly normal at a more relaxed one-and-a-half times. Within a few days, Ive worked my way up to 1.8x. Over the course of a week, I grow increasingly impatient with the pace of actual human conversation. Spit it out, I want to say.

My impersonation of a corpse is so convincing that I worry about my wife walking in and finding me

A week in, I rise (10 minutes) early and run through my yoga positions, beginning with some breathing: inhale the future, exhale the past, as the book says. I move on to the spinal twist and the shoulder stand. The corpse pose no longer hurts; in fact, my impersonation of a corpse is so convincing that I worry about my wife walking in and finding me. He died doing what he loved, she would think. Express yoga.

I listen to a podcast about robots taking over our jobs on my way to and from the shops; about 1.6x makes it the right length for the journey. Back at home, I sit down to settle on my next 15-minute happiness task. Deciding often takes longer than 15 minutes, because I reject a few out of hand. Going through Nicholls book, I come across the following passage: If were grateful for life then we cant be fearful, which means that any anxiety we experience gets processed as excitement instead. If were grateful, then we act out of a sense that we have enough rather than out of a sense of scarcity or envy.

He goes on to suggest spending 15 minutes writing about some positive things that have happened to you. I am extraordinarily resistant to this idea. I only like writing about bad things that have happened to me, in part because I know I will never run out. At first, I cant even think of any recent positive experiences, but after a few minutes, I recall a long and mostly tedious drive to Exeter the previous week.

Time is becoming an issue. It occurs to me that I might double up on some of this improvement

I was thinking about nothing but my destination when I came upon Stonehenge at sunset, the stones glistening in the low, pink light. At that moment, traffic slowed to a crawl, enabling me to get a long look. This is free, I thought. A wondrous thing to marvel at, and I havent driven an inch out of my way. After 10 minutes, the traffic cleared and I was off again, feeling strangely moved. And then I forgot all about it.

The exercise takes 20 minutes from start to finish too long. I recall that email from the life coach This is REAL WORK, isnt it? I begin to think of my time in terms of billable hours.

***

Time is becoming an issue. Ten minutes of yoga is one thing, but when you add in a happiness exercise and the 12 minutes it takes me to listen to a 20-minute podcast, youre talking about nearly a whole hour. It occurs to me that I might double up on some of this improvement.

There is a certain amount of natural overlap. Both 15 Minutes To Happiness and The 10 Minute Yoga Solution stress the importance of breathing, and the exercises are not dissimilar. But focus is the key to both, and the focal points are different. Its harder to mix mindfulness and stillness than it sounds. Add in a podcast explaining what GDP is, and the whole thing becomes an exercise in frustration. I am reminded, to my eternal disappointment, that there are no quick fixes.

After a fortnight of this, I would have to say the improvements have been marginal: some extra flexibility here, a little more gratitude there, a lot more to say when the subject of GDP next comes up at a dinner party. The Nicholls book is worth a read even if you do none of the exercises, if only to come away with the knowledge that the successful pursuit of happiness mainly involves not trying too hard. Its not unrealistic to think that in stopping trying to be happy, you can find that youre happy enough already, he writes. Paradoxically, it could be that the only reason for you being unhappy is your relentless attempt at trying not be.

And Ive learned the lesson I was always going to learn, only faster: stop making New Year resolutions. Again.

Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazines letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).

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Most of us are too busy to be better: the lazy person's ...

Editors note: As Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, weare publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For teaching andsharing purposes, readers are advised to supplement these historic articles with more up-to-date ones suggested in the Related Articles and Further Reading below.

By G.J. Keane

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardins most obvious claim to fame was his overwhelming acceptance of evolution, and an unquestionable passion to try to fit Christianity into it.

He was born in Auvergne, France, in 1881 and entered the Catholic Society of Jesus at 18. He spent the next three years teaching physics and chemistry at Cairo, followed by four years theological training at Hastings, England. He developed a seemingly unquenchable thirst for palaeontology and spent much of his adult life in China searching for mans evolutionary ancestors. He was involved in the excavation of the so-called Peking Man in 1929. Throughout his life he found he was unable to totally harmonize traditional Catholicism with the scientific framework of evolution, and incapable of openly flouting the orders of his superiors.

In the end he became Chardin the mystic, and his thoughts were published only after his death.

But Teilhard was also involved in the Piltdown hoax. This skull, which was later discovered by workers at the British Museum to have been made of parts of a human skull and the jaw of an orang-utan, had been chemically stained to indicate great age, and the teeth filed to resemble human teeth. A probing yet charitable analysis of Teilhards probable role in the hoax has been published by prominent evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould.1

Teilhards unquestioning acceptance of evolution, together with his passion for mysticism, led him to propose ideas which were clearly incompatible with the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church. He had entered the priesthood in 1899, only 30 years after the First Vatican Council (1870), which stated:

After having studied 10 years for the priesthood, Teilhard would have been familiar with the 1870 Catholic position against evolution. Despite this he was convinced evolution was true.

Further, he believed strongly that a church which accepted the Genesis account of Creation was wedded to an outmoded and unscientific outlook. In his framework, such a Church was out of touch with reality and would lag behind the rest of the world as it plunged into the 20th century. He felt it was vital for the church to adapt its theology to harmonise with modern evolutionary theory.3

Such a harmony became his lifes mission and the end product was his formulation of a mystical evolutionary theology.

The church, until the time of Charles Darwin, had promoted an objective creation-based view of reality. In other words, the universe is comprised of real, distinct things. Chardin sought to change this! He proposed that the universe did not consist of real things, since everything was evolving and converging towards a future goal called Omega. The only thing that must give it unity, therefore, is the spiritual or mystical realm. God must be the only unifying force. According to Teilhard, God somehow inserted himself into the evolutionary process, and Christ the force drawing everything towards the goal of Omega.

He did not accept the God of Genesis who was clearly portrayed as the Creator of all things.

De Chardin wrote:

His ideas have been the centre of much controversy within and without the Catholic Church. His most definitive work,The Phenomenon of Man (published by others after his death), contains Chardins so-called scientific treatise. It outlines all of his standard evolutionary facts and simply glosses over difficult questions.

The origin of the Earth he stated was purely accidental:

The origin of the first cell provided no problem to de Chardin. He wrote:

On the reproduction of cells, he claims that:

For the evolution of mans consciousness he proposed the concept of noogenesis. He stated:

For Teilhard, evolution is so central to truth that the word creation does not even rate inclusion in his books index. He wrote:

And where does original sin fit into Teilhards views? There is no mention of Adam, Eve, Satan or the term original sin in his book. And without original sin, there is no need of the Saviour Christ, and without a need of a Saviour, there can be no Christian Church.

De Chardin has become a cult figure to many after his death, particularly to academic evolutionists among Catholics and Anglicans. Many still believe his ideas were ahead of his time, and that his thinking will inevitably be accepted by the official teaching bodies of the Catholic Church. The reality is however that his confused speculation has only contributed to further obscuring the notion that God has revealed objective truth to man through the Holy Scriptures. Mysticism has always resulted in common sense being replaced by nonsense.

Teilhards speculative theories were not scientific, but metaphysical! They depended for plausibility upon evolution being historically true. As the credibility of evolution theory diminishes, his writings reduce to highly imaginative anti-Christian fantasy. During his lifetime Chardin was refused permission to publish his theories, and in fairness to him it must be stated that he remained obedient to his superiors.

As one Catholic theologian has pointed out: Teilhards fundamental error was to seek for something more elementary than being as the basis of his metaphysics. He thought he had found it in the concept of unification, but he was mistaken Created being is composite and oriented towards an end distinct from itself, not in so far as it is being, but in so far as it is created.12

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Teilhard De Chardin - creation.com

Producer Mary Frost; co-producer Jesuit Fr. Eddie Siebert, president of Loyola Productions in Los Angeles; and cinematographer Erik Lohr, filming for the Teilhard project in China (Courtesy of Frank Frost Productions)

It wasn't until the early 1960s, when he was in studies to become a Jesuit, that Frank Frost saw his first movie. It was 1948's "Johnny Belinda." He's never forgotten it.

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"I was totally bowled over," he said. For Frost, the 10th of 13 children growing up in 1950s South Dakota and Indiana without even a television, the experience was a revelation. "I was planning on majoring in English literature, and this was to me the new literature."

It would be the start of his career as a filmmaker. Now 78, Frost and his wife, Mary, 72 (he left the Jesuits after a decade, before ordination), are working on the project of a lifetime: a documentary about the French Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

"There was a warning from the Vatican in 1962 that seminaries shouldn't let students read Teilhard," recalled Frank with a chuckle. "So of course, we did." But it would be several decades before Frank really got to know the legendary priest, who died in 1955, by traveling the world in his footsteps.

"The Teilhard de Chardin Project" has taken the Frosts from France to England to China where Teilhard was essentially exiled in the 1920s for his "dangerous thinking" on science and evolution beginning with research in 2012-13 and filming in 2016. They interviewed the surviving members of Teilhard's family and visited the chateau in which he grew up. The family foundation has given the film its blessing.

In partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting, it's set to air in 2020 on PBS.

"We often say it's several stories," said Frank, a stack of Teilhard's books, with Frank's notes from his novitiate days, nearby in their home in McLean, Virginia, where their studio is located. "Clerical Indiana Jones. 20th-century Galileo. And it's a love story."

A chance comment a decade ago about a bust of Teilhard planted the seed for the project in Frank's and Mary's heads.

"Someone said a film on religion and science would be interesting, so we very tentatively started researching," Frank said. "We tried a lot of projects that never got finished because we couldn't raise the funds. But this is close enough to our hearts that we decided to stick with it."

Director Frank Frost; Fr. Olivier Teilhard de Chardin, great nephew of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; and co-producer Jesuit Fr. Eddie Siebert, on location in 2016 in the Auvergne region of France where Teilhard was born and raised (Courtesy of Frank Frost Productions)

A fermentable time

Movies have been in Frank's heart since the novitiate. While still in formation, he met Jesuit Fr. Patrick J. Sullivan, director of the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (before 1965 called the National Legion of Decency). Sullivan's influence was significant, and Frank began reviewing movies for him.

Despite Frank's desire to study film, the Jesuits sent him to get a doctorate in English but ultimately gave him the go-ahead to enroll at the University of Southern California, where he earned a doctorate in film communications.

In 1970, after he'd left the society, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops hired Frank to make films documenting poverty in the United States for their newly formed Campaign for Human Development. He worked there for eight years before starting his own company; his earliest projects included films on the jazz musician Dave Brubeck, Pope Paul VI, and Pope John Paul II's 1979 visit to the United States.

In 1935, Teilhard joined Helmut de Terra on an expedition in the Punjab region of India from October through December to map stratigraphy. This picture is identified by the Teilhard Foundation in Paris as being from that expedition.

Business was good, good enough that Frank needed help staying organized. Enter Mary Link (now Frost), six years younger and from a small Catholic family in Ohio. While Frank was studying to be a priest, she was studying English and journalism at the University of Toledo with no clear idea of what to do next.

"I got out of college in a very fermentable time," Mary said with a sly smile. She wandered about Europe, came back to the U.S. and entered a doctoral program that she quickly realized was not for her she didn't want to teach. She ended up in a reporting job with legendary Washington, D.C., newspaper woman Esther Van Wagoner Tufty, known as "The Duchess."

Mary spent a few years working for Tufty, reporting on Congress, then took a position at Congressional Quarterly, where she covered health care and justice. "I was working as a researcher the day Nixon resigned," she said, recalling that she fielded several frantic phone calls from Walter Cronkite's research assistants while he was on the air, breaking the news. "They asked me what year Nixon's mother died!"

She married and moved to Florida to live on a sailboat for a few years but returned to D.C. after the marriage ended.

"I was really kind of flailing," she said, when a friend mentioned that a local filmmaker was in need of an assistant. Was she interested? "She told Frank I'd work for free," Mary said. Frank only intended to hire her for a month, at minimum wage, so she'd have a credit to put on her rsum.

"I was rather rude to Mary, I'm sorry to say," he recalled ruefully. But then, suddenly, business was booming. His eye for filmmaking and her talent for logistics whether finding accommodations for the crew in Africa or tide tables in England were a match. "In a very short time, she made herself indispensable."

And that's been the case ever since.

Co-producer Jesuit Fr. Eddie Siebert, cinematographer Erik Lohr, Producer Mary Frost and associate producer for China, Cindy Zeng pose near a monument to the discovery of "Peking Man" at Zhoukoudian in China, where Teilhard de Chardin was part of the discovery team in 1929. (Courtesy of Frank Frost Productions)

A life together

The couple have a daughter, Claire, who lives with her husband, Zack*, and two young sons in Richmond, Virginia. They met during college, at Duke.

"The boys are a delight, and we have really enjoyed being grandparents," said Mary. "And they have turned Frank into a major Duke basketball fan, though he is always loyal to Georgetown, too!"

They also have more than 200 nieces and nephews over three generations on Frank's side of the family.

Even their spare time, which they don't have much of while working on the Teilhard Project, is taken up with movies. Frank has long been a member of SIGNIS, the international Catholic media organization affiliated with the Vatican, and has served on SIGNIS juries at major festivals in Berlin, Venice and Monte Carlo and for the Prix Italia. He's now a president of SIGNIS North America, for the United States.

Since 2000, Frank and Mary have led a National Film Retreat every summer, either on the East or West coast, with NCR film reviewer and Daughters of St. Paul Sr. Rose Pacatte. The Frosts also created, in 2009, and chair a SIGNIS jury at Filmfest DC, Washington's international film festival.

"We have had a long-standing interest in recognizing quality films," said Mary.

Eight years ago, they started the "Movie Moments of Grace" film club at their parish, Holy Trinity, near Georgetown University's campus. They show five films each season, and attendance hovers between 80 and 100 people. The films are chosen for what the couple call their "human or spiritual value."

"This is not a teaching moment," said Frank of the post-movie small group discussions, which take place over wine and cheese. "It is a discovery moment."

Jesuit Fr. Eddie Siebert films the giant rhinoceros specimen on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France. The fossils were collected by Teilhard de Chardin during his first paleontology expedition in China in 1923. (Courtesy of Frank Frost Productions)

The project of a lifetime

Frank Frost Productions has made more than 30 films, including a 10-part series called "Scandinavia," narrated by Walter Cronkite; "Bernardin," about the life and death of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago; and "Thrse: Living on Love," about Thrse of Lisieux. Now, after nearly 40 years of working together, the couple is close to completing their most ambitious, personal project.

"If we had the money tomorrow, we'd finish in a year," Frank said, but he didn't sound discouraged. "We've never reached an obstacle we couldn't overcome. It's almost miraculous."

Jesuit Fr. Eddie Siebert, president of Loyola Productions in Los Angeles, collaborated with the Frosts on this film and watched the way they work together. He's learned a great deal about his fellow Jesuit Teilhard in the process and admires the couple's energy and "guerrilla" documentary style. He's now a co-producer on the film.

"Filmmaking is hard no matter what. You have to get the right crew, and when you add world travel and you're on a shoestring budget, you really have to use all your wits," he said. "It's remarkable to watch them. I take away this real inspiration about what it is to make films that one is passionate about, and that's pretty exciting, especially as a filmmaker, and as a Jesuit."

The appreciation goes both ways.

"Eddie has brought a Jesuit understanding of Teilhard," said Mary, "along with a much younger outlook."

Siebert, who had never traveled to China before, is anxious for viewers to come to know Teilhard the priest, the scientist, the environmentalist when the movie is complete.

"What Frank and Mary really want to do is make Teilhard accessible to people who have an interest," he said. "You don't have to have a Ph.D. in science to understand that Teilhard the man was fascinating."

[Julie Bourbon is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.]

* A caption in this story has been updated to clarify the identity of a person in the photo, and the name of Frank and Mary's son-in-law has been corrected.

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Project of a lifetime: Couple take on documentary about ...

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote more than 60 plays during his lifetime and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

George Bernard Shaw was born July 26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. In 1876 he moved to London, where he wrote regularly but struggled financially. In 1895, he became a theater critic for the Saturday Review and began writing plays of his own. His play Pygmalion was later made into a film twice, and the screenplay he wrote for the first version of it won an Oscar. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 60 plays and won many other awards, among them the Nobel Prize.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856. The third and youngest child, Shaw's early education took the form of tutoring sessions provided by his clerical uncle.

Early on, Shaw explored the worlds of the arts (music, art, literature) under his mother's guidance and through regular visits to the National Gallery of Ireland. In 1872, Shaw's mother left her husband and took Shaw's two sisters to London, and four years later Shaw followed (his younger sister had died in the meantime), deciding to become a writer. Shaw struggled financially, and his mother essentially supported him while he spent time in the British Museum reading room, working on his first novels.

Unfortunately, despite the time he spent writing them, his novels were dismal failures, widely rejected by publishers. Shaw soon turned his attention to politics and the activities of the British intelligentsia, joining the Fabian Society in 1884. The Fabian Society was a socialist group whose goal was nothing short of the transformation of England through a more vibrant political and intellectual base, and Shaw became heavily involved, even editing a famous tract the group published (Fabian Essays in Socialism, 1889).

The year after he joined the Fabian Society, Shaw landed some writing work in the form of book reviews and art, music and theater criticism, and in 1895 he was brought aboard the Saturday Review as its theater critic. It was at this point that Shaw began writing plays of his own.

Shaw's first plays were published in volumes titled "Plays Unpleasant" (containing Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren's Profession) and "Plays Pleasant" (which had Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny and You Never Can Tell). The plays were filled with what would become Shaw's signature wit, accompanied by healthy doses of social criticism, which stemmed from his Fabian Society leanings. These plays would not go on to be his best remembered, or those for which he had high regard, but they laid the groundwork for the oversized career to come.

Toward the end of the 19th century, beginning with Caesar and Cleopatra (written in 1898), Shaw's writing came into its own, the product of a mature writer hitting on all cylinders. In 1903, Shaw wrote Man and Superman, whose third act, "Don Juan in Hell," achieved a status larger than the play itself and is often staged as a separate play entirely. While Shaw would write plays for the next 50 years, the plays written in the 20 years after Man and Superman would become foundational plays in his oeuvre. Works such as Major Barbara (1905), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), Pygmalion (1912),Androcles and the Lion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923) all firmly established Shaw as a leading dramatist of his time. In 1925, Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Pygmalion, one of Shaw's most famous plays, was adapted to the big screen in 1938, earning Shaw an Academy Award for writing the screenplay.Pygmalion went on to further fame when it was adapted into a musical and became a hit, first on the Broadway stage (1956) with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, and later on the screen (1964) with Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.

Shaw died in 1950 at age 94 while working on yet another play.

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George Bernard Shaw - Plays, Works & Education - Biography

It's likely our species survived because of our knack for detecting danger. But our worry-filled thoughts can present dangers of their own: Thinking negatively can drag down our moods, our actions and even our health.

Experts say it's worthwhileand possibleto learn how to think more positively.

Consider what researchers found about the benefits of staying positive:

Trying to be optimistic doesn't mean ignoring the uglier sides of life. It just means focusing on the positive as much as possible-and it gets easier with practice.

If you want to pump up your optimism, you might:

Noticing and appreciating the positives in our lives offers a great mood boost.

To increase your gratefulness, you can:

If you want to feel positive, it pays to decrease the downers in your life. With practice, you can resist worrisome thoughts and perhaps even transform your internal critic into more of a cheering squad.

Reviewed by Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, a University of California, Riverside professor and author ofThe How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want(Penguin Press).

These proven tools can help you feel stronger and more hopeful. Check out each page for specific, easy-to-follow tips.

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Home Positive Emotions What is Positive Mindset and 89 Ways to Achieve a Positive Mental Attitude

Last Updated on August 30, 2018

It is probably not a surprise to you that positivity is, inherently, at the center of positive psychology.

Positivity doesnt always refer to simply smiling and looking cheerful, howeverpositivity is more about ones overall perspective on life and their tendency to focus on all that is good in life.

In this piece, well cover the basics of positivity within positive psychology, identify some of the many benefits of approaching life from a positive point of view, and explore some tips and techniques for cultivating a positive mindset.

This piece is a long one, so settle in and get comfortable. Ready to get started? Then read on!

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You probably have an idea of what a positive mindset or positive attitude is already, but its always helpful to start with a definition.

This definition from Remez Sasson (n.d.) is a good general description:

Positive thinking is a mental and emotional attitude that focuses on the bright side of life and expects positive results.

Another, more comprehensive definition comes from Kendra Cherry at Very Well Mind (2017B):

[P]ositive thinking actually means approaching lifes challenges with a positive outlook. It does not necessarily mean avoiding or ignoring the bad things; instead, it involves making the most of the potentially bad situations, trying to see the best in other people, and viewing yourself and your abilities in a positive light.

We can extrapolate from these definitions and come up with a good description of positive mindset as the tendency to focus on the bright side, expect positive results, and approach challenges with a positive outlook. Having a positive mindset means making positive thinking a habit, continually searching for the silver lining and making the best out of any situation you find yourself in.

So, now we know what a positive mindset is, we can dive into the next important question: What does it look like?

There are many traits and characteristics associated with a positive mindset, including:

Not only are these characteristics of a positive mindset, they may also work in the other directionactively adopting optimism, acceptance, resilience, gratitude, mindfulness, and integrity in your life will help you develop and maintain a positive mindset.

If you found the list above still too vague, there are many more specific examples of a positive attitude in action.

For example, positive attitudes can include:

Now we know a little bit more about what a positive mindset looks like, we can turn to one of the biggest questions of all: Whats the deal with having a positive attitude?

What is it about having a positive mindset that is so important, so impactful, so life-changing?

Well, the traits and characteristics listed above give us a hint; if you comb through the literature, youll see a plethora of benefits linked to optimism, resilience, and mindfulness. Youll see that awareness and integrity are linked to better quality of life, and acceptance and gratitude can take you from the okay life to the good life.

Developing a truly positive mindset and gaining these benefits is a function of the thoughts you cultivate.

Dont worrythis piece isnt about the kind of positive thinking that is all positive, all the time. We dont claim that just thinking happy thoughts will bring you all the success you desire in life, and we certainly dont believe that optimism is warranted in every situation, every minute of the day.

Developing the right thoughts is not about being constantly happy or cheerful, and its not about ignoring anything negative or unpleasant in your life. Its about incorporating both the positive and negative into your perspective and choosing to still be generally optimistic.

Its about acknowledging that you will not always be happy and learning to accept bad moods and difficult emotions when they come.

Above all, its about increasing your control over your own attitude in the face of whatever comes your way. You cannot control your mood, and you cannot always control the thoughts that pop into your head, but you can choose how you handle them.

When you choose to give in to the negativity, pessimism, and doom-and-gloom view of the world, you are not only submitting to a loss of control and potentially wallowing in unhappinessyou are missing out on an important opportunity for growth and development.

According to positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, negative thinking, and negative emotions have their place: they allow you to sharpen your focus on dangers, threats, and vulnerabilities. This is vital for survival, although perhaps not as much as it was for our ancestors. On the other hand, positive thinking and positive emotions broaden and build our resources and skills, and open us up to possibilities (Fredrickson, 2004).

Building a positive framework for your thoughts is not about being bubbly and annoyingly cheerful, but making an investment in yourself and your future. Its okay to feel down or think pessimistically sometimes, but choosing to respond with optimism, resilience, and gratitude will benefit you far more in the long run.

Aside from enhancing your skills and personal resources, there are many other benefits of cultivating a positive mindset, including better overall health, better ability to cope with stress, and greater well-being (Cherry, 2017A). According to the experts at the Mayo Clinic, positive thinking can increase your lifespan, reduce rates of depression and levels of distress, give you greater resistance to the common cold, improve your overall psychological and physical well-being, improve your cardiovascular health and protect you from cardiovascular disease, and help you build coping skills to keep you afloat during challenging times (2017).

Youve probably heard of all these generic benefits before, so well get more specific and explore the benefits of a positive mindset in several different contexts:

No construct better captures the essence of a positive attitude in the workplace quite like psychological capital (or PsyCap for short). This multicomponent construct is made up of four psychological resources:

PsyCap was first conceptualized as positive psychological capital by renowned management and leadership researchers Luthans and Youssef in 2004. The concept quickly took off among positive organizational psychologists, and by 2011 there were already hundreds of citations of PsyCap in the literature.

The first meta-analysis of all the research on PsyCap was conducted in 2011, and it outlined some of the many benefits of PsyCap in the workplace:

It seems pretty straightforward that positive attitudes like optimism and resilience lead to positive outcomes for the organization and for the employees!

Another study by a few of the giants in the field of positive psychology (Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener, 2005) investigated the relationship between happiness and benefits to employees. They showed that positive attitudes in the workplace also benefit the employee in addition to the organization:

So, a positive attitude can have great benefits for the organization as a whole and for all of its employees. It turns out that positive attitude can also result in benefits for leaders and their followers (as well as spreading positivity throughout the organization).

As important as a positive mindset is for the rank-and-file, its easy to see why it is vital for those in a position of leadership.

Researchers Hannah, Woolfolk, and Lord (2009) outlined a framework for positive leadership that rests on the idea that leaders with a positive self-concept (a positive idea of who they are and a habit of thinking positively about themselves) are more able to bring the right stuff to their leadership role. In their theory, a leader with a positive mindset is not only more likely to be actively engaged and to perform at a high level, he or she is also more able to influence followers toward a more positive mindset through role modeling and normative influence.

A study completed around the same time provides support for the relationship between leader and follower positivity; trust in management influenced positive PsyCap, which had a big impact on performance for leaders and followers (Clapp-Smith, Vogegesang, & Avey, 2008). Further, trust in management was linked to positive leadership and performance. While trust in management isnt necessarily indicative of a positive mindset in both leader and follower, it is certainly a likely outcome of a generally positive attitude in the workplace.

Forbes writer Victor Lipman (2017) puts findings like these in simpler terms:

Its always easier to follow someone with a positive outlook.

In other words, positive attitudes in a leader will draw followers and encourage motivation and engagement in subordinates. Lipman also notes that having a positive outlook and being resilient is vital in leadership positions because there is a lot of stress involved in managing and leading others. Leaders must always be on and spend much of their time performing as a strong, confident leader and perhaps even a public face. This role is a tiring one, and being optimistic and resilient will help leaders stay sane and healthy in challenging contexts.

Having a positive attitude is also a boon for those educating, interacting with, and caring for a disabled student, loved one, or patient.

A positive attitude toward disability facilitates disabled students education and helps them assimilate into postsecondary education (Rao, 2004). This makes it even more troubling to learn that, according to a 2012 study on UK primary schools, only 38% of them had a Disability Equality Scheme in place and only 30% had included a plan to promote positive attitudes towards disabled people (Beckett & Buckner). Further, 76% of schools reported that their staff had not received any training in the promotion of positive attitudes towards students with disabilities.

With so many resources available for promoting positive attitudes toward disability, there is ample opportunity to rectify this lack; for example, research by The Childrens Society in the UK identified several ways to promote positivity:

A 2009 study also established that formal instruction in disability awareness combined with hands-on fieldwork experiences with people who have a disability can have a significant impact on the positive attitudes toward those with disability (Campbell, Gilmore, & Cuskelly). The research found that teachers-in-training who participated in a one-semester course involving direct work with students who had Down syndrome greatly improved their knowledge of the syndrome as well as their attitudes toward those with Down syndrome.

All of these findings show that having a positive attitude towards those with a disability is not only the right thing to work toward, but it also has a significant positive influence on both those with disability and those around them. Unsurprisingly, its also important for nurses and other health professionals to cultivate a positive attitude towards their patients with a disabilitysomething that nurses sometimes struggle with (Tervo & Palmer, 2004).

On the subject of nursing and healthcare, this is another context where having a positive mindset (towards oneself and ones patientsdisabled or otherwise) can have a positive impact.

In fact, having a positive attitude is so important for nursing, expert Jean Watson describes nursing as the Caring Science (2009). Indeed, positivity and caring are ingrained in the field; just take a look at the five core nursing values:

These five values lay the foundation for a caring, positive mindset that is the hallmark of good nursing practice. Nurses who embrace these core values and adopt a positive mindset toward themselves, their work, and their patients can help them find the meaning and fulfillment that likely prompted them to enter the field in the first place.

Having a positive mindset in health care not only acts as a facilitator of meaning and purpose in the lives of healthcare professionals, it also:

Luckily, there are evidence-backed ways for nurses to implement a more positive outlook, including:

Speaking of the importance of positivity in health care, the benefits can extend to the patients as well.

Youve probably heard the common phrases and encouragements used when discussing someones cancer diagnosis.

A cancer patient will likely be told at least a few times that You have to stay positive! and You can fight this if you maintain a positive attitude.

This idea that being positive will help cancer patients to fight the disease is a common one, although the literature is a bit iffy on whether this phenomenon is real (Coyne & Tennen, 2010; OBaugh, Wilkes, Luke, & George, 2003).

Although it is unclear whether simply cultivating a positive mindset will help a patient beat cancer, theres no doubt that getting support, focusing on a healthy mental state, and maintaining a positive attitude will help patients reduce their tension, anxiety, fatigue, and depression, and improve their overall quality of life (Spiegel et al., 2007).

Cancer Treatment Centers of America expert Katherine Puckett agrees that positivity can be helpful for patients being treated for cancer, but clarifies that other emotions are perfectly acceptable as well.

So often I have heard a loved one say to a cancer patient who is crying, Stop crying. You know you have to be positive However, when we make space for people to express all of their feelings, rather than bottling them up inside, it is then easier for them to be optimistic. It is okay to allow tears to flowthese can be a healthy release. (Katherine Puckett, as reported in Fischer, 2016).

This indicates that the most important factor regarding positivity in cancer recovery is that it is authentic. False smiles and superficial cheerfulness will likely do nothing for the cancer patient, but working on cultivating an authentically positive mindset and focusing on the activities and techniques that build well-being can have a significant impact on a cancer patients quality of life andpossiblytheir chances of beating cancer.

Do a quick Google search on how to cultivate a more positive mindset, and youll see that there are tons of suggestions out there! Weve gathered some of the most popular and most evidence-backed methods here, but dont hesitate to search for more if you need them.

Larry Alton from Success.com lists 7 practical tips to help you get more positive:

Successful author, speaker, and coach Brian Tracy (n.d.) echoes some of these tips and adds a couple more:

For a more specific list of habits and actions you can take to develop a more positive mindset, try these 10 suggestions from Megan Wycklendt (2014) of Fulfillment Daily:

Finally, these 11 techniques from Dr. Tchiki Davis (2018) can also help you adopt a more positive attitude:

To pass along the benefits of developing a positive mindset to students, you can encourage them to try the techniques listed above. However, there are some methods for improving students attitude towards learning and school that may be even more effective.

Elliot Seif from the ASCDs Edge website outlines 13 ways you can help students cultivate this mindset:

However, these techniques are not always within a teachers (or parents) realm of control. If you these techniques are too overwhelming or the scope is out of your control, try these 7 strategies that you will likely have the power to implement:

For more tips and suggestions from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, check out their excellent resource on instilling positive attitudes and perceptions about learning here.

If youre interested in fun, engaging, and hands-on ways to improve your positivity and enhance your positive mindset, youve come to the right place! There are many activities and games you can use to boost your positive thinking. Some of the most popular ones are listed here, but feel free to search for more if none of them align with your intereststhere are a lot to choose from out there!

Zdravko Lukovski from the Enlightenment Portal website has 10 exercises and activities that you can implement in your own life or encourage your clients to try in order to think more positively:

This list from Thought Catalogs Kathy Mitchell (2017) has some of the same ideas as Lukovski, but she adds a few more activities as well:

If youre more interested in games you can play to boost positive thinking, try these suggested games from Mary Osborne (2017) at Live Strong.

Recognizing Positive Behavior

Gather your team (or family, friends, etc.) and review a list of a generic individuals positive behaviors (like giving credit to others, smiling, saying thank you, and listening nonjudgmentally).

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What is Positive Mindset and 89 Ways to Achieve a Positive ...

Ojochogwu Abdul

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Part 5:Belief in Progress vs. Rational Uncertainty

The Enlightenment, with its confident efforts to fashion a science of man, was archetypal of the belief and quest that humankind will eventually achieve lasting peace and happiness. In what some interpret as a reformulation of Christianitys teleological salvation history in which the People of God will be redeemed at the end of days and with the Kingdom of Heaven established on Earth, most Enlightenment thinkers believed in the inevitability of human political and technological progress, secularizing the Christian conception of history and eschatology into a conviction that humanity would, using a system of thought built on reason and science, be able to continually improve itself. As portrayed by Carl Becker in his 1933 book The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, the philosophies demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials. Whether this Enlightenment humanist view of progress amounted merely to a recapitulation of the Christian teleological vision of history, or if Enlightenment beliefs in continual, linear political, intellectual, and material improvement reflected, asJames Hughesposits, a clear difference from the dominant Christian historical narrative in which little would change until the End Times and Christs return, the notion, in any case, of a collective progress towards a definitive end-point was one that remained unsupported by the scientific worldview. The scientific worldview, as Hughes reminds us in the opening paragraph of this essay within his series, does not support historical inevitability, only uncertainty. We may annihilate ourselves or regress, he says, and Even the normative judgment of what progress is, and whether we have made any, is open to empirical skepticism.

Hereby, we are introduced to a conflict that exists, at least since after the Enlightenment, between a view of progressive optimism and that of radical uncertainty. Building on the Enlightenments faith in the inevitability of political and scientific progress, the idea of an end-point, salvation moment for humankind fuelled all the great Enlightenment ideologies that followed, flowing down, as Hughes traces, through Comtes positivism and Marxist theories of historical determinism to neoconservative triumphalism about the end of history in democratic capitalism. Communists envisaged that end-point as a post-capitalist utopia that would finally resolve the class struggle which they conceived as the true engine of history. This vision also contained the 20th-century project to build the Soviet Man, one of extra-human capacities, for as Trotsky had predicted, after the Revolution, the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise, whereas for 20th-century free-market liberals, this End of History had arrived with the final triumph of liberal democracy, with the entire world bound to be swept in its course. Events though, especially so far in the 21st century, appear to prove this view wrong.

This belief moreover, as Hughes would convincingly argue, in the historical inevitability of progress has also always been locked in conflict with the rationalist, scientific observation that humanity could regress or disappear altogether. Enlightenment pessimism, or at least realism, has, over the centuries, proven a stubborn resistance and constraint of Enlightenment optimism. Hughes, citing Henry Vyberg, reminds us that there were, after all, even French Enlightenment thinkers within that same era who rejected the belief in linear historical progress, but proposed historical cycles or even decadence instead. That aside, contemporary commentators like John Gray would even argue that the efforts themselves of the Enlightenment on the quest for progress unfortunately issued in, for example, the racist pseudo-science of Voltaire and Hume, while all endeavours to establish the rule of reason have resulted in bloody fanaticisms, from Jacobinism to Bolshevism, which equaled the worst atrocities attributable to religious believers. Horrendous acts like racism and anti-Semitism, in the verdict of Gray: .are not incidental defects in Enlightenment thinking. They flow from some of the Enlightenments central beliefs.

Even Darwinisms theory of natural selection was, according to Hughes, suborned by the progressive optimistic thinking of the Enlightenment and its successors to the doctrine of inevitable progress, aided in part by Darwins own teleological interpretation. Problem, however, is that from the scientific worldview, there is no support for progress as to be found provided by the theory of natural selection, only that humanity, Hughes plainly states, like all creatures, is on a random walk through a mine field, that human intelligence is only an accident, and that we could easily go extinct as many species have done. Gray, for example, rebukes Darwin, who wrote: As natural selection works solely for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress to perfection. Natural selection, however, does not work solely for the good of each being, a fact Darwin himself elsewhere acknowledged. Nonetheless, it has continually proven rather difficult for people to resist the impulse to identify evolution with progress, with an extended downside to this attitude being equally difficult to resist the temptation to apply evolution in the rationalization of views as dangerous as Social Darwinism and acts as horrible as eugenics.

Many skeptics therefore hold, rationally, that scientific utopias and promises to transform the human condition deserve the deepest suspicion. Reason is but a frail reed, all events of moral and political progress are and will always remain subject to reversal, and civilization could as well just collapse, eventually. Historical events and experiences have therefore caused faith in the inevitability of progress to wax and wane over time. Hughes notes that among several Millenarian movements and New Age beliefs, such faith could still be found that the world is headed for a millennial age, just as it exists in techno-optimist futurism. Nevertheless, he makes us see that since the rise and fall of fascism and communism, and the mounting evidence of the dangers and unintended consequences of technology, there are few groups that still hold fast to an Enlightenment belief in the inevitability of conjoined scientific and political progress. Within the transhumanist community, however, the possession of such faith in progress can still be found as held by many, albeit signifying a camp in the continuation therefore of the Enlightenment-bequeathed conflict as manifested between transhumanist optimism in contradiction with views of future uncertainty.

As with several occasions in the past, humanity is, again, currently being spun yet another End of History narrative: one of a posthuman future. Yuval Harari, for instance, in Homo Deus argues that emerging technologies and new scientific discoveries are undermining the foundations of Enlightenment humanism, although as he proceeds with his presentation he also proves himself unable to avoid one of the defining tropes of Enlightenment humanist thinking, i.e., that deeply entrenched tendency to conceive human history in teleological terms: fundamentally as a matter of collective progress towards a definitive end-point. This time, though, our eras End of History glorious salvation moment is to be ushered in, not by a politico-economic system, but by a nascent techno-elite with a base in Silicon Valley, USA, a cluster steeped in a predominant tech-utopianism which has at its core the idea that the new technologies emerging there can steer humanity towards a definitive break-point in our history, the Singularity. Among believers in this coming Singularity, transhumanists, as it were, having inherited the tension between Enlightenment convictions in the inevitability of progress, and, in Hughes words, Enlightenments scientific, rational realism that human progress or even civilization may fail, now struggle with a renewed contradiction. And here the contrast as Hughes intends to portray gains sharpness, for as such, transhumanists today are torn between their Enlightenment faith in inevitable progress toward posthuman transcension and utopian Singularities on the one hand, and, on the other, their rational awareness of the possibility that each new technology may have as many risks as benefits and that humanity may not have a future.

The risks of new technologies, even if not necessarily one that threatens the survival of humanity as a species with extinction, may yet be of an undesirable impact on the mode and trajectory of our extant civilization. Henry Kissinger, in his 2018 article How the Enlightenment Ends, expressed his perception that technology, which is rooted in Enlightenment thought, is now superseding the very philosophy that is its fundamental principle. The universal values proposed by the Enlightenment philosophes, as Kissinger points out, could be spread worldwide only through modern technology, but at the same time, such technology has ended or accomplished the Enlightenment and is now going its own way, creating the need for a new guiding philosophy. Kissinger argues specifically that AI may spell the end of the Enlightenment itself, and issues grave warnings about the consequences of AI and the end of Enlightenment and human reasoning, this as a consequence of an AI-led technological revolution whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms. By way of analogy to how the printing press allowed the Age of Reason to supplant the Age of Religion, he buttresses his proposal that the modern counterpart of this revolutionary process is the rise of intelligent AI that will supersede human ability and put an end to the Enlightenment. Kissinger further outlines his three areas of concern regarding the trajectory of artificial intelligence research: AI may achieve unintended results; in achieving intended goals, AI may change human thought processes and human values, and AI may reach intended goals, but be unable to explain the rationale for its conclusions. Kissingers thesis, of course, has not gone without both support and criticisms attracted from different quarters. Reacting to Kissinger, Yuk Hui, for example, in What Begins After the End of the Enlightenment? maintained that Kissinger is wrongthe Enlightenment has not ended. Rather, modern technologythe support structure of Enlightenment philosophyhas become its own philosophy, with the universalizing force of technology becoming itself the political project of the Enlightenment.

Transhumanists, as mentioned already, reflect the continuity of some of those contradictions between belief in progress and uncertainty about human future. Hughes shows us nonetheless that there are some interesting historical turns suggesting further directions that this mood has taken. In the 1990s, Hughes recalls, transhumanists were full of exuberant Enlightenment optimism about unending progress. As an example, Hughes cites Max Mores 1998 Extropian Principles which defined Perpetual Progress as the first precept of their brand of transhumanism. Over time, however, Hughes communicates how More himself has had cause to temper this optimism, stressing rather this driving principle as one of desirability and more a normative goal than a faith in historical inevitability. History, More would say in 2002, since the Enlightenment makes me wary of all arguments to inevitability

Rational uncertainty among transhumanists hence make many of them refrain from an argument for the inevitability of transhumanism as a matter of progress. Further, there are indeed several possible factors which could deter the transhumanist idea and drive for progress from translating to reality: A neo-Luddite revolution, a turn and rise in preference for rural life, mass disenchantment with technological addiction and increased option for digital detox, nostalgia, disillusionment with modern civilization and a return-to-innocence counter-cultural movement, neo-Romanticism, a pop-culture allure and longing for a Tolkien-esque world, cyclical thinking, conservatism, traditionalism, etc. The alternative, backlash, and antagonistic forces are myriad. Even within transhumanism, the anti-democratic and socially conservative Neoreactionary movement, with its rejection of the view that history shows inevitable progression towards greater liberty and enlightenment, is gradually (and rather disturbingly) growing a contingent. Hughes talks, as another point for rational uncertainty, about the three critiques: futurological, historical, and anthropological, of transhumanist and Enlightenment faith in progress that Phillipe Verdoux offers, and in which the anthropological argument holds that pre-moderns were probably as happy or happier than we moderns. After all, Rousseau, himself a French Enlightenment thinker, is generally seen as having believed in the superiority of the savage over the civilized. Perspectives like these could stir anti-modern, anti-progress sentiments in peoples hearts and minds.

Demonstrating still why transhumanists must not be obstinate over the idea of inevitability, Hughes refers to Greg Burchs 2001 work Progress, Counter-Progress, and Counter-Counter-Progress in which the latter expounded on the Enlightenment and transhumanist commitment to progress as to a political program, fully cognizant that there are many powerful enemies of progress and that victory was not inevitable. Moreover, the possible failure in realizing goals of progress might not even result from the actions of enemies in that antagonistic sense of the word, for there is also that likely scenario, as the 2006 movie Idiocracy depicts, of a future dystopian society based on dysgenics, one in which, going by expectations and trends of the 21st century, the most intelligent humans decrease in reproduction and eventually fail to have children while the least intelligent reproduce prolifically. As such, through the process of natural selection, generations are created that collectively become increasingly dumber and more virile with each passing century, leading to a future world plagued by anti-intellectualism, bereft of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, coherence in notions of justice and human rights, and manifesting several other traits of degeneration in culture. This is yet a possibility for our future world.

So while for many extropians and transhumanists, nonetheless, perpetual progress was an unstoppable train, responding to which one either got on board for transcension or consigned oneself to the graveyard, other transhumanists, however, Hughes comments, especially in response to certain historical experiences (the 2000 dot-com crash, for example), have seen reason to increasingly temper their expectations about progress. In Hughess appraisal, while, therefore, some transhumanists still press for technological innovation on all fronts and oppose all regulation, others are focusing on reducing the civilization-ending potentials of asteroid strikes, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Some realism hence need be in place to keep under constant check the excesses of contemporary secular technomillennialism as contained in some transhumanist strains.

Hughes presents Nick Bostroms 2001 essay Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards as one influential example of this anti-millennial realism, a text in which Bostrom, following his outline of scenarios that could either end the existence of the human species or have us evolve into dead-ends, then addressed not just how we can avoid extinction and ensure that there are descendants of humanity, but also how we can ensure that we will be proud to claim them. Subsequently, Bostrom has been able to produce work on catastrophic risk estimation at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. Hughes seems to favour this approach, for he ensures to indicate that this has also been adopted as a programmatic focus for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) which he directs, and as well for the transhumanist non-profit, the Lifeboat Foundation. Transhumanists who listen to Bostrom, as we could deduce from Hughes, are being urged to take a more critical approach concerning technological progress.

With the availability of this rather cautious attitude, a new tension, Hughes reports, now plays out between eschatological certainty and pessimistic risk assessment. This has taken place mainly concerning the debate over the Singularity. For the likes of Ray Kurzweil (2005), representing the camp of a rather technomillennial, eschatological certainty, his patterns of accelerating trendlines towards a utopian merger of enhanced humanity and godlike artificial intelligence is one of unstoppability, and this Kurzweil supports by referring to the steady exponential march of technological progress through (and despite) wars and depressions. Dystopian and apocalyptic predictions of how humanity might fare under superintelligent machines (extinction, inferiority, and the likes) are, in the assessment of Hughes, but minimally entertained by Kurzweil, since to the techno-prophet we are bound to eventually integrate with these machines into apotheosis.

The platform, IEET, thus has taken a responsibility of serving as a site for teasing out this tension between technoprogressive optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect, as Hughes echoes Antonio Gramsci. On the one hand, Hughes explains, we have championed the possibility of, and evidence of, human progress. By adopting the term technoprogressivism as our outlook, we have placed ourselves on the side of Enlightenment political and technological progress.And yet on the other hand, he continues, we have promoted technoprogressivism precisely in order to critique uncritical techno-libertarian and futurist ideas about the inevitability of progress. We have consistently emphasized the negative effects that unregulated, unaccountable, and inequitably distributed technological development could have on society (one feels tempted to call out Landian accelerationism at this point). Technoprogressivism, the guiding philosophy of IEET, avails as a principle which insists that technological progress needs to be consistently conjoined with, and dependent on, political progress, whilst recognizing that neither are inevitable.

In charting the essay towards a close, Hughes mentions his and a number of IEET-led technoprogresive publications, among which we have Verdoux who, despite his futurological, historical, and anthropological critique of transhumanism, yet goes ahead to argue for transhumanism on moral grounds (free from the language of Marxisms historical inevitabilism or utopianism, and cautious of the tragic history of communism), and as a less dangerous course than any attempt at relinquishing technological development, but only after the naive faith in progress has been set aside. Unfortunately, however, the rational capitulationism to the transhumanist future that Verdoux offers, according to Hughes, is not something that stirs mens souls. Hughes hence, while admitting to our need to embrace these critical, pessimistic voices and perspectives, yet calls on us to likewise heed to the need to also re-discover our capacity for vision and hope. This need for optimism that humans can collectively exercise foresight and invention, and peacefully deliberate our way to a better future, rather than yielding to narratives that would lead us into the traps of utopian and apocalyptic fatalism, has been one of the motivations behind the creation of the technoprogressive brand. The brand, Hughes presents, has been of help in distinguishing necessarily Enlightenment optimism about the possibility of human political, technological and moral progress from millennialist techno-utopian inevitabilism.

Presumably, upon this technoprogressive philosophy, the new version of the Transhumanist Declaration, adopted by Humanity+ in 2009, indicated a shift from some of the language of the 1998 version, and conveyed a more reflective, critical, realistic, utilitarian, proceed with caution and act with wisdom tone with respect to the transhumanist vision for humanitys progress. This version of the declaration, though relatively sobered, remains equally inspiring nonetheless. Hughes closes the essay with a reminder on our need to stay aware of the diverse ways by which our indifferent universe threatens our existence, how our growing powers come with unintended consequences, and why applying mindfulness on our part in all actions remains the best approach for navigating our way towards progress in our radically uncertain future.

Conclusively, following Hughes objectives in this series, it can be suggested that more studies on the Enlightenment (European and global) are desirable especially for its potential to furnish us with richer understanding into a number of problems within contemporary transhumanism as sprouting from its roots deep in the Enlightenment. Interest and scholarship in Enlightenment studies, fortunately, seems to be experiencing some current revival, and even so with increasing diversity in perspective, thereby presenting transhumanism with a variety of paths through which to explore and gain context for connected issues. Seeking insight thence into some foundations of transhumanisms problems could take the path, among others: of an examination of internal contradictions within the Enlightenment, of the approach of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment; of assessing opponents of the Enlightenment as found, for example, in Isaiah Berlins notion of Counter Enlightenment; of investigating a rather radical strain of the Enlightenment as presented in Jonathan Israels Radical Enlightenment, and as well in grappling with the nature of the relationships between transhumanism and other heirs both of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment today. Again, and significantly, serious attention need be paid now and going forwards in jealously guarding transhumanism against ultimately falling into the hands of the Dark Enlightenment.

Ojochogwu Abdulis the founder of the Transhumanist Enlightenment Caf (TEC), is the co-founder of the Enlightenment Transhumanist Forum of Nigeria (H+ Nigeria), and currently serves as a Foreign Ambassador for the U.S. Transhumanist Party in Nigeria.

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Influential German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is known for his writings on good and evil, the end of religion in modern society and the concept of a "super-man."

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rcken bei Ltzen, Germany. In his brilliant but relatively brief career, he published numerous major works of philosophy, including Twilight of the Idols and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the last decade of his life he suffered from insanity; he died on August 25, 1900. His writings on individuality and morality in contemporary civilization influenced many major thinkers and writers of the 20th century.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rcken bei Ltzen, a small village in Prussia (part of present-day Germany). His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran preacher; he died when Nietzsche was 4 years old. Nietzsche and his younger sister, Elisabeth, were raised by their mother, Franziska.

Nietzsche attended a private preparatory school in Naumburg and then received a classical education at the prestigious Schulpforta school. After graduating in 1864, he attended the University of Bonn for two semesters. He transferred to the University of Leipzig, where he studied philology, a combination of literature, linguistics and history. He was strongly influenced by the writings of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. During his time in Leipzig, he began a friendship with the composer Richard Wagner, whose music he greatly admired.

In 1869, Nietzsche took a position as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. During his professorship he published his first books, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Human, All Too Human (1878). He also began to distance himself from classical scholarship, as well as the teachings of Schopenhauer, and to take more interest in the values underlying modern-day civilization. By this time, his friendship with Wagner had deteriorated. Suffering from a nervous disorder, he resigned from his post at Basel in 1879.

For much of the following decade, Nietzsche lived in seclusion, moving from Switzerland to France to Italy when he was not staying at his mother's house in Naumburg. However, this was also a highly productive period for him as a thinker and writer. One of his most significant works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885. He also wrote Beyond Good and Evil (published in 1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Twilight of the Idols (1889).

In these works of the 1880s, Nietzsche developed the central points of his philosophy. One of these was his famous statement that "God is dead," a rejection of Christianity as a meaningful force in contemporary life. Others were his endorsement of self-perfection through creative drive and a "will to power," and his concept of a "super-man" or "over-man" (bermensch), an individual who strives to exist beyond conventional categories of good and evil, master and slave.

Nietzsche suffered a collapse in 1889 while living in Turin, Italy. The last decade of his life was spent in a state of mental incapacitation. The reason for his insanity is still unknown, although historians have attributed it to causes as varied as syphilis, an inherited brain disease, a tumor and overuse of sedative drugs. After a stay in an asylum, Nietzsche was cared for by his mother in Naumburg and his sister in Weimar, Germany. He died in Weimar on August 25, 1900.

Nietzsche is regarded as a major influence on 20th century philosophy, theology and art. His ideas on individuality, morality and the meaning of existence contributed to the thinking of philosophers Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault; Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, two of the founding figures of psychiatry; and writers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.

Less beneficially, certain aspects of Nietzsche's work were used by the Nazi Party of the 1930s'40s as justification for its activities; this selective and misleading use of his work has somewhat darkened his reputation for later audiences.

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Friedrich Nietzsche - Scholar, Philosopher - Biography