The Justice Department’s webpage for documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is missing at least 16 of its files a day after they were released.

The point, of course, is to see the whole — what Virginia Woolf called “the thing itself.” Not just to uncover the fragments and discover how each works but to understand their harmonic unity — the sum that, as the forgotten genius Willard Gibbs knew, “is simpler than its parts,” simpler and more beautiful, the way myriad complex chords played by a vast orchestra of disparate instruments become a symphony — a single unit of transcendence. The philosopher, naturalist, and pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887–April 21, 1948) takes up this question in a wonderful essay about the Rio… read article

Why Spiritually Awake People Are Quietly Disappearing from Society - Alan Watts #alanwatts #spiritualawakening #consciousness #philosophy Have you ever felt an overwhelming pull to step back from.....

In modern society, Simone de Beauvoir observed in her later years, “it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life” — it is something upon which the vast majority of humanity looks upon “with sorrow and rebellion,” dreading it more than death itself. But her one solution to the problem of keeping old age from becoming “an absurd parody of our former life” is balanced precariously on the tip of Maslow’s pyramid, entirely depended on the needs below being met. So too with Bertrand Russell’s key to growing old contentedly and Ursula K. Le Guin’s… read article