Reclusland

When an individual draws this oracle, it means that success will come to him from the primal depths of the universe and that everything depends upon his seeking his happiness and that of others in one way only, that is, by perseverance in what is right.

“Great indeed is the generating power of the Creative; all beings owe their beginning to it. This power permeates all heaven.” -  Confucius

THE IMAGE

The movement of heaven is full of power.
Thus the superior man makes himself strong and untiring.

Since there is only one heaven, the doubling of the trigram Ch’ien, of which
heaven is the image, indicates the movement of heaven. One complete
revolution of heaven makes a day, and the repetition of the trigram means
that each day is followed by another. This creates the idea of time. Since it is
the same heaven moving with untiring power, there is also created the idea
of duration both in and beyond time, a movement that never stops nor
slackens, just as one day follows another in an unending course. This
duration in time is the image of the power inherent in the Creative.

(the east mountain moves over the water)

Nine in the fifth place means:
Flying dragon in the heavens.
It furthers one to see the great man.

Confucius says about this line:
Things that accord in tone vibrate together. Things that have affinity in their
inmost natures seek one another. Water flows to what is wet, fire turns to
what is dry. Clouds (the breath of heaven) follow the dragon, wind (the breath
of earth) follows the tiger. Thus the sage arises, and all creatures follow him
with their eyes. What is born of heaven feels related to what is above. What
is born of earth feels related to what is below. Each follows its kind.

“For it is one thing to know, and another to love; one thing to understand, and another to will. I don’t deny that [Aristotle] teaches us the nature of virtue. But reading him offers us none of those exhortations, or only a very few, that goad and inflame our minds to love virtue and hate vice […] What good is there in knowing what virtue is, if this knowledge doesn’t make us love it? What point is there in knowing vice, if this knowledge doesn’t make us shun it? By heaven, if the will is corrupt, an idle and irresolute mind will take the wrong path when it discovers the difficulty of the virtues and the alluring ease of the vices.”

- Francesco Petrarca: De sui ipsius et multorum aliorum ignorantia

“What you do is what the whole universe is doing, at the place you call here and now”

“Reason calls the grave a gateway of peace: and instinct shuns it.”
- T. E. Lawrence [The Mint (Penguin Books 1984)]

I went to a screening of Lawrence of  Arabia a few months back.  Got to see a full color print in an actual theater (B.A.M. Rose Cinemas, for any fellow Brooklynite’s out there, which only heightened the experience of being back in an old-timey theater).   It’s an beautifully shot movie, all the more so because it was filmed in 1962..

The movie was full of great quotes too:

(context: Ali has just shot Lawrence’s guide at a deserted well in the middle of the desert)
Sherif Ali: Have you no fear, English?
T.E. Lawrence: My fear is my concern.

(context: Lawrence has just put out a match with his bare fingers)
William Potter: Ooh! It damn well ‘urts!
T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.
Officer: What’s the trick then?
T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

I like these, not because it’s typical bad assery, but because in both scenes, the level of focus Peter O’Toole was able to portray as Lawrence is palpable.  His is scared, and it does hurt.  But he’s holding his focus while inside that, and it shows.

My favorite, though, was this one, where Lawrence breaks down and gives up on his winter campaign after being tortured (but not recognized) by a leader of the Turkish Army:

T.E. Lawrence: A man can do whatever he wants, but he cannot want whatever he wants!

He says this, and follows it with “and what decides what he wants? This!” and he points at his skin.  But to make this into a racial statement is to miss an opportunity for something much greater I think.  After all, what does decide what a man wants?  In all the talk of free will versus destiny that I’ve ever heard, no one’s ever brought up the fact that we do not seem to be free to choose what we want.  How can it be free will if there’s no conscious choice of desire?  Theoretically, for true free will, we would be able to pick a desire, and then allow it to begin to act on us, to move us to it’s music and make us dance as we want.  It should be a tool, not a drive to give into or to resist.  Show me someone able to do that, and I’ll believe in true free will.  : )

Anyway, long story short, it’s an awesome movie, go watch it.  It also made me really interested in T. E. Lawrence as well.  If this is what the movie business makes of his life, the real story must be a lot more interesting.  I’ve considered reading his massive autobiography, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph“ but it seems the best edition of it (closest to what he wanted it to be) was the 1922 unabridged Oxford text.  Which is conveniently both out of print and not for sale used. (If anyone has a copy they’re looking to get rid of, hit me up!)  I know I won’t read it twice, so I’d rather make sure it’s the right edition if I do read it.

That’s Lawerence, second from the right.
The guy in the front is Obi Won Kenobi Prince Faisal I of Iraq

“I’m not certain I understand the whole question of ego and egoism. I think it is necessary for life and I think none of us are immune to it. From the moment we are born, it is cultivated within us and it has its place. I’ve ceased to think about the ego. It’s there. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s not “It” anyway. So I don’t bother myself about it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a big obstacle, and a big help at the same time to getting what you want. Ego drives one, of course, and on the other hand, the ego blocks one.  I’m so close to the end of my life, I’m just concerned with the necessary.”

- From “A Voice At The Borders of Silence”

”When one is still and listens, one begins to be in touch with a mysterious element that is within each of us, which can transform and shape us and can help to transform the world,”

- From his NY Times obituary

New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallizes out of the Future

• The standard spacetime diagrams used in relativity accord no special status to the past, the present or the future. That’s because they assume that everything evolves from time-reversible local physics.

• it is possible represent such a universe using a kind of spacetime diagram in which space and time merge into a single entity. “The universe just is: a fixed spacetime block,”say Ellis and Rothman. In this view, no instant has any special status: “All past and future times are equally present, and the present “now” is just one of an infinite number.”

• Ellis and Rothman introduce a significant new type of block universe. They say the character of the block changes dramatically when quantum mechanics is thrown into the mix. All of a sudden, the past and the future take on entirely different characteristics. The future is dominated by the weird laws of quantum mechanics in which objects can exist in two places at the same time and particles can be so deeply linked that they share the same existence. By contrast, the past is dominated by the unflinching certainty of classical mechanics.

• What’s interesting is that the transition between these states takes place largely in the present. It’s almost as if the past crystallizes out of the future, in the instant we call the present.

• They point out, for example, that this crystallization process doesn’t take place entirely in the present. In quantum mechanics the past can sometimes be delayed, for example in delayed choice experiments. This means the structure of the transition from future to past is more complex than a cursory thought might suggest.

• Ellis and Rothman suggest that their model provides a straightforward solution to the problem of the origin of the arrow of time. “The arrow of time arises simply because the future does not yet exist,” they say.

Granted, the article ends with:  That’s a thought-provoking but ultimately unconvincing model in its current form. But it’ll be interesting to see whether Ellis and Rothman can conjure a little more substance from the idea. What it needs, of course, are some testable predictions, things that cosmologists usually spend little time worrying about. Don’t hold your breath.

So maybe nothing to get too excited about, but the picture that paints is beautiful.  Even if nothing else, this provides an excellent metaphor for how karma works, and of how the mind moves through time.

via ledgergermane

I’ve been meaning to do this for a few weeks now, but reality seemed to keep conspiring against it.  But I’m betting that’s because, on some level, I’m rather loathe to reveal any details of my actual, real, analogue life on here.  Which I need to push through, I think, as I’d like to have a little more life in my writing . As Robert Frost said: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” (thanks for that, J)

So, to that end, a quick wrap up on my Ango Training experience.

- I’ve kept up the Chi Kung in the mornings, more regularly, I have to admit, than I’ve kept up my actual meditation practice. I feel I’ve reached a kind of plateau with this which I’m really happy with right now.  The quick energy boosts I used to get from running through the forms are no longer quite so strong, but my energy’s comfortably at a higher level more often, and I managed to fight off what I thought was going to be a rather nasty cold, while still managing some late nights, too much coffee, and too much wine over Thanksgiving.  It was rather strange to recognize all the symptoms that I usually take to mean the low energy and listless of a cold are about to sink in, only to find out that they simply never did.

- I also managed to keep up with the weekly yoga class, and I think that has benefited me as much, if not more, than the daily Chi Kung.  I was lucky enough to find a really wonderful teacher, who’s been teaching for quite a long time, and, well, I’m not sure what else to say on that, other than that I’m really grateful to have stumbled into the class.

- My meditation practice has deepened as well, I believe.  Although there were days where I didn’t sit, this is the most regular I’ve ever been in my practice, and I’m really starting to understand what it means to be with the breath.  It comes and it goes, but when I hit it just right, it’s pretty great.  I am somewhat aware that this is probably more a bliss/concentration state than anything else, but I don’t think it’s quite as cut and dry as that with Zazen.  Next big thing on my list is to wade into Danial Ingram’s “Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha,” so hopefully that’ll clear some stuff up for me.

- As for my writing project, I did manage to write every day of Ango up until the day before the art presentation, and I hand copied them out into a blank book.  I decided to call it “Liber Quintus Ignis” (or, “book of the fifth fire”) after a school of mysticism contemporary to the Buddha, that would sit inside a cross of four fires, and stare up at the sun until they went blind (the sun being the fifth fire).  This supposedly lead to enlightenment.  Clearly kind of a stupid practice, and I never actually stared at the sun, but I did manage to get some poetry out of it that I’m fairly happy with.  I’m considering what I want to do with it as far as publishing it, but I don’t think I’ll do it on this blog.  It wouldn’t really fit the content of what this blog has become I think.  Perhaps I’ll start another…  A happy side of effect of copying out 72 poems by hand while in a somewhat meditative state, over a period of several days, is that my hand writing (which has always been graciously described as chicken scratch) has improved greatly, particularly when I bring consciousness to the act of writing by hand.

- Finished all the reading I planned to and more, and I do recommend all the books I mentioned.   I think next time, I’ll need to make a bigger list, if I want it to sustain me through the whole period.  Also, I have a newfound respect for the depth of Dogen Zenji’s thought.   It is no wonder that Zen has lasted so long, coming from such a mind.

- I made it to the Reggie Ray retreat, and I highly recommend sitting with Reggie. His combination of mediation and somatic body work is great, and I think, pretty unique.  I got to learn a lot about the Vajrayana tradition (as taught by Chogyam Trungpa) as well.

- I did not make it to the Ken Cohen Chi Kung retreat, as I decided last minute to save the money and vacation days.  From what I’ve heard of Mr. Cohen, it would have been an a great retreat, but I still stick by my decision at this point.

- For my take on the Thich Nhat Hanh talk, see here.

All in all, it was a great experience.  What I took away from it the most was the amazing degree to which, when you take your practice seriously, it’ll lift your life up in ways you’d never imagine.  I’m definitely signing up again in the Spring!

In the meantime, my studies are bringing me into a more Gurdjieffian territory.  I’m researching some of his lesser known pupils, mainly William Segal (who was a student of both the Gurdjieff Work and Zen Buddhism) and Rene Daumal (a poet who died at the age of 36 after a lifelong search for truth).  It seems there’s some steps being taken to make “The Work” a little more well known, which is something I’m definitely in favor of.

I do plan on continuing to post here as well, but I’m also feeling some trepidation as well.  As much as I enjoy putting my thoughts out here for you all to read, I’m having some sense that maybe silence might be a better option for a while.  Or at least a limited silence.  I’ve noticed how quickly delusion can be expelled, and how that can change things on a pretty deep level, as far as what you consider important and unimportant (or worse, harmful).  As that Ajahn Chah quote I posted kind of hinted at, I’m not looking to be the guy who needs to know everything about the person who shot him with an arrow, before he pulls the arrow out.  “We must arrange our lives to support good practice”, and I don’t want this to come between me and my practice.  I want this to be one aspect of my practice.  Something I’ll have to keep working on, but don’t worry, I have no plans to shut things down here (didn’t I just mention something about starting another one of these? jeez…)

So stay tuned, kiddies.  It’s great having you all here.  A strong practice to all, and to all a good night.

It has been said that the more you study physics and biology, the more amazing it becomes that anything exists at all.  That the universe exists and that we exist to experience it is seen as a more and more unlikely occurrence.  Once you come to understand how different things would be if, say, the weight of a proton was just a tiny bit heavier, or if the force of gravity was a little more forceful, the more obvious it becomes that there could just as easily be nothing here at all.

However, like a lot of things that seem highly unlikely but still undergo the formality of actually occurring, there’s a different way to look at this that cuts like Occam’s Razor through the unlikeliness: Perhaps things are the way they are because there’s life here.  Perhaps it’s not that consciousness, at some point in the distant past, sprang out of matter.  Instead, perhaps matter exists because of consciousness.

Maybe, as reality came into being (however you want to explain that, be it “fiat lux!” or a BIG BANG), consciousness had to feel things out, had to reach out into the dark and wait until it could grab onto something solid.  In Zen, there’s a saying that enlightenment is like grouping behind you in the dark for a pillow.  I imagine the birth of the universe could have been something like that, a blind fumbling in the dark until suddenly, “ahah!”  consciousness touches space and space wobbles into a wave of energy and vacuum, which them complexifies into matter, then into life, and then into humanity.

A similar comparison would be the tuning of a musical instrument, trying to find the exact right pitch.  Once one string is tuned, you move onto the next one.  Perhaps the laws were kind of like that, with consciousness pushing further into space after each law dropped into place.

Alternatively, it could be said that the universe exists as a broad spectrum of possible laws, and that life only exists within the slices of the spectrum with the laws to support it.  Either way though, whether there’s only one storyline or a whole array of branches, it doesn’t matter because the end result’s the same here: life and the laws that support it are indivisible.  Whether universes exist where the physical laws make life impossible is kind of a moot point, I think, at least while we’re still alive.

The view that the reality exists the way it does because it springs out of consciousness (rather than consciousness springing out of matter at some point), is currently known as Biocentricism, which I first head about this over at “Imagining the 10th Dimension” (thanks Rob!).  Robert Lanza, who first proposed the theory, has 7 main priciples behind it:

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
4. Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The “universe” is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Which (as wikipedia seems to suggest) is a bit close to solipsism.  But that’s only the case if:
1) Consciousness only exists inside human beings.
2) All human beings actually are conscious (and don’t just hover on the borderlands of consciousness).

If we don’t accept both those two premises, then those 7 principles deserve another reading…

The point here is that, as recent conversation on this blog have lead me to think, this same urge, this fumbling in the dark, might be what’s responsible for everything.  It’s something we’ve labeled as “evolution” and mistakenly described as the ability for a species to successfully exist and procreate.  There’s never been a “why” behind this.  Why procreate?  Simply to procreate?

Perhaps there’s more to it than this.  Perhaps consciousness is something that has existed all along, somehow apart from the material world, and that as it comes into the material world, it “evolves” the material world  to better allow for the further embodiment of consciousness within it.  When I said above that “consciousness touches space”, perhaps a better way of saying this would be that consciousness and space broke away from each other, so that one could observe the other.  And that since then, consciousness has been trying to build itself back into space, for the sake of interacting with it.

Anyway, what originally got me thinking about this was a comparison between the laws of the universe and karma.  Past behavior creates an inertia that allows for present existence.  Within the human mind, this works as memory, but within  the physical/animal world, it works as DNA.   In the physical/mineral world, it works as molecules/atoms.  Beyond that, it works as the laws of physics.  Each gets locked into place, simply because it has proven, so far, to be the best way for allowing consciousness to embody itself in matter.  And what we are to do every moment with our thoughts is to try to find a way to further combine the two within ourselves.

In a way, it’s like God split in two, and each half is seeking to combine with the other in such a way as to create little pockets of wholeness throughout, to experience wholeness within splitness.  Except that God never actually split, so this whole thing is really more of a game than anything else…

But that’s maybe a little too esoteric for my liking.  So instead, I’ll leave you with a song and a picture.  Because in the end, my attempt here is at a new kind of poetry, not a new kind science.

(cause we all shine on, all the time)

• craving a cigarette while performing a cognitive task not only increases the chances of a person’s mind wandering, but also makes that person less likely to notice when his or her mind has wandered.

• craving disrupts an individual’s meta-awareness, the ability to periodically appraise one’s own thoughts.

• Participants were assigned at random to either a crave-condition or low-crave group. Those in the latter group were permitted to smoke throughout the study; members of the crave-condition group had to abstain. Participants were asked to read as many as 34 pages of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” from a computer screen. If they caught themselves zoning out, they pressed a key labeled ZO. Every few minutes, a tone sounded, and they were asked via the computer, “Were you zoning out?” to which they responded by pressing a “Yes” or “No” key. After 30 minutes, a reading comprehension test was administered.

• Although both groups were prompted a similar number of times, the people craving cigarettes acknowledged more mind-wandering episodes-three times as many, in fact- as those in the low-crave group. But as far as independently recognizing (meta-awareness) that they were zoning out, those who were craving were no more likely to do so than the other group. Participants in the craving group had at least three times as many opportunities to catch themselves zoning out-but they did not. They were impaired in their ability to notice their own mind-wandering episodes.

• this may explain why craving often disrupts efforts to exercise self-control-a process requiring the ability to become aware of your current state in order to regulate it.”

(via here)

see also:

• my previous post: “It’s not because of the study in itself, but because certain people don’t make the effort, they forget themselves.“
• Gurdjieff: “Remember yourself always and everywhere.“

“When people do a lot of study, their minds are full of words, they get high on the books and forget themselves. They get lost in externals. Now this is so only for those who don’t have wisdom, who are unrestrained and don’t have steady sati. For these people studying can be a cause for decline. When such people are engaged in study they don’t do any sitting or walking meditation and become less and less restrained. Their minds become more and more distracted. Aimless chatter, lack of restraint and socializing become the order of the day. This is the cause for the decline of the practice. It’s not because of the study in itself, but because certain people don’t make the effort, they forget themselves. Actually the scriptures are pointers along the path of practice. If we really understand the practice, then reading or studying are both further aspects of meditation. But if we study and then forget ourselves it gives rise to a lot of talking and fruitless activity.”

- Ajahn Chah (via Mind Deep)

books or the internet, the same rules apply…

“We are sheep kept to provide wool for our masters who feed us and keep us as slaves of illusion. But we have a chance of escape and our masters are anxious to help us, but we like being sheep. It is comfortable.”

- Gurdjieff

Wind stirs water by penetrating it. Thus the superior man, when obliged to judge the mistakes of men, tries to penetrate their minds with understanding, in order to gain a sympathetic appreciation of the circumstances. In ancient China, the entire administration of justice was guided by this principle. A deep understanding that knows how to pardon was considered the highest form of justice. This system was not without success, for its aim was to make so strong a moral impression that there was no reason to fear abuse of such mildness. For it sprang not from weakness but from a superior clarity.

“It is a combination of what we are born with and outside circumstances that makes us what we are; it is all mechanical, all under the law of accident. It is useless to deny that people are born different and that we cannot change — in any case at the beginning. We have to take it for granted that people have different capacities, but not for awakening; this is where people make a mistake. Awakening does not depend on what is born; it depends on magnetic centre, and magnetic centre depends on what one is interested in. One person is interested in one thing and another in another thing, but on what that depends we do not know and it will not help us to investigate this question because it will be only theories. In our state of consciousness we can know only some things and we must concentrate on the things we can know without wasting time on the things we cannot know.”

- P. D. Ouspensky

I forget how I found this article, but it’s a great one.  You can read the whole thing through the link below, but I’ve summarized what I think are the main points here:

The unnatural selection of consciousness:

• Biology does not tolerate anything biologically useless and, given that my brain consumes 20% of my energy supply, and quite a lot of this seems to be used by neurons that are supposed to be responsible for keeping me conscious, consciousness must have a use.

• But how well-founded is this belief? Was it really natural selection that eventually brought into being creatures that could see that they were naturally selected? Was it the blind laws of physics that so organised the matter in us that it could see the laws of physics and that they were blind? If we are going to address these questions properly, we need to start far enough back to see them clearly. We need to ask by what means consciousness could have come into being – if it was not there in the beginning – and what advantages it confers.

• Consider the emergence of sight from photosensitivity. Firstly, chemical or electrochemical sensitivity to light is not the same as awareness of light. Secondly, the content of awareness of light – brightness, colour, never mind beauty or meaning – is not to be found in electromagnetic radiation, which is not intrinsically bright, coloured, beautiful or meaningful. These secondary and tertiary qualities are not properties of the physical world and the energy in question. Thirdly, it is not clear how certain organisations of matter manage to be aware – of impingements of energy, and later of objects, and (in the case of humans) of themselves – when very similar organisations of matter do not have this property.

• Computers, after all, do not get any nearer to being conscious as the inputs are more complexly related to their outputs, however many stages and layers of processing intervene between the two.

• Indeed, the contrast between environment and organism already contains an embryonic hint of the differentiation between a subject and its objects; howsoever this might be concealed by treating organisms as physical systems. Without this fudge, it is difficult to see how energy exchanges between parts of a physical system would count as “inputs” and “outputs”.

• But the question remains: How is it that certain configurations of matter should be aware, should suffer, enjoy, fear etc? What is there in matter, such that eventually certain configurations of it (human beings) pool that experience and live in a public world?

• Why should consciousness of the material world around their vehicles (the organisms) make certain (material) replicators better able to replicate?

• Think, after all, what unconscious mechanisms can achieve: the evolution of most of the universe; the processes that are supposed to have created life and conscious organisms; the growth, development and most of the running of even highly conscious organisms such as ourselves. If you had to undertake something really difficult – for example growing in utero a brain with all its connexions in place – consciousness is the last thing you would want to oversee the task.

• Once you have a species that depends on consciousness, then it is essential for its members to remain conscious. But if we assume the materialist viewpoint and, unlike many evolutionary biologists, adhere to it consistently, and set aside an anthropocentric viewpoint that sees the entire evolutionary process as something that was always leading up to us or creatures like us, it seems highly implausible that, in an unconscious biosphere, consciousness, even if it were on offer, would seem like a good option.

• Looking prospectively from the beginning rather than retrospectively, one could argue that an organism that has to plan, to deliberate, to rehearse possible courses of action, and has to see wholes so as to deal with singulars, in order to survive, is in a mess. Of course, once in the mess, it would be better off with better consciousness – and this applies irrespective of whether we are considering threats and opportunities from the material environment, other species, or competition from conspecifics.

• And there is a serious difficulty with the notion of “better and better” consciousness that will compensate for the disadvantage of having to work through consciousness in the first place.

• For some…the criterion for intelligence…is that the organism is more closely coupled into its environment. If that were true, then a silicate crystal, so hard-wired into its environment that no wires are required, would be just the thing to be.

• Consciousness makes evolutionary sense only if one does not start far enough back; if, that is to say, one fails to assume a consistent and sincere materialist position, beginning with a world without consciousness, and then considers whether there could be putative biological drivers for organisms to become conscious. This is the only valid starting point for those who look to evolution to explain consciousness, given that the history of matter has overwhelmingly been without conscious life, indeed without history. Once the viewpoint of consistent materialism is assumed, it ceases to be self-evident that it is a good thing to experience what is there, that it will make an organism better able so to position itself in the causal net as to increase the probability of replication of its genomic material. On the contrary, even setting aside the confusional states it is prone to, and the sleep it requires, consciousness seems like the worst possible evolutionary move.

should escape dishonor. That recoil had at last urged him to make preparations for quitting Middlemarch. If evil truth must be reported of him, he would then be at a less scorching distance from the contempt of his old neighbors; and in a new scene, where his life would not have gathered the same wide sensibility, the tormentor, if he pursued him, would be less formidable. To leave the place finally would, he knew, be extremely painful to his wife, and on other grounds he would have preferred to stay where he had struck root. Hence he made his preparations at first in a conditional way, wishing to leave on all sides an opening for his return after brief absence, if any favorable intervention of Providence should

(via facade)