CCC

291. Move against the flow and you are drawn toward the vortex where the emotions are more intense and much closer together. It becomes very easy to skip from emotional extreme to extreme. Extreme love can change to extreme hate or extreme anger or extreme apathy.

292. The question is, do words have meaning and/or power of themselves, or is that strictly contained in the inflection, vocal tone, etc.? Words are frequently given meaning through ritual. Do they give meaning to ritual? (91ff.)

293. When it comes down to the wire, we always end in a barrage of words. Legal documents spend pages defining the words used in the documents.

294. We can only experience what we have words to express. If there is no means of expressing the experience, we doubt—in fact, we invalidate the experience.

295. Imagine: Our entire concept of God is limited to the same words that we use to make automobiles, wage war, make love, and entertain ourselves in novels, plays, and music.

296. One of humanity’s sorest needs today is for inventors of words.

297. If major world political units are reluctant to limit the growth of weaponry, it may fall to the smallest political units to respond to the need. Every state, town, and village has the power to ban the manufacture of military goods within its precinct.

298. Certainly no family lacks the right to prescribe alternate forms of employment.

299. The individual is the simplest and most significant political unit in the world.

300. An original idea may have been thought of before and still be original by virtue of the path it takes into being (288). Thus we may look at a person of the 20^th century industrial era and say, “Ah, here is a genius, for see how this person has discovered a way to invent the wheel.”