Spend the next week giving your entire attention to these thoughts:. Compare yourself to others and realize how unsuccessful you are. Ctritcise yourself and others for everything wrong you do or they do. Desire all the things you want in life and do nothing about it. Watch nothing but the news and read nothing but celebrity magazines.
The quality of our thoughts seeds creates the quality of our life our garden. Give your attention to the same negative thoughts over and over again, and you feed rotten seeds the energy to spread and spoil your garden. But give your attention to empowering and enriching thoughts over and over again, and you will feel empowered and enriched. In other words, plant the seeds of self-love, confidence, gratitude, generosity, kindness, and compassion, and watch how the garden in your mind will blossom into a beautiful orchard of colored fruit.
You must also water and care for your seedlings, providing daily attention. And you must pull out the weeds that will inevitably appear. We live in a world where every being, business, and technology device is fighting for your attention. Even your own thoughts are swarming for it. All of them are constantly throwing seeds in your garden.
The news and movies you watch, the books your read, the people you talk to and spend time with, the conversations you have, the apps you use, the influencers you follow, and the newsletters you subscribe to.
These seeds will either grow into lush plants or arise as vicious weeds. The question is, then, are the seeds you consume futile or fruitful? But the truth is, weeds will grow in every garden. And even after you pluck them out, they will continue to grow. This helps you identify a bad seed from a good one. It helps you recognize sabotaging behavioral and thought patterns so you can stop them. And the way to that is through silent meditation, introspective journaling, and emotional intelligence.
The more you observe and tame your mind, the quieter you become, and the more you will be able to hear. Candide has much in common with the ancient Roman outlook. But it might also express what could be seen as an early attempt at a secular Buddhist point of view. Voltaire was familiar with Buddhism, though it did not go by that name. Buddhists were lumped in, Donald S. Yet the many Jesuit accounts of Eastern religion reaching Europe at the time circulated widely among intellectuals, including Voltaire, who wrote approvingly, though critically, of Buddhist tenets in his Dictionnaire philosophique.
As the secular mindfulness movement has done in the 21st century, Lopez argues, Voltaire sought in the age of Enlightenment to separate miraculous legend from practical teaching. But like the Buddha, whose supposed biography Voltaire knew well, Candide begins his life in a castle. Meditate in private, and reflect often on the fragility of human affairs. Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at jdmagness. We accept Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto!
To donate, click here. We thank you! Name required. He ordered the best coffee and crate after crate of wine though, odd reminder of another time, he drank his Burgundies and laid down his Beaujolais. It was a garden with a principle. It was at this moment of delight and apparent retreat, of affable manners and simple living, that he began the series of crusades that eventually blossomed into the human-rights campaigns that came to dominate the rest of his life. It would be nice to say that Voltaire was a courageous man whom no amount of comfort could seduce.
What motivated him, then, to start up? Partly it must have been that he so much enjoyed vexing stupid powerful people that he kept forgetting that stupid people who had gained power were never stupid about threats to their power. Each time he poked the silly tiger and the tiger clawed back, he was genuinely shocked. And then there is a kind of egotism so vast and so pleased with itself that it includes other people as an extension of itself. Voltaire felt so much for other people because he felt so much for himself; everything happened to him because he was the only reasonable subject of everything that happened.
By inflating his ego to immense proportions, he made it a shelter for the helpless. But there was something else, too. His exile moved him away from court practices and court values, with their hypersensitivity toward status, toward family practices and family values, with their hypersensitivity toward security. It is not so much the establishment of a garden but the ownership of a gate that moves people from liking a society based on favors to one based on rights.
When people were dragged from their gardens to be tortured and killed in the name of faith, he began to take it, as they say, personally. In those days, unspeakably cruel tortures were still routine in the French penal system. Condemned criminals were tortured by being broken on the wheel—that is, being bound on a scaffold to a wheel and then having their bones broken, one by one, with an iron bar. Damiens was pulled apart alive, his limbs attached to four horses and the horses driven in different directions, for public instruction in the center of Paris.
Voltaire was no fan of regicide. It was because he was for the execution that the public torture frightened him: it was a sign of how quickly civilities could disintegrate under threat. Historians have fussed for centuries about exactly what Voltaire meant by it—the Catholic Church?
The horror was the alliance of religious fanaticism with the instruments of the state, and the two combined for torture and official murder. The young Candide lives in the little German principality of Thunder Ten Tronck, under the guidance of his tutor, Pangloss, a theorist of optimism. Candide then encounters every kind of eighteenth-century horror, from enslavement by the Turks to bondage on a French galley, and ends up on a little farm near Constantinople, wisely counselling Pangloss that the only worthwhile thing for people to do is to cultivate their gardens.
What marks it off from most other didactic literature, as Davidson says, is its gaiety; the disembowellings and rapes are drawn with breezily overdone matter-of-factness. The tone is like that of the Monty Python movies, which are genuinely appalled by violence but register their shock by making it absurd. It is also usually said to be unfair to Leibniz, a great philosopher, who was among the inventors of calculus. Given that God could have considered every world before he made it, he must have chosen the best one—so that if there is suffering and evil in it, these things must have a cause in the mind of God.
Suffering is explicable—not defensible but explicable. But Voltaire was not unfair to Leibniz. Words nearby cultivate one's own garden cultism , cultivable , cultivar , cultivate , cultivated , cultivate one's own garden , cultivation , cultivator , cult of personality , cultrate , cultural.
All rights reserved. How to use cultivate one's own garden in a sentence Added to drinking water at concentrations of around one part per million, fluoride ions stick to dental plaque.
Ramona Helen Hunt Jackson. Pearls of Thought Maturin M.
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