Consciousness was indeed real.  It had observable energy.  That energy translated into movement, into work.  That energy ordered information, the stuff of the world, the matter, and recycled that order back into itself, lifting itself to ever higher ground.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music 

Consciousness was firmly embedded in the fabric of space and time, a material part of its vibrational energy.  Consciousness, or mind, was not split off from matter, hovering outside it.... Instead, consciousness was within matter, of matter.  It was matter looking at itself and being astonished.  It was the point seeing the wave, or the wave seeing the point.  Consciousness was quantum electrodynamism.  Time turned back upon itself.  Time splintering.  Time strutting loose among the energy levels, only slightly stilled, slightly caught, in that glance called consciousness, the observer, the energy that made it into this and not-this, live cat and dead cat.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music

Empowering friends, picking your battles, always checking principle with prudence, never overestimating American capacities, but never overestimating the enemy’s strength: this is best seen not as a strategy for all contingencies but as a disposition, a habit of mind, a temperament.

Michael Ignatieff on George Kennan's approach to US foreign policy, America's Melancholic Hero (The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2014).

Whenever there is a withering of the law
and an uprising of lawlessness on all sides,
then I manifest Myself.

For the salvation of the righteous
and the destruction of such as do evil,
for the firm establishing of the Law,
I come to birth, age after age.

 Bhagavad Gita, Book IV, Sutra 5, 7, 8