What smells like a harmful thought?

A lot about our biology is intertwined with our culture. When such an association is encountered for the first time, it could sound interesting, intriguing even, but with time, it becomes an evident relationship because our culture plays an important role in our upbringing. For example, think about how the body's olfactory wiring affects what we think about cow-dung.

Broadly speaking, scatological odors snub any inclination on the individual's part to approach the source or even think about it for prolonged periods. Talking about excrement quells taste buds at the dinner table and there is an immediate response in the form of revulsion.

[caption id="attachment_23827" align="aligncenter" width="295"] Blech![/caption]

However, what could cause such a response is not a closed question. One answer that makes sense is that the brain interprets that excrement will be poisonous if consumed in any amount, and so turns the mind away from engaging with it in any fashion so as to minimize the risk of poisoning.

At the same time, in India, cow-dung is regularly used as fuel for cooking-fires and also for a multitude of ritualistic purposes. There is no revulsion of any sort amongst those who handle it, and if there had been any in the past, it could have been subdued.

If any test exists to exclude familiarity and false convictions, and establish that the excrement-poison relationship has been eliminated in the individual’s mind, this argument could be true.

On Ambition

The purpose of ambition lurks behind a crudely fashioned mask of perseverance, resilience and desire; while it is none of them, what it is has been a matter of conjecture owing, more so than not, to the passage of time. Ambition, as far as I am concerned, is a pointer, and ambitious are those in whose service it points always forward. However, before it is contended that such a definition does naught to fulfil such expectations of itself as a designator of an individual's scholastic or industrial position, ambitiousness, I would implore, is a state of mind that has never once been proffered for invocation but is realized as, rather to be, the intended or inadvertent presence of certain traits in certain measures, i.e. will of mind to push and pull, strength of heart to sustain and forbear, and acuity of intellect to beguile and deter. Ambition, therefore, is the truth of direction assured the truth of such an assemblage and not, contrary to what it is regrettably believed to be, any one of the two.

Ambition reserves unto itself a certain qualifying dignity; had it not, then there would be no ambitious fools.