Over the past eight years, the United States has worked hard to deepen partnerships across the region and across South-east Asia in particular. We're now a part of the East Asia Summit and we have a strategic partnership with Asean. At the US-Asean Leaders Summit I hosted earlier this year in Sunnylands, California, we agreed to a set of principles that will shape the future peace and prosperity of the region, from promoting innovation and furthering economic integration to addressing transnational challenges like global health security and climate change.
When mortals are alive, they worry about death. When they're full, they worry about hunger. Theirs is the Great Uncertainty. But sages don't consider the past. And they don't worry about the future. Nor do they cling to the present. And from moment to moment they follow the Way.
There has been some conditionalities in the sense that this debt relief is supposed to release resources to be devoted to education, healthcare and infrastructure, for example. In the past African government made such promises but they never carried them out.
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you.
But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity; Her citizens, imperial spirits, Rule the present from the past, On all this world of men inherits Their seal is set.
In religion, India is the only millionaire... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.
But I can't confront the doubts I have. I can't admit that maybe the past was bad, and so, for the sake of momentum I'm condemning the future to death so it can match the past.
If you've got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper, if you have a network television station - I'm talking of the past - you know, your idiot nephew could run it. And if you've got a really good business, it doesn't make any difference.