Gracian Tells Good Looking People to Tone It Down

Here's an excellent article from Yahoo Finance on the efficacy of good looking people putting their photos on their resumés. It says that good looking men should include a picture, while good-looking women should leave theirs off. The reason: because young women are doing the resumé screening, that's why.

Gracian has some interesting advice for the good-looking as well, and it's more in line with the attached study's advice to women than to the men.

Balthasar Gracian and the Pain-body

Understanding of what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body has been around a long time. Here is one of Balthasar Gracian's maxims from The Art of Worldly Wisdom, written in 1637:

lxix Do Not Give Way to Every Common Impulse.

He is a great man who never allows himself to be influenced by the impressions of others. Self-reflection is the school of wisdom. To know one's disposition and to allow for it, even going to the other extreme so as to find the juste milieu between nature and art. Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-improvement. There be some whose humours are so monstrous that they are always under the influence of one or other of them, and put them in place of their real inclinations. They are torn asunder by such disharmony and get involved in contradictory obligations. Such excesses not only destroy firmness of will; all power of judgment gets lost, desire and knowledge pulling in opposite directions. [Italics added]

What has been less clearly stated is exactly what to do about the pain-body, how to dissolve it. Tolle says you dissolve the pain-body through simply becoming aware of it. This is a two-step process.