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When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states.
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Huston Smith (The Essential Rumi (Mystical Classics of the World))
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God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take places at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the caster oil?
The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig,whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe,is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.
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George Orwell (Why I Write)
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You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.
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Hank Green (A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2))
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26. Kieran C. R. Fox, “Is Meditation Associated with Altered Brain Structure? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Morphometric Neuroimaging in Meditation Practitioners,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 43 (2014): 48–73.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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It must be understood that in some cases the process by which a god or goddess degenerates into a fairy may occupy centuries, and that in the passage of generations such an alteration may be brought about in appearance and traits as to make it seem impossible that any relationship actually exists between the old form and the new. This may be accounted for by the circumstance that in gradually assuming the traits of fairyhood the god or goddess may also have taken on the characteristics of fairies which Already existed in the minds of the folk, the elves of a past age, who were already elves at a period when he or she still flourished in the full vigour of godhead. For in one sense Faerie represents a species of limbo, a great abyss of traditional material, into which every kind of ancient belief came to be cast as the acceptance of one new faith after another dictated the abandonment of forms and ideas unacceptable to its doctrines. The difference between god and fairy is indeed the difference between religion and folk-lore.
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Lewis Spence (British Fairy Origins)
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There are times in life that we ascribe qualities or traits to other people that are inaccurate or fail to recognize other aspects of their being because we are emotionally invested in that person fulfilling a specific role in our life. When we claim that the other person changed it is not so much that they altered their core composition, but we now must admit to ourselves that our original perception of them was imprecise.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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A number of terrible things about falling in love make it not worth the time and the effort. But the worst of these is that we can never truly fall in love with a person, but only what we think that person is - more precisely, we fall in love with an image of a person that we create in our minds based on a few inconsequential traits: hair color; bloodline; timbre of voice; preference in music or literature. We are so quick to make a judgment on first sight, and it is so easy for us to decide that the object of our love is unquestionably perfect. And while people can only be human at best, these same fallible humans are more than capable of imagining each other to be infallible gods.
Any relationship we have with another human being is an ongoing process of error correction, altering this image that we see in our mind's eye whenever we lay love-blinded eyes on our beloved. It changes bit by bit until it matches the beloved herself, who is invariably less than perfect, often unworthy of love, and often incapable of giving love. This is why any extended interpersonal relationship other than the most superficial, be it a friendship, a romance, or a tie between father and daughter, must by necessity involve disappointment and pain. When the woman you worship behaves as a human being eventually will, she does not merely disappoint; she commits sacrilege, as if the God we worship were to somehow damn Himself.
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Dexter Palmer (The Dream of Perpetual Motion)
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We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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The New York power failure was not the first time the Hell's Angels have confounded the forces of decency and got off scot-free. They are incredibly devious. Law enforcement officials have compared their guile to that of the snipe, a wily beast that many have seen but few have ever trapped. This is because the snipe has the ability to transform himself, when facing capture, into something entirely different. The only other animals capable of this are the werewolf and the Hell's Angel, which have many traits in common. The physical resemblance is obvious, but far more important is the transmogrification factor, the strange ability to alter their own physical structure, and hence "disappear." The Hell's Angels are very close-mouthed about this, but it is a well-known fact among public officials. ... About halfway through our talk I got a strong whiff of the transmogrification factor, but I was hardly prepared for the mayor's special fillip on it. There were plenty of Hell's Angels at the riot, "but they escaped, " he explained, "behind a wall of fire." While he elaborated on this I checked my calendar to make sure I hadn't lost track of the days. If it was Sunday, perhaps he had just come back from church in a high, biblical state of mind. At any moment I expected to hear that the Angels had driven their motorcycles straight into the sea, which had rolled back to let them pass. But no, it wasn't like that. The mayor was not loath to give details of the escape; he wanted law enforcement agencies everywhere to be warned of the Angels' methods. Knowledge is power, he opined.
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Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels)
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As bitter as it may be, the fact remains: It is the irresponsibleness of masses of people that lies at the basis of fascism of all countries, nations, and races, etc. Fascism is the result of man's distortion over thousands of years. It could have developed in any country or nation. It is not a character trait that is confined specifically to the Germans or Italians. It is manifest in every single individual of the world. The Austrian saying "Da kann man halt nix machen" expresses this fact just as the American saying "Let George do it." That this situation was brought about by a social development which goes back thousands of years does not alter the fact itself. It is man himself who is responsible and not "historical developments." It was the shifting of the responsibility from living man to "historical developments" that caused the downfall of the socialist freedom movements. However, the events of the past twenty years demand the responsibility of the working masses of people.
If we take "freedom" to mean first and foremost the responsibility of each individual to shape personal, occupational, and social existence in a rational way, then it can be said that there is no greater fear than the fear of the creation of general freedom. Unless this basic problem is given complete priority and solved, there will never be a freedom capable of lasting more than one or two generations.
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Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
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Lessening the grip of the self, always a major goal of meditation practitioners, has been oddly ignored by meditation researchers, who perhaps understandably focus instead on more popular benefits like relaxation and better health.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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These regions very likely underlie what traditional texts see as the root causes of suffering—attachment and aversion—where the mind becomes fixated on wanting something that seems rewarding or on getting rid of something unpleasant.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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If the heart wanders or is distracted,” advised Francis de Sales (1567–1622), a Catholic saint, “bring it back to the point quite gently . . . and even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back . . . though it went away every time, your hour would be very well-employed.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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At first the flow of thoughts rushes like a waterfall, which sometimes discourages beginners, who feel their mind is out of control. Actually, the sense of a torrent of thoughts seems to be due to paying close attention to our natural state, which Asian cultures dub “monkey mind,” for its wildly frenetic randomness.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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our society suffers from an attention deficit. Today’s children grow up with a digital device at hand continuously, and those devices offer constant distractions (and a larger stream of information than for any generation in the past), so we consider boosting attention skills to be nothing short of an urgent public health need.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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Observed from the collectivist’s state of altered reality, anyone who in any way appears confident or superior to their grandiose ego and anyone who does not meet their needs, share their views, comply with their plans, or willingly provide narcissistic supply—all traits of the confident individualist—is viewed as the odd one out and as having an inconsiderate, self-absorbed, and egocentric personality.
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Mikkel Clair Nissen (Manipulism and the Weapon of Guilt: Collectivism Exposed)
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When Pat gave her ‘criminal-hero’ Tom Ripley a charmed and parentless life, a wealthy, socially poised Alter Ego (Dickie Greenleaf), and a guilt-free modus operandi (after he kills Dickie, Tom murders only when necessary), she was doing just what her fellow comic book artists were doing with their Superheroes: allowing her fictional character to finesse situations she herself could only approach in wish fulfillment. And when she reimagined her own psychological split in Ripley’s character — endowing him with both her weakest traits (paralyzing self-consciousness and hero-worship) and her wildest dreams (murder and money) — she was turning the material of the ‘comic book’ upside down and making it into something very like a ‘tragic book.’ 'It is always so easy for me to see the world upside down,’ Pat wrote in her diary– and everywhere else.
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Joan Schenkar (The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith)
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Again and again, the goal of the progressives is to unmoor the individual and society from America’s heritage with populist tirades, prodding, and indoctrination, the purpose of which is to build popular support for a muscular centralized government ruled by a self-aggrandizing intellectual elite through an extraconstitutional and autocratic administrative Leviathan. Moreover, the individual is to be denuded of his personal traits, “primitive nature,” and “old beliefs,” since his true liberty, satisfaction, and realization are said to be tied to the universality of the state. The government, through “science” and administration—unencumbered by ancient and archaic eternal truths—can alter society in ways that supposedly modernize and improve it. Furthermore, the individual’s focus on self rather than community, and his old habits, beliefs, and traditions, must be altered through socializing education and training, thereby making him the kind of person and citizen whose behavior better conforms to the egalitarian purposes and general welfare of the overall society. Of course, this is the death of individualism and republicanism.
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Mark R. Levin (Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism)
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The four main neural pathways meditation transforms are, first, those for reacting to disturbing events—stress and our recovery from it (which Dan tried not so successfully to document). As we will see, the second brain system, for compassion and empathy, turns out to be remarkably ready for an upgrade. The third, circuitry for attention, Richie’s early interest, also improves in several ways—no surprise, given that meditation at its core retrains our habits of focus. The fourth neural system, for our very sense of self, gets little press in modern talk about meditation, though it has traditionally been a major target for alteration.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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In order to get to know who is in your System, each individual alter needs to complete a piece of paper in the form of a circle (or triangle) which contains the following information: their name, their age (it might be an age range, like age 4-7), and their traits. strengths and skills. (All parts must have a name. If they do not have a name, they need to choose one. lf their name was given to them by a perpetrator and is too upsetting or if it has a negative association, they may wish to change their name—that is perfectly ok. Any name that is not negative or triggering is fine—it does not have to be a standard ‘proper name’ as they are commonly thought of.) On the back of the circle or triangle they need to write down what caused them to split off.
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A.T.W. (Got Parts?: an Insider's Guide to Managing Life Successfully with Dissociative Identity Disorder (New Horizons in Therapy))
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Groupies and hangers-on somehow fancy themselves entitled to the narcissist’s favour and largesse, his time, attention, and other resources. They convince themselves that they are exempt from the narcissist’s rage and wrath and immune to his vagaries andabuse
. This self-imputed and self-conferred status irritates the narcissist no end as it challenges and encroaches on his standing as the only source of preferential treatment and the sole decision-maker when it comes to the allocation of his precious and cosmically significant wherewithal.
The narcissist is the guru at the centre of a cult. Like other gurus, he demands complete obedience from his flock: his spouse, his offspring, other family
members, friends, and colleagues. He feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by his followers. He punishes the wayward and the straying lambs. He enforces discipline, adherence to his teachings, and common goals. The less accomplished he is in reality – the more stringent his mastery and the more pervasive the brainwashing.
Cult leaders are narcissists who failed in their mission to "be someone", to become famous, and to impress the world with their uniqueness, talents, traits, and skills. Such disgruntled narcissists withdraw into a "zone of comfort" (known as the "Pathological Narcissistic Space") that assumes the hallmarks of a cult.
The – often involuntary – members of the narcissist's mini-cult inhabit a twilight zone of his own construction. He imposes on them an exclusionary or inclusionary shared psychosis, replete with persecutory delusions, "enemies", mythical-grandiose narratives, and apocalyptic scenarios if he is flouted.
Exclusionary shared psychosis involves the physical and emotional isolation of the narcissist and his “flock” (spouse, children, fans, friends) from the outside world in order to better shield them from imminent threats and hostile intentions. Inclusionary shared psychosis revolves around attempts to spread the narcissist’s message in a missionary fashion among friends, colleagues, co-workers, fans, churchgoers, and anyone else who comes across the mini-cult.
The narcissist's control is based on ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzziness, and ambientabuse
. His ever-shifting whims exclusively define right versus wrong, desirable and unwanted, what is to be pursued and what to be avoided. He alone determines the rights and obligations of his disciples and alters them at will.
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Sam Vaknin
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The six characteristics that, taken together, reveal the nature of the gnostic attitude.
1) It must first be pointed out that the gnostic is dissatisfied with his situation. This, in itself, is not especially surprising. We all have cause to be not completely satisfied with one aspect or another of the situation in which we find ourselves.
2) Not quite so understandable is the second aspect of the gnostic attitude: the belief that the drawbacks of the situation can be attributed to the fact that the world is intrinsically poorly organized. For it is likewise possible to assume that the order of being as it is given to us men (wherever its origin is to be sought) is good and that it is we human beings who are inadequate. But gnostics are not inclined to discover that human beings in general and they themselves in particular are inadequate. If in a given situation something is not as it should be, then the fault is to be found in the wickedness of the world.
3) The third characteristic is the belief that salvation from the evil of the world is possible.
4) From this follows the belief that the order of being will have to be changed in an historical process. From a wretched world a good one must evolve historically. This assumption is not altogether self-evident, because the Christian solution might also be considered—namely, that the world throughout history will remain as it is and that man’s salvational fulfillment is brought about through grace in death.
5) With this fifth point we come to the gnostic trait in the narrower sense—the belief that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action, that this salvational act is possible through man’s own effort.
6) If it is possible, however, so to work a structural change in the given order of being that we can be satisfied with it as a perfect one, then it becomes the task of the gnostic to seek out the prescription for such a change. Knowledge—gnosis—of the method of altering being is the central concern of the gnostic. As the sixth feature of the gnostic attitude, therefore, we recognize the construction of a formula for self and world salvation, as well as the gnostic’s readiness to come forward as a prophet who will proclaim his knowledge about the salvation of mankind.
These six characteristics, then, describe the essence of the gnostic attitude. In one variation or another they are to be found in each of the movements cited.
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Eric Voegelin (Science, Politics & Gnosticism)
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Here – Marx’s second lasting contribution to modern thought – his view of human nature – ties in with his idea of freedom. Marx’s theory that human nature is not for ever fixed, but alters in accordance with the economic and social conditions of each period, holds out the prospect of transforming society by changing the economic basis of such human traits as greed, egoism, and ambition.
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Anonymous
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incidental by-products of alterations in other traits? Belyaev strongly leaned toward the latter view, because of a phenomenon known as “pleiotropy”: a single gene affecting multiple traits. Pleiotropy means that selection—whether natural or artificial—for one trait can affect many others. This is why evolutionary biologists make a distinction between selection for and selection of.9
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Anonymous
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We’re foolish, idealogical creatures at 18. We have no idea what we want out of life, but it’s the time when we’re the most sure that we do. It’s almost comical; never again will you be so thoroughly convinced of something based on so little experience. Which is why we make impetuous decisions, life-altering decisions we later come to regret. Because we’re so sure, and then so surprised at how wrong we were. Surprised and angry, really, because everyone else was right. And if there’s anything universally true about youth, it’s that we resent the absence of experience and wisdom that others have accumulated before us. We want to stubbornly believe we were born with that wisdom, like it’s an inherent trait, and we can’t stand the idea that everyone else watches us stumble without it.
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Dom Testa (God Maker (Eric Swan, #3))
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Meditation is a catch-all word for myriad varieties of contemplative practice, just as sports refers to a wide range of athletic activities. For both sports and meditation, the end results vary depending on what you actually do.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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The forces of nature inevitably unleash themselves in such a manner that the necessity for adaptation will be stirred. An extended drought, an unusually cold winter, a volcanic eruption, any one of these could alter the balance between those traits that improve a species’ chance for survival and those that hinder it. In essence, this is what had occurred in
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Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
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it seems likely that the states we practice in meditation gradually spill over into daily life to mold our traits—at least when it comes to handling stress.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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But you allow other entities to take away your freedoms all the time. It's an intrinsic part of your system. It couldn't function without that. You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.
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Hank Green (A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2))
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Thanks to our new biotechnologies, we now have the power to change the evolutionary trajectories of species that seem destined to disappear, to rescue and revitalize ecosystems that are threatened by the ever-expanding human footprint or that are struggling to adapt to our planet’s changing climate. We could, for example, transfer the domestic ferret’s resistance to Sylvatic plague to black-footed ferrets that are facing extinction across their native range because of the introduced disease. Or we could transfer heat-tolerance between coral populations that are suffering as the oceans warm, or immunize white-footed mice against Lyme disease so that they can no longer pass the disease to humans. We may even eventually bring something back. Not a mammoth or a passenger pigeon, but instead some trait or function or aspect of an extinct species that can, in its re-establishment, restore some missing ecosystem function and allow other species to thrive in today’s altered world.
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Beth Shapiro (How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton Science Library))
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Empathy meant that people felt the pain of those who were suffering. But when another group instead got instructions in compassion - feeling love for those suffering - their brains activated a completely different set of circuits, those for parental love of a child.
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Daniel Goleman
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A host of scholars who have studied surviving southeastern Indian groups conclude that few if any of these peoples possess cultures that do not bear the mark of significant contact with nonindigenous societies. Even the most “traditional,” such as the Seminoles of Florida, whom Nancy O. Lurie describes as “Contact-Traditional,” were significantly altered from precolonial days by the time pioneer “salvage” ethnologists described their cultural traits and created laundry lists that have since become benchmarks for defining aboriginal culture in the region. To many more traditional reservation-based groups, having surviving Indian cultural traits is extremely important to proving authenticity, although they are not required for acknowledgement via the BIA process. The existence of surviving Indian cultural traits is highly persuasive to most observers in proving that a group still exists as a viable tribal community.
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Mark Edwin Miller (Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment)
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There is a second practical limitation to moral outreach, namely, the persistence of ideological racism. Some of the cultural traits attributed to or associated with the ghetto poor (for example, attitudes toward authority, work, violence, parenting, sex and reproduction, school, and crime) closely resemble well-known and long-standing racist stereotypes about blacks (their supposed tendencies toward lawlessness, laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility, ignorance, stupidity, and sexual promiscuity). These stereotypes have long been invoked to justify the subordination, exploitation, and civic exclusion of blacks. An implication of the cultural divergence thesis is that ghetto conditions have produced a subgroup of blacks who, because of their cultural patterns, exhibit characteristics that racists have long maintained are “natural” to “the black race” and that these cultural traits are at least part of the explanation for why they are poor. To make matters worse, moral reform suggests that the ghetto poor are effectively incapable of altering these suboptimal traits on their own, as it calls for state intervention to change them. Moral reform programs, even voluntary ones, implicitly endorse the idea that poor blacks have personal deficiencies that they alone cannot remedy. In an era when biological racism has been largely discredited and claims that blacks are biologically inferior are not publicly acceptable, moral reform will inevitably strike many as the functional equivalent of classic racist doctrines.
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Tommie Shelby (Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform)
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We often hear climate change blamed on "human nature," on the inherent greed and shortsightedness of our species. Or we are told we have altered the earth so much and on such a planetary scale that we are now living in the Anthropocene, the age of man. These ways of explaining our current circumstances have a very specific, if unspoken meaning: that humans are a single type, that human nature can be essentialized to the traits that created this crisis. In this way, the systems that certain humans created, and other humans powerfully resisted, are completely let off the hook. Capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy—those sorts of systems.
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Naomi Klein (On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal)
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humans the prefrontal cortex takes up a larger ratio of the brain’s top layer, the neocortex, than in any other species, and has been the site of the major evolutionary changes that make us human. This neural zone, as we will see, holds the seeds of awakening to enduring well-being, but it is also entwined with emotional suffering. We can envision wonderful possibilities, and we also can be disturbed by worrisome
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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Only of late have the scientific data reached critical mass, confirming what our intuition and the texts told us: these deep changes are external signs of strikingly different brain function.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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Are you sad, lonely, scared? Happy, confident? Getting your period? Experiencing a peak of class anxiety? So-called advertisers can seize the moment when you are perfectly primed and then influence you with messages that have worked on other people who share traits and situations with you. I say “so-called” because it’s just not right to call direct manipulation of people advertising. Advertisers used to have a limited chance to make a pitch, and that pitch might have been sneaky or annoying, but it was fleeting. Furthermore, lots of people saw the same TV or print ad; it wasn’t adapted to individuals. The biggest difference was that you weren’t monitored and assessed all the time so that you could be fed dynamically optimized stimuli—whether “content” or ad—to engage and alter you.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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in the case of the Coxey industrials, they appeared to want something they had not earned. Their demands implied that poverty and unemployment did not stem from laziness or even bad luck, but rather from larger, systemic problems in the economy, in society—factors that were beyond any one person’s control.59 Such a claim raised vexing questions. Self-reliance, resourcefulness, individual initiative—these traits were intrinsic to the ideal of what it meant to be American. Americans always made do. If government took greater responsibility for people’s well-being, would that not alter the very essence of the United States, seduce and possibly corrupt its character? Was that not the aim of those foreign theories spread in workers’ enclaves in the big cities—anarchism, Communism, Socialism?
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Philip Dray (There is Power in a Union)
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all meditation methods at their root are practices in strengthening attention
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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The more everyday mindfulness, the greater the subjective boost in well-being.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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A surprise: mindfulness also improved working memory—the holding in mind of information so it can transfer into long-term memory. Attention is crucial for working memory; if we aren’t paying attention, those digits won’t register in the first place.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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As he practiced more, added loving-kindness to the mix, and went on retreats, his PTSD symptoms gradually became less frequent, less intense.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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A highly accomplished Tibetan meditation master studied in Richie’s lab once said that one hour spent practicing loving-kindness toward a difficult person is equivalent to one hundred hours of the same toward a friend or loved one.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not.
[…]
The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root.
[…]
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.
[…]
Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.
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George Orwell (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius)
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An altered trait—a new characteristic that arises from a meditation practice—endures apart from meditation itself.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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It is a well-known fact, and one that has given much ground for complaint, that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration, they become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy, that is to say that they exhibit typically sadistic and anal-erotic traits which they did not possess earlier during their period of womanliness,” Sigmund Freud declared in 1913.8 Well, you can argue that he was a man of his time; the first couple of decades of the twentieth century weren’t exactly known for their respect for women’s finer qualities. But unfortunately, the nonsense didn’t stop there. “The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates,” pronounced American gynecologist Robert Wilson in a 1963 essay;9 he then elaborated fulsomely on this theme in his 1966 bestseller Feminine Forever.10 This frighteningly influential book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to market hormone replacement therapy. “Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of being a woman stops,” psychiatrist David Reuben wrote in 1969 in another bestseller, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.11 The postmenopausal woman, he added, comes “as close as she can to being a man.” Or rather, “not really a man but no longer a functional woman.” Half a century on, has anything really changed? Sadly, I don’t think so. It might not be acceptable in most circles to write that kind of thing anymore, but menopausal women are too often the butt of men’s jokes for me really to believe that the attitudes themselves have shifted. They’ve just gone a little more underground. So if these are the stories men are telling about us, where are the stories we’re telling about ourselves? Unfortunately, they’re not always very much more helpful. A surprising number of self-help or quasi-medical books by female authors toe the male line, enjoining women to try to stay young and beautiful at all costs, and head off to their doctor to get hormone replacement therapy to hold off the “symptoms” of the dreaded aging “disease” for as long as possible. Their aim, it seems, is above all a suspension of the aging process, an exhortation to live in a state of suspended animation. And although more women are beginning to write about menopause as a natural and profoundly transformational life-passage, in the culture at large it is still primarily viewed as something to be managed, held off, even fought.
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Sharon Blackie (Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life)
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you allow other entities to take away your freedoms all the time. It’s an intrinsic part of your system. It couldn’t function without that. You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.
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Hank Green (A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2))
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I think a kid is always an obstacle. Every parent has to come face-to-face with things about themselves when they start a family, right? You have to alter behaviors you don't want impacting the kids, traits you don't want them to inherit, learn your own way of parenting, so you don't repeat the mistakes your own parents made. It isn't just about diaper changes and picking a good pediatrician. There is real work going on on the inside too. So what if our work is a little different than someone else's? We can do it.
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Jessica Gadziala (Reeve (The Henchmen MC #11))
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As with Lawrence, these other competitors in the field tended to be young, wholly untrained for the missions they were given, and largely unsupervised. And just as with their more famous British counterpart, to capitalize on their extraordinary freedom of action, these men drew upon a very particular set of personality traits—cleverness, bravery, a talent for treachery—to both forge their own destiny and alter the course of history. Among them was a fallen American aristocrat in his twenties who, as the only American field intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War I, would strongly influence his nation’s postwar policy in the region, even as he remained on the payroll of Standard Oil of New York. There was the young German scholar who, donning the camouflage of Arab robes, would seek to foment an Islamic jihad against the Western colonial powers, and who would carry his “war by revolution” ideas into the Nazi era. Along with them was a Jewish scientist who, under the cover of working for the Ottoman government, would establish an elaborate anti-Ottoman spy ring and play a crucial role in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If little remembered today, these men shared something else with their British counterpart. Like Lawrence, they were not the senior generals who charted battlefield campaigns in the Middle East, nor the elder statesmen who drew lines on maps in the war’s aftermath. Instead, their roles were perhaps even more profound: it was they who created the conditions on the ground that brought those campaigns to fruition, who made those postwar policies and boundaries possible. History is always a collaborative effort, and in the case of World War I an effort that involved literally millions of players, but to a surprising degree, the subterranean and complex game these four men played, their hidden loyalties and personal duels, helped create the modern Middle East and, by inevitable extension, the world we live in today.
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Scott Anderson (Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East)
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She’d fallen hard despite my warnings, had believed she could bring to life the heart of a man that had turned cold. Most women want to believe they can change a man, that there is some magic inside them, some trait, that will make him alter his ways. But people don’t change, not unless they want to.
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Lily White (Wishing Well)
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The debris that buried Steve saved his life as the plane’s fuselage exploded,
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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The authority is God’s. Although mediated through various styles, the fundamental authority of God in counseling must be evident in all biblical counseling. Any personality traits that interfere with, rather than mediate the message must be altered. That is why the Lord changed the apostle Peter from a weak, vacillating, fearful disciple to the bold fearless disciple who told the authorities, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
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Jay E. Adams (The Christian Counselor's Manual: The Practice of Nouthetic Counseling (Jay Adams Library))
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The first two jobs revolutions had in common one trait—people of average or even below-average intelligence could do many of the jobs with no more than a high school education. Will that be true in the digital, high tech third wave? And if it is not, what will be the consequences of living in a society where the brightest and hardest working are rewarded and almost everyone else is reduced to servant-level jobs and wages? Among leading economists, the belief is nearly universal that this third revolutionary wave rolling across the globe is so powerful that nothing can stop it or even alter its course. There are, Blinder says, no cures, just palliatives. He suggests spending more on job retraining, changing the education system for the future, making health care available to all whether they have a job or not, and improved protections for pensions.
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David Cay Johnston (Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill))
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But the brain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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For the Stoics, one key was seeing that our feelings about life’s events, not those events themselves, determine our happiness; we find equanimity by distinguishing what we can control in life from what we cannot.
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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Therefore, we must invest in research that allows us to grow more healthy food and transport it more effectively. And please make no mistake: that includes accepting genetically modified crops, those engineered to include a trait in the plant that doesn’t occur in its wild form, such as resistance to insects, tolerance to drought, greater vitamin A production, or more efficient use of sunlight to convert CO2 to sugar—as an absolutely necessary part of our food future. With more efficient plants, we could feed up to 200 million additional people, just from plants grown in the US Midwest. 33 These crops have gotten a bad rap for being “unnatural,” although many people who hold this view don’t recognize that most of the food we think of as “natural” has already been subject to significant genetic manipulation. The ears of corn you see at the grocery store look nothing like the wild plant from which modern corn came; over the course of nine thousand years, the spindly finger-length grass known as teosinte was cultivated to evolve larger cobs and more rows of plump, soft, sugary kernels, a process of modification that significantly altered the plant’s genome.34 The apples we’ve grown accustomed to eating have a bit more resemblance to their small, wild ancestors, but good luck finding one of those ancestors; they have been nearly wiped off the planet, and that’s no great loss to our diet, since the biggest genetic contributor to modern apples, Malus sylvestris, is so tart it’s darn near inedible.
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David A. Sinclair (Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To)
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the Visuddhimagga. This fifth-century text, which means Path to Purification in Pali (the language of Buddhism’s earliest canon),
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Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
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Sequences of base pairs, called genes, code for and produce gene products such as proteins. If just one of the base pairs is altered by mutation, say from ultraviolet damage, a virus, or cigarette smoke, the resulting protein will be aberrant, and usually faulty. Some of these mutations are not fatal and are actually kept by the cells and the population. These are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. If the incidence of the change is found in less than 1 percent of the population of humans, it is called a mutation; if more than 1 percent, it is typically called an SNP. There are about twenty million SNPs found in humans, and they account for many differences in the appearance and behavior of people, from curly hair to obesity to drug addiction. It is these SNPs where the hunt for genetic “causes” of traits and diseases has focused since the 1990s.
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James Fallon (The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain)
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The psychology of attraction is controlled
by childhood traits undiscovered within the self.
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Levi Johnson (ALTER EGO: Poetry for the Hidden Self)
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Nothing sprang up at him in his youth that declared the presence of God, but when he studied mathematics in high school and college, one principle arrested his attention: central tendency, the great force drawing natural phenomena toward moderation and away from extremes. Some birch trees are tall at maturity and some are short, but most are a middle height. A cat can give birth to any number of kittens from one to eight in a typical litter, but more kittens are born to litters of four than any other litter size. The differences fall quite smoothly along a bell curve. Scientific consensus was that all genetic traits, except of course those that had been intentionally altered, including human height, weight, intelligence, etc. were so distributed. It was like nature did what Brodt had one day in the breakroom heard Sanayah call "choosing the middle path." Was central tendency a law of nature or a law of God, or were they the same thing?
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Gwen Chavarria (Residuals Squared: A Speculative Fiction)