Conquer From Within Quotes

To conquer frustration, one must remain intensely focused on the outcome, not the obstacles.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within

I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Weapons may be carried by creatures who are evil, dishonest, violent or lazy. The true warrior is good, gentle and honest. His bravery comes from within himself; he learns to conquer his own fears and misdeeds. —Matthias

You cannot defeat darkness by running from it, nor can you conquer your inner demons by hiding them from the world. In order to defeat the darkness, you must bring it into the light.

The ego lusts for satisfaction. It has a prideful ferocious appetite for its version of "truth". It is the most challenging aspect to conquer; the cause for most spiritual turmoil.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

Do not hate the player, nor the game...rule it!

Life is an island in an ocean of solitude and seclusion. Life is an island, rocks are its desires, trees its dreams, and flowers its loneliness, and it is in the middle of an ocean of solitude and seclusion. Your life, my friend, is an island separated from all other islands and continents. Regardless of how many boats you send to other shores, you yourself are an island separated by its own pains,secluded its happiness and far away in its compassion and hidden in its secrets and mysteries. I saw you, my friend, sitting upon a mound of gold, happy in your wealth and great in your riches and believing that a handful of gold is the secret chain that links the thoughts of the people with your own thoughts and links their feeling with your own. I saw you as a great conqueror leading a conquering army toward the fortress, then destroying and capturing it. On second glance I found beyond the wall of your treasures a heart trembling in its solitude and seclusion like the trembling of a thirsty man within a cage of gold and jewels, but without water. I saw you, my friend, sitting on a throne of glory surrounded by people extolling your charity, enumerating your gifts, gazing upon you as if they were in the presence of a prophet lifting their souls up into the planets and stars. I saw you looking at them, contentment and strength upon your face, as if you were to them as the soul is to the body. On the second look I saw your secluded self standing beside your throne, suffering in its seclusion and quaking in its loneliness. I saw that self stretching its hands as if begging from unseen ghosts. I saw it looking above the shoulders of the people to a far horizon, empty of everything except its solitude and seclusion. I saw you, my friend, passionately in love with a beautiful woman, filling her palms with your kisses as she looked at you with sympathy and affection in her eyes and sweetness of motherhood on her lips; I said, secretly, that love has erased his solitude and removed his seclusion and he is now within the eternal soul which draws toward itself, with love, those who were separated by solitude and seclusion. On the second look I saw behind your soul another lonely soul, like a fog, trying in vain to become a drop of tears in the palm of that woman. Your life, my friend, is a residence far away from any other residence and neighbors. Your inner soul is a home far away from other homes named after you. If this residence is dark, you cannot light it with your neighbor's lamp; if it is empty you cannot fill it with the riches of your neighbor; were it in the middle of a desert, you could not move it to a garden planted by someone else. Your inner soul, my friend, is surrounded with solitude and seclusion. Were it not for this solitude and this seclusion you would not be you and I would not be I. If it were not for that solitude and seclusion, I would, if I heard your voice, think myself to be speaking; yet, if I saw your face, i would imagine that I were looking into a mirror.

If the source were simply a few behavioral habits, you would have conquered them already.

There is a switch within all of us that we can flick from SURVIVE to CONQUER. Even though we need to survive sometimes, we shouldn’t get too comfortable in our life jackets.

Who dare tries is a success, and shall master the art of conquering dreams.

The antidote to a meaningless and lawless existence was provided by humanism, a revolutionary new creed that conquered the world during the last few centuries. The humanist religion worships humanity, and expects humanity to play the part that God played in Christianity and Islam, and that the laws of nature played in Buddhism and Daoism. Whereas traditionally the great cosmic plan gave meaning to the life of humans, humanism reverses the roles and expects the experiences of humans to give meaning to the cosmos. According to humanism, humans must draw from within their inner experiences not only the meaning of their own lives, but also the meaning of the entire universe. This is the primary commandment humanism has given us: create meaning for a meaningless world. Accordingly,

Every man on earth is sick with the fever of sin, with the blindness of sin and is overcome with its fury. As sins consist mostly of malice and pride, it is necessary to treat everyone who suffers from the malady of sin with kindness and love. This is an important truth, which we often forget. Very often we act in the opposite manner: we add malice to malice by our anger, we oppose pride with pride. Thus, evil grows within us and does not decrease; it is not cured – rather it spreads

We lead a difficult life, not always managing to fit our actions to the vision we have of the world. (And when I think I have caught a glimpse of the color of my fate, it flees from my gaze.) We struggle and suffer to reconquer our solitude. But a day comes when the earth has its simple and primitive smile. Then, it is as if the struggles and life within us were rubbed out. Millions of eyes have looked at this landscape, and for me it is like the first smile of the world. It takes me out of myself, in the deepest meaning of the expression. It assures me that nothing matters except my love, and that even this love has no value for me unless it remains innocent and free. It denies me a personality, and deprives my suffering of its echo. The world is beautiful, and this is everything. The great truth which it patiently teaches me is that neither the mind nor even the heart has any importance. And that the stone warmed by the stone or the cypress tree swelling against the empty sky set a boundary to the only world in which "to be right" has any meaning: nature without men. This world reduces me to nothing. It carries me to the very end. Without anger, it denies that I exist. And, agreeing to my defeat, I move toward a wisdom where everything has already been conquered -- except that tears come into my eyes, and this great sob of poetry which swells my heart makes me forget the truth of the world.

Souls’ may be subjugated and regulated – for a time – but never terminated. They live!

Sometimes Richard had the sinking suspicion that he had a far better chance of preventing Bonaparte from conquering Europe than he had of thwarting his mother’s plans to see him married off within the next Season.

To think about taking our place in nature instead of conquering it is a deep change in the way we see ourselves and the world. It means changing from binary and linear thinking to a cyclical paradigm that is a new declaration of interdependence.

The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming; a long outwaiting.

He was also aware that while the public was dividing and conquering itself by focusing on banal, media-driven conflicts such as Neoconservatives versus Liberals, democracy versus terrorism and the West versus the rest, destructive covert outfits were slowly but surely growing stronger. The special agent also understood how groups like Nexus fostered and benefited from the climate of fear perpetuated in television broadcasts and newspaper headlines. As long as Americans were consumed by fear of evildoers, whether these be communists, terrorists, religious extremists or any other potential enemy, he knew they would never realize the greatest enemy of all was operating within – within the West, within America, within their own Government.

The problem is that moderates of all faiths are committed to reinterpreting, or ignoring outright, the most dangerous and absurd parts of their scripture—and this commitment is precisely what makes them moderates. But it also requires some degree of intellectual dishonesty, because moderates can’t acknowledge that their moderation comes from outside the faith. The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside. In the twenty-first century, the moderate’s commitment to scientific rationality, human rights, gender equality, and every other modern value—values that, as you say, are potentially universal for human beings—comes from the past thousand years of human progress, much of which was accomplished in spite of religion, not because of it. So when moderates claim to find their modern, ethical commitments within scripture, it looks like an exercise in self-deception. The truth is that most of our modern values are antithetical to the specific teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And where we do find these values expressed in our holy books, they are almost never best expressed there. Moderates seem unwilling to grapple with the fact that all scriptures contain an extraordinary amount of stupidity and barbarism that can always be rediscovered and made holy anew by fundamentalists—and there’s no principle of moderation internal to the faith that prevents this. These fundamentalist readings are, almost by definition, more complete and consistent—and, therefore, more honest. The fundamentalist picks up the book and says, “Okay, I’m just going to read every word of this and do my best to understand what God wants from me. I’ll leave my personal biases completely out of it.” Conversely, every moderate seems to believe that his interpretation and selective reading of scripture is more accurate than God’s literal words. Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. It really isn’t hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery—you just put in a few lines like “Don’t take sex slaves!” and “When you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don’t rape any of them!” And yet God couldn’t seem to manage it. This is why the approach of a group like the Islamic State holds a certain intellectual appeal (which, admittedly, sounds strange to say) because the most straightforward reading of scripture suggests that Allah advises jihadists to take sex slaves from among the conquered, decapitate their enemies, and so forth.

Pride can be friend, ego can be foe...depending on which one we choose, or not, to conquer.

The conquered roam free in the box of insanity.

The one who has conquered himself is a far greater hero than he who has defeated a thousand times a thousand men. —FROM THE DHAMMAPADA (SAYINGS OF THE BUDDHA

When you conquer fear, you unleash a greater power from within you.

To prevent humiliating collisions with the universe, I suggest we all adopt an attitude of being open to learning in every moment of our relationships. Every interaction contains within it the possibility of deep connection with our beloved, with ourselves, and with the cosmos. Relationship is the ultimate spiritual path, because it constantly presents us with the challenge to love and embrace in the very situations in which we're most prone to shun and reject. For that reason above all, relationship is the place where our spirituality most visibly comes to light. You can tell more about a person's true spirituality from the way he or she treats his or her partner than you ever could from tallying that person's church attendance.

I would like there to exist spaces that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin: My birthpalce, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories . . . Such places don't exist, and it's because they do'nt exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it, It is never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it. My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer reseble waht was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory, I shall look at a few old yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognising them. The words 'Phone directory available within' or 'Snacks served at any hour' will no longer be written up in a semi-circle in white porcelain letter on the window of the little café in the Rue Coquillière. Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only Shapeless shreds: To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs. Paris 1973-1974

It has generally been assumed that fairy tales were first created for children and are largely the domain of children. But nothing could be further from the truth. From the very beginning, thousands of years ago, when tales were told to create communal bonds in face of the inexplicable forces of nature, to the present, when fairy tales are written and told to provide hope in a world seemingly on the brink of catastrophe, mature men and women have been the creators and cultivators of the fairy tale tradition. When introduced to fairy tales, children welcome them mainly because they nurture their great desire for change and independence. On the whole, the literary fairy tale has become an established genre within a process of Western civilization that cuts across all ages. Even though numerous critics and shamans have mystified and misinterpreted the fairy tale because of their spiritual quest for universal archetypes or their need to save the world through therapy, both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

The rebel defies more than he denies. Originally, at least, he does not suppress God; he merely talks to Him as an equal. But it is not a polite dialogue. It is a polemic animated by the desire to conquer. The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn. His insurrection against his condition becomes an unlimited campaign against the heavens for the purpose of bringing back a captive king who will first be dethroned and finally condemned to death. Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary. When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

Success expert Peter Lowe, who has gleaned success secrets from hundreds of people who are at the top of their profession, says, “The most common trait I have found in all successful people is that they have conquered the temptation to give up.

My best advice about writer’s block is: the reason you’re having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it’s the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from “writing well” to “writing badly,” you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don’t like to admit it, because we’re raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let’s just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that’s a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn’t going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it’s no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you’re an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn’t make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!

Have you ever noticed, those who are so beautiful it almost hurts, have some pretty terrible backgrounds. And when I say beautiful i don't mean looks, more so A essence that shines from them. Angelic humans they are, every chance to turn dark yet within them they find this unbreakable power that says no, it's always in the midst of chaos they find a calm and conquer on. I always look to those with big smiles but deep eyes and wonder where they've been or what they've seen. Strength isn't something we're born with, we humans acquire it along the way. And I am always ever so curious at what has broken them so deeply that they chose to finally rise. To finally love themselves a little deeper. Those kind of stories captivate me, surface connection doesn't even compare.

The way I see it right now, the United States of America has destroyed itself, or is destroying itself from within, thus making it vulnerable to being conquered from without. The United States of America is corrupt, as it has no rule of law, and little or no prudential regulation and supervision. The Global Financial Crisis, make no mistake about it, is a global Depression even worse, than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and was caused by the same thing – rampant corruption, and it will result in the same thing – World War.

I believe this movement will prevail. I don’t mean it will defeat, conquer, or create harm to someone else. Quite the opposite. I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense. I mean that the thinking that informs the movement’s goals will reign. It will soon suffuse most institutions, but before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior. Some say it is too late, but people never change when they are comfortable. Helen Keller threw aside the gnawing fears of chronic bad news when she declared, “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!” In such a time, history is suspended and thus unfinished. It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives. My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but cooperation must be on the planet’s terms. The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and reimagine the world from the bottom up, based on the first principles if justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different. We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize out social and ecological fabric. It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers. “We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is more harmful resides within is, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, as history of violence and greed. There is not question that the environmental movement is most critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is actually the other way around; the only way we are going to put out this fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus. Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally. What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name.

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be a continuous “recurrence of birth” a rebirth, to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn. The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperation's of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of our self, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life. We should tower in stature. Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should indeed become the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day—a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung has called “the archetypal images.” This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, “discrimination.

We desire some pleasure, and the material means of obtaining it are lacking. “It is a mistake,” Labruyère tells us, “to be in love without an ample fortune.” There is nothing for it but to attempt a gradual elimination of our desire for that pleasure. [...] But the pleasure can never be realised. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our heart until it desires something other than what it is going to obtain. And if this transposition has been so rapid that our heart has not had time to change, nature does not, on that account, despair of conquering us, in a manner more gradual, it is true, more subtle, but no less efficacious. It is then, at the last moment, that the possession of our happiness is wrested from us, or rather it is that very possession which nature, with diabolical cleverness, uses to destroy our happiness. After failure in every quarter of the domain of life and action, it is a final incapacity, the mental incapacity for happiness, that nature creates in us. The phenomenon, of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives way to the bitterest of reactions.

As you watch anything—a tree, your wife, your children, your neighbor, the stars of a night, the light on the water, the bird in the sky, anything—there is always the observer—the censor, the thinker, the experiencer, the seeker—and the thing he is observing; the observer and the observed; the thinker and the thought. So, there is always a division. It is this division that is time. That division is the very essence of conflict. And when there is conflict, there is contradiction. There is “the observer and the observed”—that is a contradiction; there is a separation. And hence where there is contradiction, there is conflict. And when there is conflict, there is always the urgency to get beyond it, to conquer it, to overcome it, to escape from it, to do something about it, and all that activity involves time…. As long as there is this division, time will go on, and time is sorrow. And a man who will understand the end of sorrow must understand this, must find, must go beyond this duality between the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experienced. That is, when there is a division between the observer and the observed, there is time, and therefore there is no ending of sorrow. Then, what is one to do? You understand the question? I see, within myself, the observer is always watching, judging, censoring, accepting, rejecting, disciplining, controlling, shaping. That observer, that thinker, is the result of thought, obviously. Thought is first; not the observer, not the thinker. If there was no thinking at all, there would be no observer, no thinker; then there would only be complete, total attention.

Would you believe me if I told you an entire world was at your fingertips? What if I told you that all pain and suffering in your life could come to an end once and for all? Would you be intrigued? Would you smile? Would you weep in reverence? Would you find beauty in the smallest pleasures in life again? Would you rise from the ashes to conquer your demons and find your truest, most Divine Self? I did, and so can you.

Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.

Empire is also a very stable form of government. Most empires have found it alarmingly easy to put down rebellions. In general, they have been toppled only by external invasion or by a split within the ruling elite. Conversely, conquered peoples don’t have a very good record of freeing themselves from their imperial overlords. Most have remained subjugated for hundreds of years. Typically, they have been slowly digested by the conquering empire, until their distinct cultures fizzled out.

Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the orders of Hitler “the worst of all,” General Keitel said on the stand at Nuremberg, stemmed from the Nacht und Nebel Erlass—“Night and Fog Decree.” This grotesque order, reserved for the unfortunate inhabitants of the conquered territories in the West, was issued by Hitler himself on December 7, 1941. Its purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons “endangering German security” who were not to be immediately executed and make them vanish without a trace into the night and fog of the unknown in Germany. No information was to be given their families as to their fate even when, as invariably occurred, it was merely a question of the place of burial in the Reich. On December 12, 1941, Keitel issued a directive explaining the Fuehrer’s orders. “In principle,” he said, “the punishment for offenses committed against the German state is the death penalty.” But if these offenses are punished with imprisonment, even with hard labor for life, this will be looked upon as a sign of weakness. Efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate.42 The following February Keitel enlarged on the Night and Fog Decree. In cases where the death penalty was not meted out within eight days of a person’s arrest, the prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly… these measures will have a deterrent effect because (a) the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace, (b) no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.

[a St. Luke 14:26.] Of course, the term 'hate' does not imply hatred of parents or relatives, or of life, in the ordinary sense. But it points to this, that, as outward separation, consequent upon men's antagonism to Christ, was before them in the near future, so, in the present, inward separation, a renunciation in mind and heart, preparatory to that outwardly, was absolutely necessary. And this immediate call was illustrated in twofold manner. A man who was about to begin building a tower, must count the cost of his undertaking. [b vv. 28-30.] It was not enough that he was prepared to defray the expense of the foundations; he must look to the cost of the whole. So must they, in becoming disciples, look not on what was involved in the present following of Christ, but remember the cost of the final acknowledgement of Jesus. Again, if a king went to war, common prudence would lead him to consider whether his forces were equal to the great contest before him; else it were far better to withdraw in time, even though it involved humiliation, from what, in view of his weakness, would end in miserable defeat. [c vv. 31, 32.] So, and much more, must the intending disciple make complete inward surrender of all, deliberately counting the cost, and, in view of the coming trial, ask himself whether he had, indeed, sufficient inward strength, the force of love to Christ, to conquer. And thus discipleship, then, and, in measure, to all time, involves the necessity of complete inward surrender of everything for the love of Christ, so that if, and when, the time of outward trial comes, we may be prepared to conquer in the fight. [d ver. 33.] He fights well, who has first fought and conquered within.

Dusk, they’d labeled the room—as if out of all the worlds mentioned within, this world remained their focus. This place. Pelias told her it was a world the Daglan had long coveted but had not had the chance to conquer. An empty world, but one of plenty. She had no way of knowing that he had spent our era of peace learning ancient summoning magic and searching the cosmos for whatever remained of the Daglan on other worlds. What he wanted from them, I can only guess—perhaps he knew that to wrest the Trove from Theia and seize power for himself, he needed someone more powerful than he was.

We knew that through wave after wave of successive generations, we would be born into the physical plane, and no matter how long it took, we would strive to wake up, and unify, and evolve, and eventually implement on Earth the same spiritual culture that exists in the Afterlife. Certainly the journey would be difficult, even torturous. With the first intuition to awaken, we would sense the Fear of aloneness and separation. Yet we would not go back to sleep; we would fight through the Fear, relying on the dim intuition that we weren’t alone, that we were spiritual beings with a spiritual purpose on the planet. And, following the urge of evolution, we would gravitate together into larger, more complex social groupings, differentiating into more diverse occupations, overcoming a need to defeat and conquer each other, and eventually implement a democratic process through which new ideas could be shared and synthesized and evolved into ever-better truths. Gradually our security would come from inside us, as we progressed from an expression of the divine in terms of nature gods to the divine as one father God outside ourselves to a final expression as the Holy Spirit within.

Within twenty-five years of the prophet Muhammad's death in 632, they had conquered all of the Fertile Crescent and Persia, and thrust into Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their lightning advance was even more penetrating towards the west: Egypt fell in 641 and the rest of North Africa as far as Tunisia in the next decade. Two generations later, by 712, the Arabic language had become the medium of worship and government in a continuous band of conquered territories from Toledo and Tangier in the west to Samarkand and Sind in the east. No one has ever explained clearly how or why the Arabs could do this.

The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

And now, if the people of the lower world chanced to be looking upward out of the turmoil of their petty perplexities, they probably mistook the castle in the air for a heap of sunset clouds, to which the magic of light and shade had imparted the aspect of a fantastically constructed mansion. To such beholders it was unreal, because they lacked the imaginative faith. Had they been worthy to pass within its portal, they would have recognized the truth, that the dominions which the spirit conquers for itself among unrealities become a thousand times more real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet, saying, “This is solid and substantial; this may be called a fact.

At the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a Philadelphia lady asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” It takes a nation of patriots to keep a republic. Especially this republic. The United States, with all its might, isn’t likely to be conquered from the outside anytime soon. If American liberty loses its luster, the dimming will come from within. It will be due to our own lack of attention and devotion. Without patriotism, there cannot be a United States. It falls upon us—upon you and me—to take care of this miraculous American democracy, to make it work, to love it.

Most people don’t discover what life is all about until just before they die. While we are young, we spend our days striving and keeping up with social expectations. We are so busy chasing life’s big pleasures that we miss out on the little ones, like dancing barefoot in a park on a rainy day with our kids or planting a rose garden or watching the sun come up. We live in an age where we have conquered the highest of mountains but have yet to master our selves. We have taller buildings but shorter tempers, more possessions but less happiness, fuller minds but emptier lives. Do not wait until you are on your deathbed to realize the meaning of life and the precious role you have to play within it.

When readers who are White, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, and able-bodied enter the fantastic dream, they are empowered and afforded a sense of transcendence that can be elusive within the real world. If this is the case, then readers and hearers of fantastic tales who have been endarkened and Othered by the dominant culture can never be plausible conquering heroes nor prizes to be won in the fantastic. Unless the tale is meant to be comedic, tongue-in-cheek, a wink and a nod that breaks the fourth wall and assures audiences that this is a parody of the fantastic, not the real story . . . . . . the implicit message that readers, hearers, and viewers of color receive as they read these texts is that we are the villains. We are the horde. We are the enemies. (Page 23).

Great speech to the German Reichstag Berlin, January 30, 1939 Once again I will be a prophet: should the international Jewry of finance (Finanzjudentum) succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a Bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe. Thus, the days of propagandist impotence of the non-Jewish peoples are over. National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy possess institutions which, if necessary, permit opening the eyes of the world to the true nature of this problem. Many a people is instinctively aware of this, albeit not scientifically versed in it. At this moment, the Jews are still propagating their campaign of hatred in certain states under the cover of press, film, radio, theater, and literature, which are all in their hands. Should indeed this one Volk attain its goal of prodding masses of millions from other peoples to enter into a war devoid of all sense for them, and serving the interests of the Jews exclusively, then the effectiveness of an enlightenment will once more display its might. Within Germany, this enlightenment conquered Jewry utterly in the span of a few years. Peoples desire not to perish on the battlefield just so that this rootless, internationalist race can profit financially from this war and thereby gratify its lust for vengeance derived from the Old Testament. The Jewish watchword “Proletarians of the world, unite!” will be conquered by a far more lofty realization, namely: “Creative men of all nations, recognize your common foe!

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. ….. Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

If in the life of man you find anything better than justice, truth, sobriety, manliness; and, in sum, anything better than the satisfaction of your soul with itself in that wherein it is given to you to follow right reason; and with fate in that which is determined beyond your control; if, I say, you find aught better than this, then turn thereto with all your heart, and enjoy it as the best that is to be found. But if nothing seems to you better than the divinity seated within you, which has conquered all your impulses, which sifts all your thoughts, which, as Socrates said, has detached itself from the promptings of sense, and devoted itself to God and to the love of mankind; if you find every other thing small and worthless compared with this, see that you give place to no other which might turn, divert, or distract you from holding in highest esteem the good which is especially and properly your own.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

In every affair consider what precedes and what follows, and then undertake it. Otherwise you will begin with spirit, indeed, careless of the consequences, and when these are developed, you will shamefully desist. “I would conquer at the Olympic Games.” But consider what precedes and what follows, and then, if it be for your advantage, engage in the affair. You must conform to rules, submit to a diet, refrain from dainties; exercise your body, whether you choose it or not, at a stated hour, in heat and cold; you must drink no cold water, and sometimes no wine—in a word, you must give yourself up to your trainer as to a physician. Then, in the combat, you may be thrown into a ditch, dislocate your arm, turn your ankle, swallow an abundance of dust, receive stripes [for negligence], and, after all, lose the victory. When you have reckoned up all this, if your inclination still holds, set about the combat. Otherwise, take notice, you will behave like children who sometimes play wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy, when they happen to have seen and admired these shows. Thus you too will be at one time a wrestler, and another a gladiator; now a philosopher, now an orator; but nothing in earnest. Like an ape you mimic all you see, and one thing after another is sure to please you, but is out of favor as soon as it becomes familiar. For you have never entered upon anything considerately; nor after having surveyed and tested the whole matter, but carelessly, and with a halfway zeal. Thus some, when they have seen a philosopher and heard a man speaking like Euphrates[3]—though, indeed, who can speak like him?—have a mind to be philosophers, too. Consider first, man, what the matter is, and what your own nature is able to bear. If you would be a wrestler, consider your shoulders, your back, your thighs; for different persons are made for different things. Do you think that you can act as you do and be a philosopher, that you can eat, drink, be angry, be discontented, as you are now? You must watch, you must labor, you must get the better of certain appetites, must quit your acquaintances, be despised by your servant, be laughed at by those you meet; come off worse than others in everything—in offices, in honors, before tribunals. When you have fully considered all these things, approach, if you please—that is, if, by parting with them, you have a mind to purchase serenity, freedom, and tranquillity. If not, do not come hither; do not, like children, be now a philosopher, then a publican, then an orator, and then one of Caesar’s officers. These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own reason or else externals; apply yourself either to things within or without you—that is, be either a philosopher or one of the mob.

If there are always forces around which are concerned to depress and discourage, there are always forces above and around us which we can draw upon, - draw into ourselves to restore, to fill up again with strength and faith and joy and the power that perseveres and conquers. It is really a habit that one has to get of opening to these helpful forces and either passively receiving them or actively drawing upon them - for one can do either. It is easier if you have the conception of them above and around you and the faith and the will to receive them - for that brings the experience and concrete sense of them and the capacity to receive at need or at will. It is a question of habituating your consciousness to get into touch and keep in touch with these helpful forces - and for that you must accustom yourself to reject the impressions forced on you by the others, depression, self-distrust, repining and all similar disturbances. ... it is part of the experience of those who have advanced far in Yoga that besides the ordinary forces and activities of the mind and life and body in Matter, there are other forces and powers that can act and do act from behind and from above; there is also a spiritual dynamic power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in the spiritual consciousness, though all do not care to possess or, possessing, to use it, and this power is greater than any other and more effective. The invisible Force producing tangible results both inward and outward is the whole meaning of the Yogic consciousness. Your question about Yoga bringing merely a feeling of Power without any result was really very strange. Who would be satisfied with such a meaningless hallucination and call it Power? If we had not had thousands of experiences showing that the Power within could alter the mind, develop its powers, add new ones, bring in new ranges of knowledge, master the vital movements, change the character, influence men and things, control

God’s goodness comes to us amidst the battle and dust of our own suffering, our own long defeat. God always arrives with healing. But he is humble and meek, a king who comes in through the back door of our hearts not to conquer and raze our imperfections away but to hold and heal us by the intimacy of his touch, his presence here with us in the inmost rooms of our suffering. The power of God is radically gentle, never rough with our needs or careless with our yearning. God is fixed upon the restoration of our whole selves and souls, not just the bits that everyone else can see. Yet the very tenderness of his power is something we sometimes treat as his weakness or cruelty because we crave a more visible result. The healing kind of power is not the sort we’ve been taught to respect by existence in a fallen world where power just means brute force. We want the swift and the visible: illness zapped away, money in our hands, brilliant doctors, prosperous lives, and conversion stories by the thousands. We crave visibility and approbation and health and big crowds that make us feel important enough to forget the frail selves we used to be. When we pray for God to come in power to save us, we often picture a scenario in which God invades our lives as the ultimate mighty man to banish our frailty and make us something entirely other than we are, capable of the will and force whose lack we so deeply feel. But God cradles and cherishes our frailty, and that is where the true power of his love is known. I always think it intriguing that in the Gospels Jesus seems far less interested in the faith and hope at work in broken people than merely the healing of their bodies. For I think God knows there is no real healing until our hearts are healed of their fear, our minds cleansed of doubt. Broken bodies, shattered hopes, suffering minds, terrible pasts - they leave us deathly ill with the twisted belief that love can never be great enough to encompass the whole of the story. We feel that we must subtract or conceal part of ourselves if we are ever to win the love of other people or God himself. We are diminished in our own eyes by our suffering, taught to despair of our dreams, to give up our hope that God will come with goodness in his hands. So God creeps in, gentle, and we know his touch because we are not discarded or dismissed, but healed. He comes to unravel our self-doubt, to untangle the evil we have believed, to call us back from the dark lands of our insecurity. He calls us by name and wakes us from sleep so that we rise to ask what this kind and precious King commands, and so often his command is simply to open our hands so that they may be filled with his goodness. For when God arrives as the healer, we learn anew that the anguished hopes we carry are held within God’s hand like the hazelnut of Mother Julian’s vision. The story he weaves for us may look radically different from what we thought we desired, but when it arrives, we will recognize it as the intimate gift of a love whose will for us is always so much greater than our own.

To this day when I inhale a light scent of Wrangler—its sweet sharpness—or the stronger, darker scent of Musk, I return to those hours and it ceases to be just cologne that I take in but the very scent of age, of youth at its most beautiful peak. It bears the memory of possibility, of unknown forests, unchartered territories, and a heart light and skipping, hell-bent as the captain of any of the three ships, determined at all costs to prevail to the new world. Turning back was no option. Whatever the gales, whatever the emaciation, whatever the casualty to self, onward I kept my course. My heart felt the magnetism of its own compass guiding me on—its direction constant and sure. There was no other way through. I feel it again as once it had been, before it was broken-in; its strength and resolute ardency. The years of solitude were nothing compared to what lay ahead. In sailing for the horizon that part of my life had been sealed up, a gentle eddy, a trough of gentle waves diminishing further, receding away. Whatever loneliness and pain went with the years between the ages of 14 and 20, was closed, irretrievable—I was already cast in form and direction in a certain course. When I open the little bottle of eau de toilette five hundred different days unfold within me, conversations so strained, breaking slowly, so painstakingly, to a comfortable place. A place so warm and inviting after the years of silence and introspect, of hiding. A place in the sun that would burn me alive before I let it cast a shadow on me. Until that time I had not known, I had not been conscious of my loneliness. Yes, I had been taciturn in school, alone, I had set myself apart when others tried to engage. But though I was alone, I had not felt the pangs of loneliness. It had not burdened or tormented as such when I first felt the clear tang of its opposite in the form of another’s company. Of Regn’s company. We came, each in our own way, in our own need—listening, wanting, tentatively, as though we came upon each other from the side in spite of having seen each other head on for two years. It was a gradual advance, much again like a vessel waiting for its sails to catch wind, grasping hold of the ropes and learning much too quickly, all at once, how to move in a certain direction. There was no practicing. It was everything and all—for the first and last time. Everything had to be right, whether it was or not. The waters were beautiful, the work harder than anything in my life, but the very glimpse of any tempest of defeat was never in my line of vision. I’d never failed at anything. And though this may sound quite an exaggeration, I tell you earnestly, it is true. Everything to this point I’d ever set my mind to, I’d achieved. But this wasn’t about conquering some land, nor had any of my other desires ever been about proving something. It just had to be—I could not break, could not turn or retract once I’d committed myself to my course. You cannot force a clock to run backwards when it is made to persevere always, and ever, forward. Had I not been so young I’d never have had the courage to love her.

With one final flip the quarter flew high into the air and came down on the mattress with a light bounce. It jumped several inches off the bed, high enough for the instructor to catch it in his hand. Swinging around to face me, the instructor looked me in the eye and nodded. He never said a word. Making my bed correctly was not going to be an opportunity for praise. It was expected of me. It was my first task of the day, and doing it right was important. It demonstrated my discipline. It showed my attention to detail, and at the end of the day it would be a reminder that I had done something well, something to be proud of, no matter how small the task. Throughout my life in the Navy, making my bed was the one constant that I could count on every day. As a young SEAL ensign aboard the USS Grayback, a special operation submarine, I was berthed in sick bay, where the beds were stacked four high. The salty old doctor who ran sick bay insisted that I make my rack every morning. He often remarked that if the beds were not made and the room was not clean, how could the sailors expect the best medical care? As I later found out, this sentiment of cleanliness and order applied to every aspect of military life. Thirty years later, the Twin Towers came down in New York City. The Pentagon was struck, and brave Americans died in an airplane over Pennsylvania. At the time of the attacks, I was recuperating in my home from a serious parachute accident. A hospital bed had been wheeled into my government quarters, and I spent most of the day lying on my back, trying to recover. I wanted out of that bed more than anything else. Like every SEAL I longed to be with my fellow warriors in the fight. When I was finally well enough to lift myself unaided from the bed, the first thing I did was pull the sheets up tight, adjust the pillow, and make sure the hospital bed looked presentable to all those who entered my home. It was my way of showing that I had conquered the injury and was moving forward with my life. Within four weeks of 9/11, I was transferred to the White House, where I spent the next two years in the newly formed Office of Combatting Terrorism. By October 2003, I was in Iraq at our makeshift headquarters on the Baghdad airfield. For the first few months we slept on Army cots. Nevertheless, I would wake every morning, roll up my sleeping bag, place the pillow at the head of the cot, and get ready for the day.

AUGUST 19 THE “ACCURSED THINGS” And you, by all means abstain from the accursed things, lest you become accursed when you take of the accursed things, and make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it. . . . But the children of Israel committed a trespass regarding the accursed things, for Achan . . . took of the accursed things; so the anger of the LORD burned against the children of Israel. —Joshua 6:18; 7:1 (NKJV) We have to leave “accursed things” behind. Led by Joshua, God delivered the city of Jericho into the Israelites’ hands. God just had one requirement: after the city is conquered, the Israelites should leave the “accursed things”—the idols, the spoils, the wicked items that corrupted Jericho—behind. After the victory, most of the Israelites obeyed God’s command. But one man, Achan, “took of the accursed things; so the anger of the LORD burned against the children of Israel.” We have to scan our lives to see if there are items within them not of God. Are we watching, consuming, or participating in things that the enemy can use for our destruction? If so, we have to leave them behind—not only for our sake, but for our children, and our children’s children.   Dear God, help me leave behind the “accursed things.” Break me of any dependencies, and bring me into your light. Amen.

The lack of traces is the trace of his Perfect One. In the immensity of the strength of his spirit, compared to the limited consciousness of human beings, he appears to hardly know he exists. In the guise of weakness, he has true strength; he knows he is powerful and yet appears weak. He knows he is enlightened and yet appears small and mediocre. He dulls what is sharp, clarifies what is confused, tones down his shining nature, and is outwardly identical with what is ordinary. He progresses without advancing; he absorbs without conquering; he has without owning. Becoming like everybody else, he becomes different from everybody. As he goes on, he is as prudent as one who crosses a winter stream; vigilant as one who knows he is surrounded by enemies; cold as a stranger; ephemeral as a melting snowflake; rough as a tree trunk; wide as the great valleys; impenetrable as deep water; inaccessible as solitary peaks. He arrives without walking; he penetrates without looking; achieves without willing; acts without doing; he just vanishes. He is obeyed without commanding; he wins without struggling; he draws people to himself without calling for them. How disheartening to those who uphold the myth of manhood based on muscles and metallic strength: this alone is the true man, the absolute man! He absorbs within himself the ambiguous virtue of the female.

Not every answer to the running of a great empire was to be found in the Qur’an. Similarly absent was guidance on some of the most basic aspects of daily life: whether it was acceptable for the faithful to urinate behind a bush, for instance, or to wear silk, or to keep a dog, or for men to shave, or for women to dye their hair black, or how best to brush one’s teeth. For the Arabs simply to have adopted the laws and customs of the peoples they had subdued would have risked the exclusive character of their rule. Worse, it would have seen their claim to a divinely sanctioned authority fatally compromised. Accordingly, when they adopted legislation from the peoples they had conquered, they did not acknowledge their borrowing, as the Franks or the Visigoths had readily done, but derived it instead from that most respected, that most authentically Muslim of sources: the Prophet himself. Even as Poitiers was being fought, collections of sayings attributed to Muhammad were being compiled that, in due course, would come to constitute an entire corpus of law: Sunna. Any detail of Roman or Persian legislation, any fragment of Syrian or Mesopotamian custom, might be incorporated within it. The only requirement was convincingly to represent it as having been spoken by the Prophet—for anything spoken by Muhammad could be assumed to have the stamp of divine approval.

She is also the power behind spiritual awakening, the inner force that unleashes spiritual power within the human body in the form of kundalini. And she is a guardian: beautiful, queenly, and fierce. Paintings of Durga show her with flowing hair, a red sari, bangles, necklaces, a crown—and eight arms bristling with weapons. Durga carries a spear, a mace, a discus, a bow, and a sword—as well as a conch (representing creative sound), a lotus (symbolizing fertility), and a rosary (symbolizing prayer). In one version of her origin, she appears as a divine female warrior, brought into manifestation by the male gods to save them from the buffalo demon, Mahisha. The assembled gods, furious and powerless over a demon who couldn’t be conquered, sent forth their anger as a mass of light and power. Their combined strength coalesced into the form of a radiantly beautiful woman who filled every direction with her light. Her face was formed by Shiva; her hair came from Yama, the god of death; her arms were given by Vishnu. Shiva gave her his trident, Vishnu his discus, Vayu—the wind god—offered his bow and arrow. The mountain god, Himalaya, gave her the lion for her mount. Durga set forth to battle the demon for the sake of the world, armed and protected by all the powers of the divine masculine.1 As a world protector, Durga’s fierceness arises out of her uniquely potent compassion. She is the deity to call on when you’re

Hartung tells of a horrifying study by the Israeli psychologist George Tamarin. Tamarin presented to more than a thousand Israeli schoolchildren, aged between eight and fourteen, the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua:   Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction . . . But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.’ . . . Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword . . . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.   Tamarin then asked the children a simple moral question: ‘Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?’ They had to choose between A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval and 26 per cent total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with partial approval. Here are three typical answers from the total approval (A) group:   In my opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well, and here are the reasons: God promised them this land, and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would have assimilated among the Goyim.   In my opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways.   Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth.   The justification for the genocidal massacre by Joshua is religious in every case. Even those in category C, who gave total disapproval, did so, in some cases, for backhanded religious reasons. One girl, for example, disapproved of Joshua’s conquering Jericho because, in order to do so, he had to enter it:   I think it is bad, since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure land one will also become impure and share their curse.   Two others who totally disapproved did so because Joshua destroyed everything, including animals and property, instead of keeping some as spoil for the Israelites:   I think Joshua did not act well, as they could have spared the animals for themselves.   I think Joshua did not act well, as he could have left the property of Jericho; if he had not destroyed the property it would have belonged to the Israelites.   Once again the sage Maimonides, often cited for his scholarly wisdom, is in no doubt where he stands on this issue: ‘It is a positive commandment to destroy the seven nations, as it is said: Thou shalt utterly destroy them. If one does not put to death any of them that falls into one’s power, one transgresses a negative commandment, as it is said: Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth!

In the painting, the face has been horribly lacerated by blows, swollen, with terrible, swollen and bloody bruises, the eyes open, the pupils narrow; the large, open whites of the eyes gleam with a deathly, glassy sheen. But strangely, as one looks at this corpse of a tortured man, a peculiar and interesting question arises: if this is really what the corpse looked like (and it certainly must have looked just like this) when it was seen by all his disciples, his chief future apostles, by the women who followed him and stood by the cross, indeed by all who believed in him and worshipped him, then how could they believe, as they looked at such a corpse, that this martyr would rise from the dead? Here one cannot help being struck by the notion that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature so powerful, then how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when they have not been conquered even by the one who conquered nature in his own lifetime, to whom it submitted, who cried: “Talitha cumi”8 – and the damsel arose, “Lazarus, come forth”,9 and the dead man came forth? Nature appears, as one looks at that painting, in the guise of some enormous, implacable and speechless animal or, more nearly, far more nearly, though strangely – in the guise of some enormous machine of the most modern devising, which has senselessly seized, smashed to pieces and devoured, dully and without feeling, a great and priceless being – a being which alone was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was, perhaps, created solely for the emergence of that being! It is as though this painting were the means by which this idea of a dark, brazen and senseless eternal force, to which everything is subordinate, is expressed, and is involuntarily conveyed to us. Those people who surrounded the dead man, though not one of them is visible in the painting, must have felt a terrible anguish and perturbation that evening, which had smashed all their hopes and almost all their beliefs in one go. They must have parted in the most dreadful fear, though each of them also took away within him an enormous idea that could never now be driven out of them. And if this same teacher could, on the eve of his execution, have seen what he looked like, then how could he have ascended the cross and died as he did now? This question also involuntarily presents itself as one looks at the painting.

God has not given us the spirit of fear. He has given us the spirit of Love and a competent mind. Love conquers fear, because Love has Power, that creates a competent mind, that allows a person to make rational decisions and use righteous judgment to resolve or solve problems. Through this God-given process, we are able to endure and persevere in times of hardships, and when facing a crisis. When our spirit is broken by hate, and heavy loads are placed upon us, we turn to God for strength in our storms of life. And we seek his Love to restore us to wholeness. He restores us with Hope. From within him we receive Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance as it is noted in Galatians 5:22. Because of God's Love for us, we are able to have the patience to wait for his Power to restore us so that we are in control of our mind to over-power fear and to lead a successful life to meet our goals and create a greater opportunity filled with his blessings. He has created us to be a victorious people. Therefore, we are able to create far greater opportunities through Love. God gives power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increases strength. (Isaiah 40:29) When we are broken by the storms of life, God's Love restore us. We bow before him, in a humble spirit at his throne of grace, and ask in prayer for mercy and renewed strength. It is here that we find the needed strength to forgive those who have wronged us and the Power to Love. Those who wait upon the Lord, shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31) Fear is powerless. It torments the mind and paralyzes the thought process. It causes panic. Thereby, leaving the person, feeling a sense of hopelessness and unwilling to trust others. It closes possibilities to allow for change. The prophet Isaiah noted; Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. (Isaiah 40:30) And when Jesus disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, "It is a spirit," and they cried out for fear. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I, be not afraid. (Matthew 14:26, 27) Fear is a person's worst enemy; it causes panic, that results in making irrational decisions. Such behavior is based on poor judgment, that was made due to a lack of patience, to make an adequate investigation of the situation before proceeding. The outcome will create serious problems that can cause serious harm. LOVE is the chain that binds us together. Do not allow hate to separate us. There is One God One family One faith One world We are not defined by belief or by faith nor religion. We are the family of God. Written by: Ellen J. Barrier Source of Scriptures: King James Version Bible

In 2006, researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler created fake newspaper articles about polarizing political issues. The articles were written in a way that would confirm a widespread misconception about certain ideas in American politics. As soon as a person read a fake article, experimenters then handed over a true article that corrected the first. For instance, one article suggested that the United States had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The next article corrected the first and said that the United States had never found them, which was the truth. Those opposed to the war or who had strong liberal leanings tended to disagree with the original article and accept the second. Those who supported the war and leaned more toward the conservative camp tended to agree with the first article and strongly disagree with the second. These reactions shouldn’t surprise you. What should give you pause, though, is how conservatives felt about the correction. After reading that there were no WMDs, they reported being even more certain than before that there actually were WMDs and that their original beliefs were correct. The researchers repeated the experiment with other wedge issues, such as stem cell research and tax reform, and once again they found that corrections tended to increase the strength of the participants’ misconceptions if those corrections contradicted their ideologies. People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired. Researchers Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks expanded on this work in 2013. In their study, people already suspicious of electronic health records read factually incorrect articles about such technologies that supported those subjects’ beliefs. In those articles, the scientists had already identified any misinformation and placed it within brackets, highlighted it in red, and italicized the text. After they finished reading the articles, people who said beforehand that they opposed electronic health records reported no change in their opinions and felt even more strongly about the issue than before. The corrections had strengthened their biases instead of weakening them. Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was “Conquer or die.” In the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar—for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red—he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. ….. Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men---machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it’s written “the kingdom of God is within man”, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!" - - Final Speech of "The Great Dictator" by Charlie Chaplin

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. ….. Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite! Charlie Chaplin, from The Great Dictator (1940)

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities. Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition. The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941. A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death. The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available. Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.

But sleep tha pondereth and is not to be and there oh may my weary spirit dwell apart forms heaven's eternity and yet how far from hell. other friends have flown before on the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before the bird said nevermore. leave my loneliness unbroken. how dark a woe yet how sublimes a hope. And the fever called living is conquered at last. I stand amid the roar of a surf tormented shore and i hold within my hand grains of the golden sand how few yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep while i weep while i weep o god can i not grasp them with a tighter clasp o god can i not save one from the pitiless wave is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream. Hell rising form a thousand thrones shall do it reverence. It was the dead who groaned within lest the dead who is forsaken may not be happy now. even for thy woes i love thee even for thy woes thy beauty and thy woes think of all that is airy and fairy like and all that is hideous and unwieldy. hast thou not dragged Diana from her car. I care not though it perishes with a thought i then did cherish. For on its wing was dark alley and as it fluttered fell an essence powerful to destroy a soul that knew it well. (Talking about death) the intense reply of hers to our intelligence. Then all motion of whatever nature creates most writers poets in especial prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy an ecstatic intuition and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought at the true purposes seized only at the last moment at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable at the cautions selection and rejections at the painful erasures and interpolations in a word at the wheels and pinions the tackle for scene shifting the steep ladders and demon traps the cock[s feathers a the red pain and the black patches which in ninety nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary _histiro. Wit the Arabians there is a medium between heaven and hell where men suffer no punishment but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they supposed to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment. If i could dwell where israfel hath dwelt and he where i he might not sing so wildly well mortal melody, while a bolder note than this might swell form my lyre within the sky. And i am drunk with love of the dead who is my bride. And so being young and dipt in folly , I feel in love with melancholy. I could not love except where death was mingling his with beauty's breath or hymen, Time, and destiny were stalking between her and me. Yet that terror was not friegt but a tremulous delight a feeling not the jeweled mine could teach or bribe me to define nor love although the love were thine. Whose solitary soul could make an Eden of that dim lake. that my young life were a lasting dream my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the morrow. An idle longing night and day to dream my very life away. As others saw i could not bring my passions from a comman spring from the sam source i have not taken my sorrow and all i loved i loved alone La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude estune belle chose impulse upon the ether the source of all motion is thought and the source of all thought. Be of heart and fear nothing your allotted days of stupor have expired and tomorrow i will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence. unknown now known of the speculative future merged in the august and certain present.

I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was "Conquer or die." In the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar—for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red—he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick—"Fire! for God's sake fire!"—and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.

At any rate, when the war of liberation, which was directed by the princes of Thebes, was finally brought to a successful conclusion and the Arabs were expelled, we find the Egyptians a much changed nation. They had adopted for war the use of horse and chariot, which they learnt from their Semitic conquerors, whose victory was in all probability largely gained by their use, and, generally speaking, they had become much more like the Western Asiatic nations. Egypt was no longer isolated, for she had been forcibly brought into contact with the foreign world, and had learned much. She was no longer self-contained within her own borders. If the Semites could conquer her, so could she conquer the Semites. Armed with horse and chariot, the Egyptians went forth to battle, and their revenge was complete. All Palestine and Syria were Egyptian domains for five hundred years after the conquest by Thothmes I and III, and Ashur and Babel sent tribute to the Pharaoh of Egypt.

Eight months [after 9/11], after the most intensive international investigation in history, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the press that they still didn't know who did it. He said they had suspicions. The suspicions were that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan but implemented in Germany and the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, in the United States. After 9/11, Bush II essentially ordered the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, and they temporized. They might have handed him over, actually. They asked for evidence that he was involved in the attacks of 9/11. And, of course, the government, first of all, couldn't given them any evidence because they didn't have any. But secondly, they reacted with total contempt. How can you ask us for evidence if we want you to hand somebody over? What lèse-majesté is this? So Bush simply informed the people of Afghanistan that we're going to bomb you until the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. He said nothing about overthrowing the Taliban. That came three weeks later, when British admiral Michael Boyce, the head of the British Defense Staff, announced to the Afghans that we're going to continue bombing you until you overthrow your government. This fits the definition of terrorism exactly, but it's much worse. It's aggression. How did the Afghans feel about it? We actually don't know. There were leading Afghan anti-Taliban activists who were bitterly opposed to the bombing. In fact, a couple of weeks after the bombing started, the U.S. favorite, Abdul Haq, considered a great martyr in Afghanistan, was interviewed about this. He said that the Americans are carrying out the bombing only because they want to show their muscle. They're undermining our efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, which we can do. If, instead of killing innocent Afghans, they help us, that's what will happen. Soon after that, there was a meeting in Peshawar in Pakistan of a thousand tribal leaders, some from Afghanistan who trekked across the border, some from Pakistan. They disagreed on a lot of things, but they were unanimous on one thing: stop the bombing. That was after about a month. Could the Taliban have been overthrown from within? It's very likely. There were strong anti-Taliban forces. But the United States didn't want that. It wanted to invade and conquer Afghanistan and impose its own rule. ...There are geostrategic reasons. They're not small. How dominant they are in the thinking of planners we can only speculate. But there is a reason why everybody has been invading Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. The country is in a highly strategic position relative to Central Asian, South Asia, and the Middle East. There are specific reasons in the present case having to do with pipeline projects, which are in the background. We don't know how important these considerations are, but since the 1990s the United States has been trying hard to establish the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI)from Turkmenistan, which has a huge amount of natural gas, to India. It has to go through Kandahar, in fact. So Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India are all involved. The United States wants the pipeline for two reasons. One reason is to try to prevent Russia from having control of natural gas. That's the new "great game": Who controls Central Asian resources? The other reason has to do with isolating Iran. The natural way to get the energy resources India needs is from Iran, a pipeline right from Iran to Pakistan to India. The United States wants to block this from happening in the worst way. It's a complicated business. Pakistan has just agreed to let the pipeline run from Iran to Pakistan. The question is whether India will try to join in. The TAPI pipeline would be a good weapon to try to undercut that.

Muhammad’s violent end years and final violent words were quickly followed by those who succeeded him in power, after his death in 632 AD.          “Within thirty years after Muhammad’s death Islam achieved the most spectacular expansion in its history. During the caliphate of Muhammad’s immediate successors from 632 to 661, Islam conquered the whole Arabian peninsula and invaded territories which had been in Greco-Roman hands since the reign of Alexander the Great….Damascus fell in 635. Jerusalem was captured in 638. In the same year Antioch fell, and the other great Hellenistic capital, Alexandria, became a permanent Arab possession in 646. Coastal cities in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, as well as the island of Cyprus were successively occupied by Arabs in a short period of time…The rapid advance of Islam spread panic and consternation among the Christians in the Greek Near East…The Arabic wars against the Greeks were not only political and economic wars, but holy wars of Islam against Christianity.” (“Greek Christian and Other Accounts of the Muslim Conquests of the Near East,” Demetrios Constantelos, article in The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Books, 2005, Edited by Andrew Bostom, MD).

Part of me has always thought that if the world found out what I really was, it would reject me. The people in my life could not be ready for what I saw within myself. I was tempted, for the longest time, to walk away from the human world and remain on my own until I expired. Having already acquired the independence I would need to survive, both physically and spiritually, I had grown comfortable with my existence and did not fear isolation. I saw no way for the person I was becoming to coexist with the world as I perceived it. Similar sentiments have echoed endlessly in the past as individuals have grown aware of themselves. In my recent past, my ambition changed. Maybe I got stronger. Maybe I became more aware of what the problem was and realized what I could do about it. I reached the conclusion that I had a place somewhere. I would still be something of an outsider – living on the fringe and doing things the way I wanted– but I would not completely abandon the trappings of society. Everything I have seen so far gives me a vantage place from which to plot my involvement in the world. I see better now what people need, and I understand what I am equipped to provide.

But in 2009, even as the British track cycling team was preparing for the London Olympics, Brailsford embarked upon a new challenge. He created a road cycling team, Team Sky, while continuing to oversee the track team. On the day the new outfit was announced to the world, Brailsford also announced that they would win the Tour de France within five years. Most people laughed at this aspiration. One commentator said: “Brailsford has set himself up for an almighty fall.” But in 2012, two years ahead of schedule, Bradley Wiggins became the first-ever British rider to win the event. The following year, Team Sky triumphed again when Chris Froome, another Brit, won the general classification. It was widely acclaimed as one of the most extraordinary feats in British sporting history. How did it happen? How did Brailsford conquer not one cycling discipline, but two? These were the questions I asked him over dinner at the team’s small hotel after the tour of the facilities. His answer was clear: “It is about marginal gains,” he said. “The approach comes from the idea that if you break down a big goal into small parts, and then improve on each of them, you will deliver a huge increase when you put them all together.” It sounds simple, but as a philosophy, marginal gains has become one of the hottest concepts not just in sports, but beyond. It has formed the basis of business conferences, and seminars and has even been debated in the armed forces. Many British sports now employ a director of marginal gains.

As I peer back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem to view my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, the Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, and the Second Miracle Age. The Age of Miracles began with Fisk and ended with Germany. I was bursting with the joy of living. I seemed to ride in conquering might. I was captain of my soul and master of fate! I willed to do! It was done. I wished! The wish came true.

The Interview The largest determining factor in whether you get a job is usually the interview itself. You’ve made impressions all along—with your telephone call and your cover letter and resume. Now it is imperative that you create a favorable impression when at last you get a chance to talk in person. This can be the ultimate test for a socially anxious person: After all, you are being evaluated on your performance in the interview situation. Activate your PMA, then build up your energy level. If you have followed this program, you now possess the self-help techniques you need to help you through the situation. You can prepare yourself for success. As with any interaction, good chemistry is important. The prospective employer will think hard about whether you will fit in—both from a production perspective and an interactive one. The employer may think: Will this employee help to increase the bottom line? Will he interact well as part of the team within the social system that already exists here? In fact, your chemistry with the interviewer may be more important than your background and experience. One twenty-three-year-old woman who held a fairly junior position in an advertising firm nonetheless found a good media position with one of the networks, not only because of her skills and potential, but because of her ability to gauge a situation and react quickly on her feet. What happened? The interviewer began listing the qualifications necessary for the position that was available: “Self-starter, motivated, creative . . .” “Oh,” she said, after the executive paused, “you’re just read my resume!” That kind of confidence and an ability to take risks not only amused the interviewer; it displayed some of the very skills the position required! The fact that interactive chemistry plays such a large role in getting a job has both positive and negative aspects. The positive side is that a lack of experience doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t get a particular job. Often, with the right basic education and life skills, you can make a strong enough impression based on who you are and how capable you seem that the employer may feel you are trainable for the job at hand. In my office, for example, we interviewed a number of experienced applicants for a secretarial position, only to choose a woman whose office skills were not as good as several others’, but who had the right chemistry, and who we felt would fit best into the existing system in the office. It’s often easier to teach or perfect the required skills than it is to try to force an interactive chemistry that just isn’t there. The downside of interactive chemistry is that even if you do have the required skills, you may be turned down if you don’t “click” with the interviewer.

When evaluating a new client for degree of independence, I consider four factors: 1. Emotional issues: Does the person have good resources within himself or herself for coping independently with emotional issues that come up, or does he or she turn to parents not only for advice, but for cues as to how to react to the event in question? 2. Financial issues: Does the adult child earn an adequate living on his or her own, or does he or she rely heavily on parental input for things such as job contacts, supplemental funds, or housing? 3. Practical issues/interactive situations: Can the person manage day-to-day living, finances, nutrition, exercise, and housekeeping? 4. Career/Education issues: Does the person have a rewarding job or career that is commensurate with his or her abilities and offers the potential for further success? Is the person willing to learn new things to increase his or her productivity or compensation? These are the basic skills of living, many of which are addressed in the social ability questionnaire. Just as there are levels of social functioning, so too there are levels of independent functioning. All three of the following levels describe an adult with some degree of dependency problems. A healthy adult is someone who is independent financially, is able to manage practical and interactive issues, and who stays in touch with family but does not rely almost solely on family for emotional support. Level 1—Low Functioning Emotional issues: Lives at home with parent(s) or away from home in a fully structured or supervised environment. Financial issues: Contributes virtually nothing financially to the running of the household. Practical issues: Chooses clothes to wear that day, but does not manage own wardrobe (i.e., laundry, shopping, etc.). Relies on family members to buy food and prepare meals. Does few household chores, if any. May try a few tasks when asked, but seldom follows through until the job is finished. Career/education issues: Is not table to keep a job, and therefore does not earn an independent living. Extremely resistant to learning new skills or changing responsibilities. Level 2: Moderately functioning Emotional issues: Lives either at home or nearby and calls home every day. Relies on parents to discuss all details of daily life, from what happened at work or school that day to what to wear the next day. Will call home for advice rather than trying to figure something out for him- or herself. Financial issues: May rely on parents for supplemental income—parents may supply car, apartment, etc. May be employed by parents at an inflated salary for a job with very few responsibilities. May be irresponsible about paying bills. Practical issues: Is able to make daily decisions about clothing, but may rely on parents when shopping for clothing and other items. Neglects household responsibilities such as laundry, cleaning and meal planning. Career/education issues: Has a job, but is unable to cope with much on-the-job stress; job is therefore only minimally challenging, or a major source of anxiety—discussed in detail with Mom and Dad. Level 3: Functioning Emotional issues: Lives away from home. Calls home a few times a week, relies on family for emotional support and most socializing. Few friends. Practical issues: Handles all aspects of daily household management independently. Financial issues: Is financially independent, pays bills on time. Career/education issues: Has achieved some moderate success at work. Is willing to seek new information, even to take an occasional class to improve skills.

It is the Great Ones, the masters of life, whose light illumines the pathway, even at its commencement, and grows brighter with each step. Their light shines continuously; and it is only the dark clouds in the minds of men that shut it out. These are the Buddhas of Compassion. A Buddha is one who has ascended the rungs of the evolutionary ladder of life, rung by rung, one after the other, and who thus has attained Buddhahood, which means human plenitude of spiritual and intellectual glory, and who has done all this by his own self-devised and self-directed exertions along the far past evolutionary pathway. He is an 'Awakened One,' one who manifests the divinity which is the very core of the core of his own being. The Buddhas of Compassion are the noblest flowers of the human race. They are men who have raised themselves from humanity into quasi-divinity; and this is done by letting the light imprisoned within, the light of the inner god, pour forth and manifest itself through the humanity of the man, through the human soul of the man. Through sacrifice and abandoning of all that is mean and wrong, ignoble and paltry and selfish; through opening up the inner nature so that the god within may shine forth; in other words, through self-directed evolution, they have raised themselves from mere man-hood into becoming god-men, man-gods — human divinity. Every human being is a Buddha unmanifest. Every human being has, in his inner constitution, not only the Celestial Buddha, the Dhyani-Buddha, which is his inner god, but his higher ego, which when expressing itself on earth as a man, is the Manushya-Buddha or Human Buddha. Ordinary men cannot fully and wholly manifest the powers of their higher spiritual will or ego, because ordinary men are too gross; they as vehicles are not yet sufficiently etherealized. They live too much in the planes of material being. They are passional; they are personal, consequently circumscribed, limited. Every human being is an unexpressed Buddha. Even now, within you and above you, it is your higher self, and your higher self is it; and as the ages pass and as you conquer the self in order to become the greater self, you approach with every step nearer and nearer to the “sleeping” Buddha within you. And yet truly it is not the Buddha which is 'asleep'; it is you who are sleeping on the bed of matter, dreaming evil dreams, brought about by your passions, by your false views, by your egoisms, by your selfishness — making thick and heavy veils of personality wrapping around the Buddha within. For here is the secret: the Buddha within you is watching you. Your own inner Buddha has his eye, mystically speaking, on you. His hand is reached compassionately downward toward you, so to speak, but you must reach up and clasp that hand by your own unaided will and aspiration — you, the human part of you — and take the hand of the Buddha within you. A strange figure of speech? Consider then what a human being is: a god in the heart of him, a Buddha enshrining that god, a spiritual soul enshrining the Buddha, a human soul enshrining the spiritual soul, an animal soul enshrining the human soul, and a body enshrining the animal soul. So that man is at the same time one, and many more than one. When a human being has learned all that earth can teach him, he is then godlike and returns to earth no more — except those whose hearts are so filled with the holy flame of compassion that they remain in the schoolroom of earth that they have long since advanced beyond and where they themselves can learn nothing more, in order to help their younger, less evolved brothers. These exceptions are the Buddhas of Compassion.

Killing "unbelievers" has been part of — of course not all of — Islam since its inception. Within 10 years of Muhammad's death Muslims had conquered and violently converted whole peoples from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to Syria. Muslims have offered conquered people death or conversion since that time.

The need of theory is supported by the eros of the philosopher. It is not the expression of his will to conquer nature. Therefore, the joys of contemplation are "immediate enjoyments," joys that belong intrinsically to contemplation, and they come without further setting of goals or justification to the one receptive to them. They are not tied to social use, neither dependent upon the opinion of others nor gained from the expectation of future glory. The love for the observation of nature, for the observation of the details of the structure in which nature becomes comprehensible, of the order in which nature is articulated, of the spectacle nature provides for one who takes an interest in its objects, who lets its forms, colors, and sounds affect him, this love accords with the love of oneself. Both discourage highfalutin plans to change the world by the transformation of nature. Both impose moderation on the philosopher. He will be especially adequate to his desire to "contribute" something "to this beautiful system" by his conceiving it as a "system" and as "beautiful." The contribution most his own is that he has the whole in view; that he sees things and beings within the horizon of the whole, that he investigates and orders them as parts, that he knows himself as a part and reflects on his relation to the whole or that he poses the question of the whole. But if he wants to keep the question of the whole in view, he may not lose himself. To conceive the "beautiful system," he must devote himself to it in detail and again return to himself. To be able to observe nature, he may not blend into it. Observation requires both proximity and distance.

Proxemics Proxemics is the study of how people use space. As a rule, people reveal how they feel toward each other by the distance they maintain between them. You can test this by observing people’s behavior in public. Where you place yourself in relation to others gives them direct information as to how you feel about them. Where they place themselves relative to you communicates a similar message to you. You can use this to understand the messages that others send to you, and to make sure that you in turn are sending appropriate messages to them. Different levels of physical closeness are appropriate for different levels of intimacy. Familiarize yourself with the four conversation zones listed below, and use the knowledge to interact more effectively: 1. Intimate distance: From actual touch to eighteen inches away. This distance is reserved for those people we are emotionally closest to. Sharing this zone is a sign of trust and an indication that one’s defenses have been lowered. When this zone is invaded inappropriately, we feel uncomfortable and threatened. It was the inability to recognize this distance that got Phil into trouble on his date with Carol. In dating, observing your companion’s reaction as you move into this zone is crucial. If you move within eighteen inches of your partner and he or she doesn’t retreat, it is an indication that the other person is comfortable. If the person moves away—even slightly—it is an indication that you have entered the intimate zone prematurely. If other indications suggest that this companion does in fact enjoy your company, continue to proceed. Most people will truly appreciate your ability to read them—much less awkward than having to discuss these things in the early stages of a friendship or potential romance! 2. Personal distance: Eighteen inches to four feet. This is the zone occupied by people who feel comfortable together. Eighteen inches is the distance at which most couples stand when in public, and the distance at which close friends might stand if they were having an intimate conversation. The far end of this range, from two and a half to four feet, is the zone beyond arm’s length. While this distance still indicates a reasonably close relationship, it is not nearly as intimate as the range of one and a half to three feet. 3. Social distance: Four to twelve feet. Generally the distance between people who work together and between the salesperson and customer in a store. The span of seven to twelve feet is usually reserved for more formal and impersonal situations. 4. Public distance: Twelve to twenty-five feet. The closer end of the span, twelve feet away, is what teachers usually use in the classroom. Anything further away suggests a lecture situation, in which conversation is almost impossible.

Job Acquisition The entire job-acquisition process—considering job prospects, your personal and professional preparation, creating a resume, going on a job interview—depends for success upon possessing social skills and managing anxiety. How you adapt to the stress of this process can play a major role. As with other aspects of interaction, anxiety can often keep you from getting the jobs you really want and would be well suited for. If you allow your anxiety to control you, you may avoid applying for a new position because you fear rejection. Or you may let the fear of failure keep you from accepting a new challenge, no matter how badly you would like to take the job. But let’s look first at the job process and consider self-help techniques that will lead to a more rewarding, productive career. For people with social anxiety, low self-esteem is often a stumbling block to fulfillment in their careers: If you feel you are underqualified, you may hesitate to seek challenges, whether in a new company or within your current one. I have worked with several men who say their self-esteem is low because they are not the stereotype of success: They do not wear a suit, carry a briefcase, or drive the latest-model car. In their minds, this is the most important measure of success. But they themselves are not failures. One of the men I can think of is a successful plumber, another has a telephone sales job, and a third manages a large warehouse. Still, they have doubts about their appeal to women because of their career choices; increasing their self-esteem will help them to see themselves in a new way. Success need not be defined by media standards such as the right clothes or an expensive automobile. Everyone is different. Your personal success can only be measured by your own personal fulfillment and productivity.

Once a child enters adolescence, it may become increasingly difficult to raise these issues. Because adolescence is a time of rebellion—of self-definition, of distinguishing oneself from parents and peers—there may be less communication than ever. It is also a time of great emotional and physical change—and therefore a time of intense confusion within. If the adolescent child’s self-image gets lost in the shuffle, there may be years of hell to pay.

But of course Hitler had long before declared war unofficially and secretly against America, his ultimate target. He had written: ‘Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within. Our aim is to conquer the enemy through himself.’ “This

You’ve begun to master several techniques for controlling your anxiety. You’re learning the finer points of interaction and studying ways to apply your interactive skills. The next step is to add community resources—relevant agencies, groups, and organizations—to your self-help program. As you consider your particular needs, look to your own community for ways to enhance your social system: Parks and recreation departments, churches and synagogues, singles groups, self-help groups, clubs, volunteer organizations, business associations—there is an infinite array of resources to choose from. Contact your local chamber of commerce, consult newspapers for upcoming activities, and even inquire at area shops about any clubs or groups that share an interest (for example, ask at a garden center about a garden club, at a bookstore about a book club, and so on). Working through the exercises in this book is merely one component of a total self-help program. To progress from background knowledge to practical application, you must venture beyond your home and workplace (and beyond the confines of a therapist’s office, if you are in counseling). For people with social anxiety an outside system of resources is the best place to work on interactive difficulties. Here are three excellent reasons to use community resources: 1. To facilitate self-help. Conquering social anxiety necessitates interaction and involvement within the community, which is your laboratory. Using community resources creates a practical means of refining your skills and so moving forward on your individual map for change. 2. To diminish loneliness. Becoming part of the community provides the opportunity to develop personal and professional contacts that can enhance your life in many ways. 3. To network. Community involvement will not only give you the chance to improve your interactive skills, but will allow you to promote your academic or work life as well as your social life. Building connections on different levels can be the key. Any setting can provide a good opportunity for networking. In fact, I met the writer who helped me with this book in a fairly unlikely place—on the basketball court! A mutual friend introduced us, and when the subject of our professional interests came up, we saw the opportunity to work together on this project. You never know!

The sad truth of our glorious land is that our countrymen do not lack in wisdom, courage and intellect; but they do not lack in treachery, cunningness and avarice either. The smell and sight of gold is enough to send all our patriotism down the drain. We were certainly conquered by the external enemy, but more significantly by the enemy within. The misfortune, however, remains that we have not learnt any lessons from history, which they say repeats itself because nobody was listening the first time, and continue to divide ourselves along narrow, petty lines.

Who you are within is your own concern but when it comes to other people, it’s what you appear to be that counts.

The World Sonnet The world will never be a place without troubles, But that is not the point, the point is something else. The point is that most of the troubles we do have, Are caused by our own archaic stupidity 'n shallowness. Shallow and indifferent, that's the norm of the world. With such norm how can we expect there to be equality! Civilization comes from the ground, not the government. The ones walking the ground are the cause of humanity. Rhythm of the world comes from the rhythm of your heart, Place your hand on your heart and listen across biases. If there is music in you there'll be music in the world, But if there's just noise within, all around there’ll be travesty. WORLD means We On Road of Love and Determination. The aim is to conquer our last ounce of discrimination.

I ask not for any crown But that which all may win; Nor try to conquer any world Except the one within. ― Louisa May Alcott

Passion is something when you do; you just do it for yourself directed from within. You do something, and continue to do so, moving away from the doctrines of reward and punishment. Without seeing it through the doctrines of competitive beliefs which perpetuate distrust and resentment. It’s something which you continue to do just to win& conquer your inner self, NOT to defeat anyone else.

It appears, gentlemen, that our highness is nearly ready for you. Though all preparations have been set aside, I trust you will observe the protocol for greeting a king. Honor him as you would King Donald of your realm.”Roger busted out laughing. Grinning, I replied, “Our realm is not ruled by a king at all, but a man chosen by vote. And the one we call President Trump is hardly a king, and how one might greet him depends…Some honor him. Some would just as well throw poop at him.”Lancelot cocked his head. “Poop?”Roger interjected, “I think what Elijah means to say is that we are not at all familiar with the formalities associated with royalty.”“Very well,”Lancelot said. “Though I should note that your realm must be in a dreadful state if there are those among you who would treat your head of state with such contempt.”“You have no idea,”I added. “These days it seems that people are only capable of respecting leaders selectively.”Lancelot looked confused. “It’s a democracy,”Roger added. “People choose their own leader by a vote.”“But those who did not choose him feel they owe your leader no honor?”Lancelot asked. “In our realm,”I said, shaking my head, “people only seem to honor those with whom they agree.”“Such a realm,”Lancelot said, “cannot stand for long. Such is the state of many kingdoms apart from our own. Without a sense of honor and duty, without a common purpose, such realms are always in a state of war.”“But not Camelot?”I asked. “A divided kingdom,”Lancelot explained, “is prone to war for many reasons. None of these, however, pertain to Camelot under Arthur Pendragon.”“What reasons?”Roger asked. “First, a divided kingdom is so accustomed to conflict within that it cannot help but resort to the same when dealing without. Likewise, however, a divided kingdom is especially vulnerable and therefore attractive to others who would exploit them or, perhaps, aspire to conquer them. A divided realm is like a heated pot of oil. It takes only the slightest thing to upset it and turn it into a rage against itself.

In the realm of boundless skies I soar, With the fire of beginnings, I implore, Though thorns may pierce, and darkness may loom, I'll test my strength in thunder's fierce boom. For high above, I seek my place, In the heavens, a name to embrace, Yet every breath fuels my might, As I brave the storms, take flight in the night. In the face of dust, my resolve remains, Despite the wounds, and life's crushing pains, I stand unbroken, my spirit's ablaze, In the crucible, I'll burn and amaze. Though I may stumble, and falter, and strain, In my heart, the desire remains untamed, With sparks in my eyes, and hope in my veins, I'll rise from the ashes, through trials and gains. For I've etched in my fists, a star's radiant gleam, In the city's uproar, I'll conquer, it seems, Though darkness may fall in an infinite stream, My end won't be falling; it's more than it seems. On my face, I may wear the marks of the fight, With a broken resolve, a fractured light, But within my core, strength takes its flight, And from the embers, I'll emerge in the night. Though breaths may shatter, and heartbeats may sway, In the depths of my being, I'll find my way, With fiery gaze, and a steadfast say, I'll conquer the tempest, come what may. I've woven a star in the palm of my hand, Let the drums of the city resound, understand, Though shadows may gather, like grains of sand, My fall is not final, I'll rise and expand. In the realm of boundless skies, I roam, With a heart unyielding, I'll find my home, Through trials and triumphs, I'll ceaselessly roam, My end isn't falling; it's where I'll become.

As soon as Saladin was in control of Egypt, he set his sights on a larger goal. He organized his state according to Islamic law and began removing Shiite influence in Egypt. This boosted his reputation and influence in the Muslim world, especially when he declared that he was the protector of the Sunni Orthodoxy. Saladin decided that he wanted to form a Muslim coalition, which would prove to be an extremely difficult task. The Muslim world was made up of highly independent states with their own rulers. Some of those states were made up of Shia Muslims, which meant that Saladin had to overcome regional and religious differences. Sometime in 1174, he uncovered a plot to put the Fatimids back in power, and he dealt with the traitors in a swift and brutal manner. He also built several mosques and madrasahs in order to expand Sunni influence within Egypt. His popularity among the Sunni Muslims grew, and he appointed Sunni Muslims to positions within the government and courts. Saladin allowed Egyptians to hold power within his government, which gave him insight into the traditions of the Egyptian populace. He was famously tolerant of other religions and allowed Coptic Christians and Jews to continue practicing their beliefs. During Saladin’s reign, the Egyptian economy continued to flourish as it had during the Fatimid Caliphate. Muslim Coalition In 1174, Saladin managed to capture Damascus, which was an impressive feat. From there, he went on to conquer Aleppo, Mosul, and Yemen. He soon came to control the Red Sea region, which brought him one step closer to his ultimate goal. However, Saladin didn’t simply rely on military methods to gain new territories. He was an adept diplomat who fostered strong relationships with other leaders, which gave him many allies. In order to establish the legitimacy of his rule, he married Nur al-Din’s widow since she was the daughter of a previous ruler of Damascus. Saladin also won widespread respect in the Muslim world by taking the lead in the efforts to protect Islam against the invading Christians. While Saladin proclaimed to be a protector of Islam, he had no problem fighting Muslim enemies. The caliph of Baghdad recognized most of Saladin’s authority, but Aleppo remained beyond his reach. It was ruled by Nur al-Din’s

These lands conquered by Hammurabi returned to control of the Assyrians within twenty years of his death.