Contextual Self Quotes

You are not a single and narrow “type” of person. In different situations and around different people, you are different. Your personality is dynamic, flexible, and contextual. Moreover, your personality changes throughout your life, far more than you can presently imagine.

Strane says I need to contextualize my reluctance to grow up, that everyone my age is drawn to self-victimization. “And that mentality is especially difficult for young women to resist,” he says. “The world has a vested interest in keeping you helpless.” He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.

As the incorporation of every moment of its experience, every influence of its contextual heritage and environment, a soul is the presence of its complete past.

ELLE: i tried to heterotextualize my feelings for a while ELLE: in retrospect idk why ELLE: all part of the process i guess DARCY You what? "It took her a second to figure out what had confused Darcy." ELLE: apply hetero context to a super not straight situation ELLE: hetero + contextualize = heterotextualize DARCY: Huh. New word. Thanks for broadening my horizons. "Elle bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing." ELLE: i made it up ELLE (4:43 P.M.): but you’re welcome DARCY (4:45 P.M.): Of course.

This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people's arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns. The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum. Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups). Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.

What was amazing to Sam—and what became a theme of the games he would go on to make with Sadie—was how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location. As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, “The game character, like the self, is contextual.

How your sense of self could change depending on your location. As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, “The game character, like the self, is contextual.

The game character, like the self, is contextual.

Desire for goodness, Mister Reese, leads to earnestness. Earnestness in turn leads to sanctimonious self-righteousness, which breeds intolerance, upon which harsh judgment quickly follows, yielding dire punishment, inflicting general terror and paranoia, eventually culminating in revolt, leading to chaos, then dissolution, and thus, the end of civilisation.” He slowly turned, looked down upon Emancipor. “And we are creatures dependent upon civilisation. It is the only environment in which we can thrive.” Emancipor frowned. “The desire for goodness leads to the end of civilisation?” “Precisely, Mister Reese.” “But if the principal aim is to achieve good living and health among the populace, what is the harm in that?” Bauchelain sighed. “Very well, I shall try again. Good living and health, as you say, yielding well-being. But well-being is a contextual notion, a relative notion. Perceived benefits are measured by way of contrast. In any case, the result is smugness, and from that an overwhelming desire to deliver conformity among those perceived as less pure, less fortunate—the unenlightened, if you will. But conformity leads to ennui, and then indifference. From indifference, Mister Reese, dissolution follows as a natural course, and with it, once again, the end of civilisation.

Purpose and desire can seem similar, but they are very different, sometimes even opposing forces. Desire is personal, narrow, and pointed, and tends toward self-preservation, self-gratification, and short-term gains and pleasures. Purpose is wider, broader, a longer-term vision encompassing the benefit of others—something outside of yourself you’re willing to fight for. There have been many times in my life where I was acting from a place of desire but I’d fully convinced myself that it was purpose. Desire is what you want; purpose is the flowering of what you are. Desire tends to weaken over time, whereas purpose strengthens the more you lean into it. Desire can be depleting because it’s insatiable; purpose is empowering—it’s a stronger engine. Purpose has a way of contextualizing life’s unavoidable sufferings and making them meaningful and worthwhile. As Viktor Frankl wrote, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

First, intelligence is situational—there is no such thing as general intelligence. Your brain is one piece in a broader system which includes your body, your environment, other humans, and culture as a whole. Second, it is contextual—far from existing in a vacuum, any individual intelligence will always be both defined and limited by its environment. (And currently, the environment, not the brain, is acting as the bottleneck to intelligence.) Third, human intelligence is largely externalized, contained not in your brain but in your civilization. Think of individuals as tools, whose brains are modules in a cognitive system much larger than themselves—a system that is self-improving and has been for a long time.

From the dramas of Antiquity to the novels of Modernity, from Eastern epics to Western classics, there is not a text in history that is truly self-sufficient. To read and to write is to work within an existing framework of characters, conventions, plots, and premises; how we understand one work of literature is contingent on how we understand another work of literature. The more we know, the more we contextualize; the more we learn, the more we compare. Knowledge itself is comparative. Beyond how we read, beyond how we write, comparison is hard-wired into the very ways that we think.

Power is to be construed as the production of intended effects determined by external causation. Real creativity, on the other hand, entails the spontaneous production of novelty, irreducible through causal analysis. Power is exercised with respect to and over others. Creativity is always reflexive and is exercised over and with respect to “self.” And since self in a processive world is always communal, creativity is contextual, transactional, and multidimensional. Thus creativity is both self-creativity and co-creativity. Either everything shares in creativity, or there is no creativity. Indeed, it is this transactional, co-creative character of all creative processes that precludes the project of self-cultivation and self-creation from being egoistic.

Modified interaction does not always involve linguistic simplification. It may also include elaboration, slower speech rate, gesture, or the provision of additional contextual cues. Some examples of conversational modifications are: 1   Comprehension checks—efforts by the native speaker to ensure that the learner has understood (for example, ‘The bus leaves at 6:30. Do you understand?’). 2   Clarification requests—efforts by the learner to get the native speaker to clarify something that has not been understood (for example, ‘Could you repeat please?’). These requests from the learner lead to further modifications by the native speaker. 3   Self-repetition or paraphrase—the more proficient speaker repeats his or her sentence either partially or in its entirety (for example, ‘She got lost on her way home from school. She was walking home from school. She got lost.’).

Personal memory – the palest of all lights – is the wellspring of personality and creativity. Memory is the also the cornerstone of culture and the basis of community and family relationships. Without memories of our thoughts and actions, we would not recognize our individual self. Without personal memories, there is no personal character or soul of a nation. Without contextual memories, the concept of universal principles of goodwill and the individual desire to perform noble selfless acts would be moot. There can be no symmetry in any human relations without memories to provide a baseline foundation for reflection and contemplation. It would fatally tax a person’s desire to achieve fairness in their personal dealings without memories of prior acts of greed or benevolence to provide structure for judging the merits of their current behavioral options. Without the haunting of memory to remind us of our propensity to hate outsiders and readiness to overlook the disfranchised, there would be wholesale discrimination and unchecked commission of infamous crimes.

In one of the notebooks he carried with him, Nietzsche wrote, "We have art lest we perish from the truth." For those leading afterlives, the unadorned facts of what's happened to them can be brutish to bear on their own terms. Contextualizing that hardship through our intellects and imaginations is a critical salve, an act of transforming our perception that can guide and color how we experience our lives. We can knead our experiences into a larger arc, providing the cohesion that helps us form new narrative identities. Or we can look deeper into our afterlives until we ferret out a way of construing them that rouses our spirits or points them toward salvation. In her essay collection The White Album, Joan Didion delivered a pronouncement that was a natural descendants to Nietzsche's line, an admission of how desperately we rely on the subjective fictions we construct: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Those stories--whether they take the form of redemption narratives, personal parables, or the pearlescent beliefs we kneel before each day like shrines offering eternal grace--can elevate our lives and serve as the vessels of private deliverance.

I struggle with an embarrassing affliction, one that as far as I know doesn’t have a website or support group despite its disabling effects on the lives of those of us who’ve somehow contracted it. I can’t remember exactly when I started noticing the symptoms—it’s just one of those things you learn to live with, I guess. You make adjustments. You hope people don’t notice. The irony, obviously, is having gone into a line of work in which this particular infirmity is most likely to stand out, like being a gimpy tango instructor or an acrophobic flight attendant. The affliction I’m speaking of is moral relativism, and you can imagine the catastrophic effects on a critic’s career if the thing were left to run its course unfettered or I had to rely on my own inner compass alone. To be honest, calling it moral relativism may dignify it too much; it’s more like moral wishy-washiness. Critics are supposed to have deeply felt moral outrage about things, be ready to pronounce on or condemn other people’s foibles and failures at a moment’s notice whenever an editor emails requesting twelve hundred words by the day after tomorrow. The severity of your condemnation is the measure of your intellectual seriousness (especially when it comes to other people’s literary or aesthetic failures, which, for our best critics, register as nothing short of moral turpitude in itself). That’s how critics make their reputations: having take-no-prisoners convictions and expressing them in brutal mots justes. You’d better be right there with that verdict or you’d better just shut the fuck up. But when it comes to moral turpitude and ethical lapses (which happen to be subjects I’ve written on frequently, perversely drawn to the topics likely to expose me at my most irresolute)—it’s like I’m shooting outrage blanks. There I sit, fingers poised on keyboard, one part of me (the ambitious, careerist part) itching to strike, but in my truest soul limply equivocal, particularly when it comes to the many lapses I suspect I’m capable of committing myself, from bad prose to adultery. Every once in a while I succeed in landing a feeble blow or two, but for the most part it’s the limp equivocator who rules the roost—contextualizing, identifying, dithering. And here’s another confession while I’m at it—wow, it feels good to finally come clean about it all. It’s that … once in a while, when I’m feeling especially jellylike, I’ve found myself loitering on the Internet in hopes of—this is embarrassing—cadging a bit of other people’s moral outrage (not exactly in short supply online) concerning whatever subject I’m supposed to be addressing. Sometimes you just need a little shot in the arm, you know? It’s not like I’d crib anyone’s actual sentences (though frankly I have a tough time getting as worked up about plagiarism as other people seem to get—that’s how deep this horrible affliction runs). No, it’s the tranquillity of their moral authority I’m hoping will rub off on me. I confess to having a bit of an online “thing,” for this reason, about New Republic editor-columnist Leon Wieseltier—as everyone knows, one of our leading critical voices and always in high dudgeon about something or other: never fearing to lambaste anyone no matter how far beneath him in the pecking order, never fearing for a moment, when he calls someone out for being preening or self-congratulatory, as he frequently does, that it might be true of himself as well. When I’m in the depths of soft-heartedness, a little dose of Leon is all I need to feel like clambering back on the horse of critical judgment and denouncing someone for something.

Paul’s approach to culture, then, is neither completely confrontational nor totally affirming. He does not simply rail against Greek pride in intellect and Jewish pride in power; instead he shows them that the ways they are pursuing these good things are ultimately self-defeating. He reveals the fatal contradictions and underlying idolatry within their cultures and then points them to the resolution that can only be found in Christ. This is the basic formula for contextualization.

God is blessing the church in China with extraordinary growth. However, when Chinese churches and ministers who had experienced God’s blessing in their rural ministries entered the mushrooming cities of China and tried to minister and communicate the gospel in the same ways that had been blessed in the countryside, they saw less fruitfulness. Over a decade ago, several Dutch denominations approached us. While they were thriving outside of urban areas, they had not been able to start new, vital churches in Amsterdam in years — and most of the existing ones had died out. These leaders knew the gospel; they had financial resources; they had the desire for Christian mission. But they couldn’t get anything off the ground in the biggest city of their country.2 In both cases, ministry that was thriving in the heartland of the country was unable to make much of a dent in the city. It would have been easy to say, “The people of the city are too spiritually proud and hardened.” But the church leaders we met chose to respond humbly and took responsibility for the problem. They concluded that the gospel ministry that had fit nonurban areas well would need to be adapted to the culture of urban life. And they were right. This necessary adaptation to the culture is an example of what we call “contextualization.”3 SOUND CONTEXTUALIZATION Contextualization is not — as is often argued — “giving people what they want to hear.”4 Rather, it is giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them. Sound contextualization means translating and adapting the communication and ministry of the gospel to a particular culture without compromising the essence and particulars of the gospel itself. The great missionary task is to express the gospel message to a new culture in a way that avoids making the message unnecessarily alien to that culture, yet without removing or obscuring the scandal and offense of biblical truth. A contextualized gospel is marked by clarity and attractiveness, and yet it still challenges sinners’ self-sufficiency and calls them to repentance. It adapts and connects to the culture, yet at the same time challenges and confronts it. If we fail to adapt to the culture or if we fail to challenge the culture — if we under- or overcontextualize — our ministry will be unfruitful because we have failed to contextualize well.

Self-identity is about content not the container that carry the identity,contextual value and not a solo island. It is about conception and not just a birth process.

In a self-focused world, we place ourselves at the center of our own personal universe. We are in control, at least that’s what we think. We are the central character, the protagonist of the story, and the rest of the world is just our contextual stage, built to serve our uniquely complex purpose. But we fail to realize everyone else enjoys relationships just as deep, dreams just as real, a purpose just as driving, and complexities just as beautiful as our own.

Not all of us, mind you. Some folks perceive their contextual status with relative accuracy: they’re better than the rest of us at figuring out how much control they really have over local events, for example. They’re better at assessing their own performance at assigned tasks. Most of us tend to take credit for the good things that happen to us, while blaming something else for the bad. But some folks, faced with the same scenarios, apportion blame and credit without that self-serving bias. We call these people “clinically depressed”. We regard them as a bunch of unmotivated Debbie Downers who always look on the dark side - even though their worldview is empirically more accurate than the self-serving ego-boosts the rest of us experience.

The natural world is more recognizable and identifiable in its unaffected replies and usual predictability. This genuineness does have residual seepage observable in the surreal world of humanity as well, in instances where nature or a natural reality is observed in experience with an impassioned, ephemeral detection and the entirety of the world is shortly exposed as still living, composed of material, substance, texture and essence beyond the normalized human exposure of chosen limits of sensitivities, of closing endpoints of understanding, of illusory trickeries of senses, bewildering connotations of truth, and prospering beliefs in a newer, grander realism of self and the world without vital appreciation of a contextual reckoning of proportionality embedded within the curving, yielding designs of universal scales.” “Aspergic tendencies can establish a lifelong process of rebellious, reciprocated self-learning and self-teaching, whether the lessons taught are from oneself or insightful others during watchful experiences seeking new, keen-sighted inspirations to be marked by patterned, humorously strange and unexpectedly connected presences. It makes an individual believe in a perceived world which exists better in the enactions of others, while the real world of behaving, sensing and seeing a differently textured reality becomes an alleged fantasy.” “To an aspergic personality, allistic normalcy can be an enthrallment contrary to a naturally minded quest for equilibrium as a relationship with all reality. There can be guilt over one’s own social inadequacy. Inane separation can come from not wanting to impose such great exertion requirements on most others for the sake of a singular attending identity.” “As with multitudes of peoples under clever and hard-fought capitulation, nature quietly must adhere and defer to the idea of the perfect fusion of mind and body as fitting the successes of humanity accidentally shaped as the dualistic and sensitive personification of celestial, god-imaged spirituality within the universe.

A being is contextually determined as much as he cannot self-determine himself.

Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala BA GA MOHLALA IN SCHOONOORD HISTORY SOURCES AND RESEARCHERS Our sources for our ongoing research on the history of Ba Ga Mohlala in Schoonoord The main sources that we use in our ongoing researches on the history of Ba Ga Mohlala in Schoonoord are government official records, archival records, and oral evidence. There are few archival records on the history on the history of Ba Ga Mohlala in general, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe. There are also very few published documents (especially books and others forms of researched publications) on Ba Ga Mohlala in general, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe, and this is one of the principal motivations for the need to record the history of Ba Ga Mohlala in general, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe. Therefore, the bulk of secondary are the available general works of South African History, and most of such works deal scantily with the history of Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe, that is because those general works mainly deal with South African tribes in general rather  than Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe in particular. As such those sources are used to contextualize the history of Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe, and are mostly used to develop theorical framework. Oral evidence forms an important part of our researches. That is because most of the history of clans, and tribes in South Africa, such as Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe was not written and it is expected that very few written records do exist on their history. As a result, the few written records which are available are used in conjunction with oral evidence. Most importantly, the other sources which have been mentioned thus far are used to corroborate oral information, and vice versa. Thus, the combination of all these sources result in a more balanced and objective study of the history of Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe. Because oral information is one of the core sources of our studies in the history of Ba Ga Mohlala, Banareng, and Batlokwa Ba Lethebe, best practices in oral research are thoroughly  followed in order to achieve the best possible outcome possible. Like any other forms of collecting evidence, and as well as other sources of information, oral evidence has its own problem areas and some benefits, and there are also processes of dealing with those problem areas. There are three main problem areas of oral history. Firstly, the limitations of the interviewee which include, unreliability of memory, deliberate falsification, unfairness through vindictiveness, excessive discretion, superficiality and gossip, oversimplification, distortion of interviewee's role, lack of perspective, distortion due to to personal feelings, self-consciousness, influence of hindsight, and repetition of published evidence. Secondly, the interviewer has limitations which include, unrepresantative sampling, biased questioning, difference and bias towards the intreviews, and interviews as a replacement for reading documents. The third and last problem areas of oral is about the limitations inherent in the nature of intetviewing itself which include, misinterpretation of what the interviewee have said, inability of oral history to verified by others, interview transcripts missing the essence of the interview, impossibility of true communication, and dependence on survivors and those who agree to be interviewed.

Thus it would be a serious mistake to understand the images of Revelation as timeless symbols. Their character conforms to the contextuality of Revelation as a letter to the seven churches of Asia. Their resonances in the specific social, political, cultural and religious world of their first readers need to be understood if their meaning is to be appropriated today. They do not create a purely self-contained aesthetic world with no reference outside itself, but intend to relate to the world in which the readers live in order to reform and to redirect the readers’ response to that world. However, if the images are not timeless symbols, but relate to the ‘real’ world, we need also to avoid the opposite mistake of taking them too literally as descriptive of the ‘real’ world and of predicted events in the ‘real’ world. They are not just a system of codes waiting to be translated into matter-of-fact references to people and events. Once we begin to appreciate their sources and their rich symbolic associations, we realize that they cannot be read either as literal descriptions or as encoded literal descriptions, but must be read for their theological meaning and their power to evoke response.

By placing ourselves in the myth of the hero's journey, we contextualize these transformational moments within the broader contours of our lives, cultivate attitudes in which we reframe our problems as “tests” and learning opportunities, and more easily locate the meaning in our suffering. My goal in this essay is to explore how the myth of the hero's journey can be a resource for self-discovery and a guide through the turbulent waters of life.

In relation to these learning styles, psychologists have also identified other associated psychological, neurological, and personality characteristics. The students with preferences for the auditory-sequential learning style are more inclined to have extrovert personalities, while the students who prefer the visual-spatial learning style are inclined to possess introvert personalities. Extrovert personalities are more outgoing, engage in discussions, and respond easily, even with relatively unknown people, and they enjoy social activities with a large number of participants. On the contrary, introverts prefer attending to things on their own with less interaction with others, especially with relatively unknown people, and dislike social activities with large attendance. Auditory-sequential learners are good in analysis and pay more attention to specific detail; they approach solving a complex problem by dividing it into smaller parts. On the other hand, visual-spatial learners are good synthesisers, who can relate different perspectives to form an answer and are better at seeing the big picture or are holistic. As we would expect, auditory-sequential learners deal better with the concept of time and are better organised, while visual-spatial learners are relatively less competent with the concept of time. Auditory-sequential learners think in words and are better in rote memorisation; visual-spatial learners think in pictures and need to relate contextual meanings with pictures and, as a result, struggle with rote memorisation. That is, auditory-sequential learners have better auditory short-term memory, while visual-spatial learners have better visual long-term memory. Further, since they think in pictures, visual-spatial learners take a relatively longer time to process and relate information to contexts; once they do that, this contextual information is retained longer in memory.

Unleashing Reliable Insights from Generative AI by Disentangling Language Fluency and Knowledge Acquisition Generative AI carries immense potential but also comes with significant risks. One of these risks of Generative AI lies in its limited ability to identify misinformation and inaccuracies within the contextual framework. This deficiency can lead to mistakenly associating correlation with causation, reliance on incomplete or inaccurate data, and a lack of awareness regarding sensitive dependencies between information sets. With society’s increasing fascination with and dependence on Generative AI, there is a concern that the unintended consequence that it will have an unhealthy influence on shaping societal views on politics, culture, and science. Humans acquire language and communication skills from a diverse range of sources, including raw, unfiltered, and unstructured content. However, when it comes to knowledge acquisition, humans typically rely on transparent, trusted, and structured sources. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT draw from an array of opaque, unattested sources of raw, unfiltered, and unstructured content for language and communication training. LLMs treat this information as the absolute source of truth used in their responses. While this approach has demonstrated effectiveness in generating natural language, it also introduces inconsistencies and deficiencies in response integrity. While Generative AI can provide information it does not inherently yield knowledge. To unlock the true value of generative AI, it is crucial to disaggregate the process of language fluency training from the acquisition of knowledge used in responses. This disaggregation enables LLMs to not only generate coherent and fluent language but also deliver accurate and reliable information. However, in a culture that obsesses over information from self-proclaimed influencers and prioritizes virality over transparency and accuracy, distinguishing reliable information from misinformation and knowledge from ignorance has become increasingly challenging. This presents a significant obstacle for AI algorithms striving to provide accurate and trustworthy responses. Generative AI shows great promise, but addressing the issue of ensuring information integrity is crucial for ensuring accurate and reliable responses. By disaggregating language fluency training from knowledge acquisition, large language models can offer valuable insights. However, overcoming the prevailing challenges of identifying reliable information and distinguishing knowledge from ignorance remains a critical endeavour for advancing AI algorithms. It is essential to acknowledge that resolving this is an immediate challenge that needs open dialogue that includes a broad set of disciplines, not just technologists Technology alone cannot provide a complete solution.

In contrast, females, on average, tend to be more sociable, sensitive, warm, compassionate, polite, anxious, self-doubting, and more open to aesthetics. On average, women are more interested in intimate, cooperative dyadic relationships that are more emotion-focused and characterized by unstable hierarchies and strong egalitarian norms. Where aggression does arise, it tends to be more indirect and less openly confrontational. Females also tend to display better communication skills, displaying higher verbal ability and the ability to decode other people's nonverbal behavior. Women also tend to use more affiliative and tentative speech in their language, and tend to be more expressive in both their facial expressions and bodily language (although men tend to adopt a more expansive, open posture). On average, women also tend to smile and cry more frequently than men, although these effects are very contextual and the differences are substantially larger when males and females believe they are being observed than when they believe they are alone.

how your sense of self could change depending on your location. As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, "The game character, like the self, is contextual." In Koreatown, no one ever thought Sam was Korean. In Manhattan, no one had ever thought he was white. In Los Angeles, he was the "white cousin." In New York, he was that "little Chinese Kid. " And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than he ever had before.

Controversy remains about what kind of ceremony is carried out in Ge 15:9–21. What/whom do the pieces represent (possibilities: sacrifice for oath, God if he reneges, nations already as good as dead, Israelites in slavery)? Whom do the birds of prey represent (nations seeking to seize available land, e.g., Ge 14, or to plunder Israel)? Whom do the implements represent (God and/or Abram)? These issues cannot currently be resolved, but a few observations can help identify some of the possible connections with the ancient world. Before we look at the options, a word is in order about what this is not. 1. It is not a sacrifice. There is no altar, no offering of the animals to deity and no ritual with the carcasses, the meat or the blood. 2. It is not divination. The entrails are not examined and no meal is offered to deity. 3. It is not an incantation. No words are spoken to accompany the ritual and no efficacy is sought—Abram is asleep. The remaining options are based on where animals are ritually slaughtered in the ancient world when it is not for the purposes of sacrifice, divination or incantation. Option 1: A covenant ceremony or, more specifically, a royal land grant ceremony. In this case the animals typically are understood as substituting for the participants or proclaiming a self-curse if the stipulations are violated. Examples of the slaughter of animals in such ceremonies but not for sacrificial purposes are numerous. In tablets from Alalakh, the throat of a lamb is slit in connection to a deed executed between Abba-El and Yarimlim. In a Mari text, the head of a donkey is cut off when sealing a formal agreement. In an Aramaic treaty of Sefire, a calf is cut in two with the explicit statement that such will be the fate of the one who breaks the treaty. In Neo-Assyrian literature, the head of a spring lamb is cut off in a treaty between Ashurnirari V and Mati’ilu, not for sacrifice but explicitly as an example of punishment. The strength of these examples lies in the contextual connection to covenant. The weakness is that only one animal is killed in these examples, and there is no passing through the pieces and no torch and firepot. Furthermore, there are significant limitations regarding the efficacy of a divine self-curse. Option 2: Purification. The “torch” (Ge 15:17) is a portable, handheld object for bringing light. The “smoking firepot” (15:17) can refer to a number of different vessels used to heat things (e.g., an oven for food, a kiln for pottery). Here the two items are generally assumed to be associated with God, but need not be symbolic representations of him. These implements are occasionally used symbolically to represent deities in ancient Near Eastern literature, but usually sun-gods (e.g., Shamash) or fire-gods (e.g., Girru/Gibil). Gibil and Kusu are often invoked together as divine torch and censer in a wide range of cultic ceremonies for purification. Abram would have probably been familiar with the role of Gibil and Kusu in purification rituals, so that function would be plausibly communicated to him by the presence of these implements. Yet in a purification role, neither the torch nor the censer ever pass between the pieces of cut-up animals in the literature available to us. Further weakness is in the fact that Yahweh doesn’t need purification and Abram is a spectator, not a participant, so neither does he. In the Mesopotamian Hymn to Gibil (the torch), the god purifies the objects used in the ritual, but the only objects in the ritual in Ge 15 are the dead animals, and it is difficult to understand why they would need to be purified.

Of course, there was also the bureaucratic B.S. that pervades every organization. Different leaders reacted differently to stress. Some comported themselves well and put the mission first while others allowed stress to impact their decision-making. I use the word “allowed” because that’s just what it is: a choice to open oneself to external influences because the core self lacks the self-awareness to slap adversity in the face and say, “Get outta here. I got this.” Most of our actions at the operator level relied upon the decisions made by senior leaders, and if the decision-making process stalemated for any reason, then momentum lagged across the whole organization—as did results. When this happened—when there was an impetus for action but a lack of contextual awareness—there was only one thing us operators could do: we needed to adapt. We needed to make use of the minimal guidance we had because the problem set (i.e. the threat or crisis) wasn’t going to go away, and the only way to solve it was to fill the gap.

Psychologists have long pointed to self-actualization as the pinnacle of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. However, Maslow discovered later in his life that he was wrong.29 There was, in fact, a deeper motivation, which he called transcendence—a commitment to the greater good. “The fully developed (and very fortunate) human being, working under the best conditions tends to be motivated by values which transcend his self.”30 This theory went beyond the ego self to encompass our relationship to one another and the bigger world that we are a part of. Of course that is not the version we hear most often in the field of psychology. Nor do we hear that much of Maslow’s work was influenced by the wisdom of the Siksika Nation (a part of the Blackfoot confederacy in Canada), who understood one’s needs not as hierarchical but as circular and contextual at the levels of self, community, and culture equally.31