Cultural Dimensions Quotes

My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.

Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home;exiles are are aware of at least two, and this plurality gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions...

fundamentalism is a form of mental illness that seeks to repress anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. The more mature the personality structure, the greater the capacity of the person, and the culture, to tolerate the anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence that are a necessary and unavoidable dimension of our lives.

With heightened awareness of cultural sensitivity comes great responsibility. If we’re not careful, ‘diversity’ might become an item people start checking off a list and nothing more—a shallow, shadowy thing with but one dimension.

The human dimension of organizational change is vital. Because ultimately, a company is a collaboration of people.

All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elefant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains makkeable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies. The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value, As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.

Experience informs intuition. But it does more than that: Experience sets the frame within which we analyze and interpret what we perceive. You would no doubt expect, for instance, that the "wild child" raised by a pack of wolves would interpret the world from a perspective that differs substantially from your own. Even less extreme comparisons, such as those between people raised in very different cultural traditions, serve to underscore the degree to which our experiences determine our interpretive mindset.

To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.

The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm ‒ their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later, it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed.

Since “healthy communities are able to recognize past mistakes,” they went on to “pledge to work toward the common good in building a community where people of all races and cultural backgrounds are welcome to live and prosper.

We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.

Our culture teaches us to locate overt racism long ago (in the nineteenth century) or far away (in the South) or to marginalize it as the work of a few crazed deviants who carried out their violent works under cover of darkness.

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction.

For a considerable portion of humanity today, it is possible and indeed likely that one's neighbor, one's colleague, or one's employer will have a different mother tongue, eat different food, and follow a different religion than oneself. It is a matter of great urgency, therefore, that we find ways to cooperate with one another in a spirit of mutual acceptance and respect. In such a world, I feel, it is vital for us to find genuinely sustainable and universal approach to ethics, inner values, and personal integrity-an approach that can transcend religious, cultural, and racial differences and appeal to people at a sustainable, universal approach is what I call the project of secular ethics. All religions, therefore, to some extent, ground the cultivation of inner values and ethical awareness in some kind of metaphysical (that is, not empirically demonstrable) understanding of the world and of life after death. And just as the doctrine of divine judgment underlies ethical teachings in many theistic religions, so too does the doctrine of karma and future lives in non-theistic religions. As I see it, spirituality has two dimensions. The first dimension, that of basic spiritual well-being-by which I mean inner mental and emotional strength and balance-does not depend on religion but comes from our innate human nature as beings with a natural disposition toward compassion, kindness, and caring for others. The second dimension is what may be considered religion-based spirituality, which is acquired from our upbringing and culture and is tied to particular beliefs and practices. The difference between the two is something like the difference between water and tea. On this understanding, ethics consists less of rules to be obeyed than of principles for inner self-regulation to promote those aspects of our nature which we recognize as conducive to our own well-being and that of others. It is by moving beyond narrow self-interest that we find meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in life.

People carry around with them internalization's fixed-feature space learned early in life. Man is like other members of the animal kingdom , first, last and always a prisoner of his biological organism. No matter how hard he tries, it is impossible for him to the best himself of his own culture, where it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world.

The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking—the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics. Traditionally, another way of acquiring knowledge has been through personal conversations. The discussion and exchange of ideas has for millennia provided an emotional and psychological dimension in addition to the factual content of the information exchanged. It supplies intangibles of conviction and personality. Now the culture of texting produces a curious reluctance to engage in face-to-face interaction, especially on a one-to-one basis.

One might well ask at this point why it should be necessary for a person to be in contact with his or her historical-spiritual roots. In Zurich we have the opportunity to analyze many Americans who come to the Jung Institute and thus to observe the symptoms and results of a hiatus in culture (emigration of their forebears) and a loss of roots. In that case we are dealing with people whose consciousness is structured similarly to ours; but when we bore into the depths, we find something that resembles a gap in the steps—no continuity! A cultivated white man—and beneath that a primitive shadow, of which the

Concurrently, the growing class power and public voice of conservative and liberal well-to-do black folks easily obscures the class cruelty these individuals enact both in the way they talk about underprivileged blacks and the way they represent them. The existence of that class cruelty and its fascist dimensions have been somewhat highlighted by the efforts of privileged-class blacks to censor the voices of black youth, particularly gangsta rappers who are opposing bourgeois class values by extolling the values of street culture and street vernacular. Significantly, the attack on urban underclass black youth culture and its gangster dimensions (glamorization of crime, etc.) is usually presented via a critique of sexism. Since most privileged-class blacks have shown no interest in advancing feminist politics, the only organized effort to end sexism and sexist oppression, this attack on sexism seems merely gratuitous, a smoke screen that deflects away from the fact that what really disturbs bourgeois folks is the support of rebellion, unruly behavior, and disrespect for their class values. In reality, they and their white counterparts fear the power these young folks have to change the minds and life choices of youth from privileged classes. If only underclass black folks were listening to gangsta rap, there would be no public effort to silence and censor this music. The fear is that it will generate class rebellion.

He has read whole volumes on the philosophy of nonviolence. How peace had to be understood in all its moral dimensions. The proper coexistence of all existents. The excluded middle ground. The surpassing of personality. The vanity of cultural superiority. The tension between individual conscience and collective responsibility. The need to proclaim again and again what has already been said.

From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to spend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology.

The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. Such efforts will lead to the kind of intellectual integrity that sometimes receives recognition. But for the Christian that recognition is only a fairly inconsequential by-product. The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as "good" as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son of God to "become flesh and dwell among us." Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open.

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.

Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures.11 Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos—whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes—premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being.

How do we break free from the dichotomies that limit God's power in our lives? How can love and service to God become living sparks that light up our whole lives? By discovering a worldview perspective that unifies *both* secular and sacred, public and private, within a single framework. By understanding that all honest work and creative enterprise can be a valid calling from the Lord. And by realizing that there are biblical principles that apply to every field of work. These insights will fill us with purpose, and we will begin to experience the joy that comes from relating to God in and through every dimension of our lives.

It is our contemporary culture’s tragedy to have lost any sense of suffering as a positive dimension of human existence. Beginning with the premise that life ought to be without pain, we make suffering something to be avoided at all cost. We consider the equation between evil and suffering so self-evident that we make avoiding suffering the equal of fighting evil. No wonder we are the most narcotized generation ever to inhabit the earth, searching for ever more effective addictive patterns to anaesthetize our existence.

There's something about a white man who seriously opens up to black people. White people who become family to black people. There's another dimension of militance that emerges from them. They grip their anger with the system in ways black people are not allowed, in efforts to right the wrongs.

All groups and organizations need to know how they are doing against their goals and periodically need to check to determine whether they are performing in line with their mission. This process involves three areas in which the group needs to achieve consensus leading to cultural dimensions that later drop out of awareness and become basic assumptions. Consensus must be achieved on what to measure, how to measure it, and what to do when corrections are needed. The cultural elements that form around each of these issues often become the primary focus for what newcomers to the organization will be concerned about because such measurements inevitably become linked to how each employee is doing his or her job.

I am no insect of the gutter that can be identified by the puny two directions, east and west - I am time - I am space - I am the very dimension of life, love and unity.

Most of culture lies hidden and is outside voluntary control, making up the warp and weft of human existence. Even when small fragments of culture are elevated to awareness, they are difficult to change, not only because they are so personally experienced but because people cannot act or interact at all in any meaningful way except through the medium of culture.

Nowadays, the tendency to be preoccupied with having, at the expense of losing touch with the dimension of being, is becoming ever more pronounced. In times such as ours, when secular and material values dominate social and cultural life to an extreme degree, the intensity of the urge to have creates an ever widening gulf from the awareness of who and what we are.

The Australian aborigines, reckoned to be among the most primitive of races upon evidence that is far from conclusive, have a region that is well-developed. They worship the Earth Mother, and recognise in their graceful, plaintive stories the prior existence of culture heroes as well limned as any in Valhalla. To an amazing degree they feel the reality of the metaphysical world they have created––the dream-time, which is neither a dream nor a period, or if it is a period is one which has no dimension, so that the past and the present exist together.

The need to control others as a prerequisite for male agency presupposed self-control. That imperative, in turn, included both the physical and emotional dimensions of a man’s bodily self.

If we put this whole progression in terms of our discussion of the possibilities of heroism, it goes like this: Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God. His life thereby acquires ultimate value in place of merely social and cultural, historical value. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, his inner yearning for absolute significance, to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance, for cosmic heroism. This invisible mystery at the heart of every creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. This is the meaning of faith. At the same time it is the meaning of the merger of psychology and religion in Kierkegaard's thought. The truly open person, the one who has shed his character armor, the vital lie of his cultural conditioning, is beyond the help of any mere "science," of any merely social standard of health. He is absolutely alone and trembling on the bring of oblivion-which is at the same time the brink of infinity. To give him the new support that he needs, the "courage to renounce dread without any dread...only faith is capable of," says Kierkegaard. Not that this is an easy out for man, or a cure-all for the human condition-Kierkegaard is never facile. He gives a strikingly beautiful idea: not that [faith] annihilates dread, but remaining ever young, it is continually developing itself out of the death throe of dread. In other words, as long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. Faith poses a new life task, the adventure in openness to a multi-dimensional reality.

Forests to the [early] Northern European peoples were dangerous and generous, domestic and wild, beautiful and terrible. And the forests were the terrain out of which fairy stories, one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, evolved. The mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forest are both the background to and source of these tales.... Forests are places where a person can get lost and also hide -- and losing and hiding, of things and people, are central to European fairy stories in ways that are not true of similar stories in different geographies. Landscape informs the collective imagination as much as or more than it forms the individual psyche and its imagination, but this dimension is not something to which we always pay enough attention.

Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.

Today, we are at a turning point in our history. We can no longer continue to accept tradition for tradition's sake. We can no longer go on playing the same old war games without eventually becoming conscious of the dimensions of the destruction involved. We must realize that child murder was also part of our "traditions" and that our blindness in respect of this tradition is itself a consequence of this practice. We have no other choice but to become fully conscious of the darker aspects of our own cultural heritage. Only then will we cease to pass them blindly on to future generations.

It's about cultures; they widen the dimensions of the present, they vanquish the walls of the narrow perception. They make you look forward to experiencing a new life that is full of unusual things.

Whites forced out African Americans from major league baseball not because they couldn't play well, but because they could. Whites expelled black jockeys from the Kentucky Derby not because they were incompetent, but because they won 15 of the first 28 derbies. They drove blacks our of the job of postal carrier so they could do it themselves, not because blacks couldn't do it. The foregoing seems obvious, but when it comes to housing, even today, deep inside white culture as a legacy from the Nadir is the sneaking suspicion that African Americans are a problem, so it is best to keep them out.

Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world.

Dimension, Existence, Culture and Identity all splinter and are left behind. Pink Sound, brothers and sisters. Pinkness. It's dark. It's... flat. It is unexplainable... it is peaceful... it is love... ...it is...

Where are we as a modern civilization if our educational institutions conspire to train only a fraction of our capacities? and if this is all they can really do, then why not acknowledge that fact openly and give legitimacy to the other alternative forms of education that do cultivate those neglected dimensions of personality, instead of pretending that anything lying outside the standards set by the Wester analytic tradition is either inferior, anti-intellectual, or diabolic? (p. 293-294)

But it speaks for an inner world— and again this is evident in Murakami— that sits in a different dimension from the smooth-running, flawlessly attentive, and all but anonymous machine that keeps public order moving forward so efficiently in Japan.

Reading The Waste Land, then, is in part reading about reading in the early twentieth century. The crisis in epistemology brought on by the discrediting of objectivity is especially relevant to understanding the poem, because the problem of knowledge is itself one of its major subjects. Like Joyce, Valéry, and other contemporary writers, Eliot consciously adds a dimension in which his work is self-reflexive, a dimension in which it refers to itself and its nature as a linguistic structure, a dimension which incorporates the larger subject of the crisis in Western culture into the process of reading. The Waste Land contains, in addition to its many other gifts, a partial set of instructions on how to read in the twentieth century. We believe and shall try to demonstrate that Eliot's poem, in one of its aspects, is a brief and striking primer, a McGuffey's Eclectic Reader for the twentieth century.

I don’t think I can even imagine what a culture that’s been developing steadily for a billion years ought to be like. Disembodied electrical essences, maybe. Ghostly creatures flitting in and out of the eighth, ninth, and tenth dimensions. Cosmic minds that know all, perceive all, understand all. Maybe

A tissue is evidently an enduring thing. It's functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as part into the constitution of a tissue. Cell colonies, or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves. They must be studied like history.

Culture is critical in marriage because in a real sense, culture is the behavioral expression of one's values, appreciations, tastes, and relational style in both simple and serious matters of life. Add to this the dimensions of language and cultural memory, and you have worlds within worlds. In effect, culture provides the how and why of an individual's behavior.

Our quick tour through the many dimensions of cognitive and emotional dysfunction makes it plain why the practice of psychiatry has changed so profoundly over the past thirty years. The familiar caricature of the bearded and monocled Freudian analyst probing his reclining patient for memories of toilet training gone awry and parentally directed lust is now an anachronism, as is the professional practice of that mostly empty and confabulatory art. How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted—on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness (schizophrenia, mania and depression)—is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.

In this chapter, we’ve considered six psychological tendencies that exacerbate intertribal conflict. First, human tribes are tribalistic, favoring Us over Them. Second, tribes have genuine disagreements about how societies should be organized, emphasizing, to different extents, the rights of individuals versus the greater good of the group. Tribal values also differ along other dimensions, such as the role of honor in prescribing responses to threats. Third, tribes have distinctive moral commitments, typically religious ones, whereby moral authority is vested in local individuals, texts, traditions, and deities that other groups don’t recognize as authoritative. Fourth, tribes, like the individuals within them, are prone to biased fairness, allowing group-level self-interest to distort their sense of justice. Fifth, tribal beliefs are easily biased. Biased beliefs arise from simple self-interest, but also from more complex social dynamics. Once a belief becomes a cultural identity badge, it can perpetuate itself, even as it undermines the tribe’s interests. Finally, the way we process information about social events can cause us to underestimate the harm we cause others, leading to the escalation of conflict.

I only vaguely understood at the time the ways that I myself was on my knees, how in need I was of taking back my soul as a woman. The episode propelled me into a collision with the patriarchal underpinning of my church, my faith tradition, my culture, my marriage, and, most illuminating of all, me. It sent me in search of the feminine dimension of God. It began a spiritual cataclysm. My old life dissolved and a new life, a new consciousness, rose up.

The second part of the folk theory holds that racism is entirely a matter of individual beliefs, intentions, and actions. In the folk theory, a racist is a person who believes that people of color are biologically inferior to Whites, so that White privilege is deserved and must be defended. Racism is what this kind of White supremacist thinks and does. The folk theory holds that such people are anachronisms, who are ignorant, vicious, and remote from the mainstream. Their ignorance can be cured by education. Their viciousness can be addressed by helping them to enjoy new advantages, so that they can gain self-esteem and will not have to look down on others. Since education and general well-being are increasing, racism should soon disappear entirely, except as a sign of mental derangement or disability. One of the most difficult exercises that this book recommends is to move away from thinking of racism as entirely a matter of individual beliefs and psychological states. White Americans generally agree that things happen in the world because individuals, with beliefs, emotions, and intentions, cause them to happen. They consider this understanding to be the most obvious kind of common sense. Yet not everyone approaches the world from this perspective, and it is very interesting to try to think about racism from outside the framework that it imposes. Critical theorists do not deny that individual beliefs figure in racism. But we prefer to emphasize its collective, cultural dimensions, and to avoid singling out individuals and trying to decide whether they are racists or not. Furthermore, critical theorists insist that ordinary people who do not share White supremacist beliefs can still talk and behave in ways that advance the projects of White racism. I will try to show, in chapters to come, how

For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated. The surgery to extract it is necessarily complex and detailed. As a beginning it is important to X-ray our history and reveal the full extent of the disease. The strands of prejudice toward Negroes are tightly wound around the American character. The prejudice has been nourished by the doctrine of race inferiority. Yet to focus upon the Negro alone as the "inferior race" of American myth is to miss the broader dimensions of the evil. Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations. This is in sharp contrast to many nations south of the border, which assimilated their Indians, respected their culture, and elevated many of them to high position. It was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found rapid growth. This long-standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals. It is this tangled web of prejudice from which many Americans now seek to liberate themselves, without realizing how deeply it has been woven into their consciousness.

There is a poetic thread, William Blake said, that if grasped, will guide us through these stages, through giddy achievement, the sobriety of loss, and finally into the heart—a place of service to a wider purpose than just our own predicament. There is character in exchange for safety just beyond the streetlights, scars to be boasted of. Initiation recognizes this truth, holds it in ritual and gives it shape, lest too many go down that don’t come back. What we notice again and again in contemporary life is the process without the context. If the culture has amnesia around this reality, then nothing is to be gained by risking it, because it’s too terrifying: “Your early work was your best.” “Life has dealt me a cruel hand, if it wasn’t for my bad luck . . .” Without the dimension of myth, the world can seem depleted and arbitrary. With it there is perspective, tools, and the sense of an adventure to be lived. As the Chinese say, “No one becomes a good navigator on calm waters!

Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia - evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul. Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

The domestication of the human being is the great unthought; it is that before which humanism from antiquity to the present day has averted its eyes. To appreciate this is sufficient to find oneself in deep water. Where we can no longer stand, the evidence rises over our heads that the educational taming and befriending of the human being could never have been accomplished with letters and words alone. To be sure, reading [Lesen] was a great formative power for human beings—and it still is, within more modest dimensions. Yet selection [Auslesen]—however it may have been carried out—was always in play as the power behind the power. Readings and selections [Lektionen und Selektionen] have more to do with each other than any cultural historian was willing and able to consider, and if it also appears to us for the time being to be impossible to reconstruct with sufficient precision the connection between reading and selection [Lesen und Auslesen], it is nevertheless more than a tentative hunch that there is something real about it.

Gless's lexical shift from "sexiness" through "femininity" to a "real strong lady" is a discursive shift and therefore has sociopolitical dimension. "Sexiness" is from an explicitly patriarchal discourse, "femininity" is from a discourse that attempts to naturalize gender construction and difference in terms of the status quo and is therefore implicitly patriarchal, whereas "real strong lady" is from a discourse that consciously opposes and exposes both the explicit and implicit patriarchy of "sexiness" and "femininity".

Most people only care about one state of consciousness – the ordinary waking state – and they seek to accumulate material things. We have lost connection with any subtler levels of reality, the many dimensions and dream worlds that ayahuasca reveals. Amazonian cultures like the Achuar and the Secoya often believe that communing with these other levels or dimensions is an essential part of what we are here to do as humans. In losing touch with the dream world and the imaginal dimensions, modern humanity lost its soul and its purpose.

The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence, in one area after another, and has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies. Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence. Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality.

In terms of Arab culture, the importance of the Sufi contribution lies in its re-reading of the religious texts and the attribution to them of other meanings and dimensions; this in turn permits a new reading of the literary, philosophical and political legacy, which has led to a fresh look at language, not only in the religious context but also as a tool of revelation and expression. Sufis have gone beyond the legacy of the ‘established principles’ to set up the legacy of the mysteries. Another form of knowledge has been established and another intellectual domain.

Remarkably, studies of visual perception have found that two-dimensional images projected onto the retina only achieve full dimensionality as a result of our perception: we infer the third dimension of depth. Sadly, though, as the urgency to expedite all communicative transactions usurps out customary patterns of exchange, perception is accelerated as well. There does not seem to be a great deal of time left over to infer--or interpret, or imagine--much of anything at all. In the end, of course, there is nothing real about this at all, except for our propensity to let it happen.

But in other instances, he made so much sense that it hurt, like his post on why “well-meaning white folks” were sometimes far worse than white folks who wore their racist hearts on their sleeves. So, as Nella considered why she distrusted Needles and Pins so much, she also considered what Jesse had said about white people who went out of their way to present “diversity”: “With heightened awareness of cultural sensitivity comes great responsibility. If we’re not careful, ‘diversity’ might become an item people start checking off a list and nothing more—a shallow, shadowy thing with but one dimension.

This is not more cultural happenstance. It is a blitzkrieg from the darkness—a frontal attack of calculated and evil dimensions plotted by the adversary of God, man and all that is good, and being advanced by cunning, demonic hordes who can only be blocked in one way: prayer. Call the people to pray. Teach them to counterattack. Unveil My Word to them so that, by calling on Me through the grace I readily give when they invoke the name of My Son, they may unleash My power. As they accept this partnership I call them to, praying that My Kingdom may enter the world of those they love “on earth,” I will answer them by My Spirit’s power—working My will “as it is in heaven.” Well, that is really what happened. I don’t mean, of course, that God stepped into my office in the sense of physical appearance. Rather He made His presence and will known by the means He has revealed in His eternal Word of truth—the Holy Bible. In that book, which is the ultimate authority on all life’s issues, both eternal and temporal, He says that He will speak at times to people by “prophecy.” In this use, prophecy is not a reference to anything arbitrary or arcane—God is never random; nor is He weird. (Toss out the pundits who publish cleverly

Woman I is considered to this day to be one of the most anxiety-producing and disturbing images of a woman in the history of art. In this painting de Kooning, who was reared by an abusive mother, creates an image that captures the divergent dimensions of the eternal woman: fertility, motherhood, aggressive sexual power, and savagery. She is at once a primitive earth mother and a femme fatale. With this image, marked by fanglike teeth and huge eyes that echo the shape of her enormous breasts, de Kooning gave birth to a new synthesis of the female. 7.6 The first known female sculpture, the Venus of Hohle Fels, circa 35,000 B.C.

The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms - will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations : co-immunism.

These passages (Nietzsche, GM, 2.16) have an uncanny dual-aspect quality to them, with master morality oscillating between being a mythic trace of our wholly animal past (the articulation of a state of nature) and a specific mode of organizing the cultural dimension of any genuinely human life, and slave morality oscillating between being a later such mode and being the mythical means by which the human animal enters into culture in the first place (by dividing himself in two). Either way, however, the priests who lead the revolution are plainly possessed of an inner life of very significant depth and richness, and so must have already been marked by the very self-scrutinizing, life-denying value-system that Nietzsche’s account also tells us they create in order to marshal their slave army. But if Nietzsche finds himself affirming the paradoxical conclusion that slave morality makes possible not only its cultural hegemony but also its own existence, that indicates a fundamental tendency on his part to view this life-denying value-system as having always already left its traces on human life—as being what first makes genuinely human life possible, and indeed what first makes human beings and the world in which they live at once interesting, profound, momentous, and promising.

Yes. As I said, we are learning to recognize and believe in our intuitions at a higher level. We all want the coincidences to come more consistently, but for most of us, this awareness is new and we’re surrounded by a culture that still operates too much in the old skepticism, so we lose the expectation, the faith. Yet what we’re beginning to realize is that when we fully pay attention, inspecting the details of the potential future we’re shown, purposely keeping the image in the back of our minds, intentionally believing—when we do this—then whatever we are imaging tends to happen more readily.” “Then we ‘will’ it to happen?” “No. Remember my experience in the Afterlife. There you can make anything happen just by wishing it so, but such creation isn’t fulfilling. The same is true of this dimension, only everything moves at a slower rate. On Earth, we can will and create almost anything we wish, but real fulfillment comes only when we first tune into our inner direction and divine guidance. Only then do we use our will to move toward the potential futures we received. In this sense, we become cocreators with the divine source. Do you see how this knowledge begins the Tenth Insight? We are learning to use our visualization in the same way it is used in the Afterlife, and when we do, we fall into alignment with that dimension, and that helps unite Heaven and Earth.

In Europe, the dimensions of physical space seemed compressed. The looming vertical presence of mountains cut me off from the horizon. I'd not lived with that kind of spatial curtailment before. Even a city of skyscrapers is more porous than a snowcapped range. Alps form a solid barrier, an obstacle every bit as conceptual as visual and physical. Alpine bluffs and crags just don't rear up, they lean outwards, projecting their mass, and their solidity does not relent. For a West Australian like me, whose default setting is in diametric opposition, and for whom space is the impinging force, the effect is claustrophobic. I think I was constantly and instinctively searching for distances that were unavailable, measuring space and coming up short.

The Japanese word seiki is also a way of pointing to this vitality of presence. Carl Whitaker hinted at it when he said therapy was as good as the goodness of the therapist. Though his words are easy to misunderstand, they imply a truth: “I found seiki at the heart of most healing traditions.” Keeney is referring to his decade-long journey around the world, studying with the most accomplished healers in southern Africa, Latin America, South Asia, among the aborigines of Australia, and to many other far-flung places that hold ancient practices. He finds it more than a little amusing that in the culture of therapy we are so obsessed with things that matter so little to others around the world. “I have learned that one’s model or protocols matter not at all and that evidence-based therapy is a gambler’s way of pulling the authority card. If you have seiki, or a powerful life force, then any model will come to life. Without it, the session will be dead and incapable of transformation.” Keeney finds it challenging, if not frustrating, to try to explain this idea to those who don’t speak this language. “I guess if you have seiki or n/om, you feel what I am talking about; if you don’t, no words will matter. The extent to which you feel, smell, taste, hear, and see this vitality is a measure of how much mastery there is in your practice and everyday life.” We believe it is an illusion that master therapists truly understand what therapy is all about and how it works. The reality is that the process has many different dimensions and nuances that we never really grasp. There are aspects that appear both mysterious and magical.

In most ancient cultures, there must have been an intuitive understanding of this process, which is why old people were respected and revered. They were the repositories of wisdom and provided the dimension of depth without which no civilization can survive for long. In our civilization, which is totally identified with the outer and ignorant of the inner dimension of spirit, the word old has mainly negative connotations. It equals useless and so we regard it as almost an insult to refer to someone as old. To avoid the word, we use euphemisms such as elderly and senior. The First Nation’s “grandmother” is a figure of great dignity. Today’s “granny” is at best cute. Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it?

Always seeking to open channels to new dimensions of consciousness and reach new heights of enlightenment, he spent a lot of time and money endearing himself to and worming his way into the trust of secretive tribal healers and shamans. Under their guidance, he experimented with all kinds of psychoactive substances and entheogens—mostly plant-derived concoctions that played a pivotal role in the religious practices of the tribal cultures he was exploring. He started with more easily accessible, local mind-altering substances like psilocybin mushrooms and Salvia divinorum, under the guidance of Mazatec shamans in the isolated cloud forests of the Sierra Mazateca, then he moved on to more obscure, and more intense, hallucinogens like ayahuasca, the vine of the soul; iboga, the sacred visionary root; borrachero; and others that few outsiders had ever been offered. He

Vitality, understood both somatically and mentally, is itself the medium that contains a gradient between more and less. It therefore contains the vertical component that guides ascents within itself, and has no need of additional external or metaphysical attractors. That God is supposedly dead is irrelevant in this context. With or without God, each person will only get as far as their form carries them. Naturally 'God', during the time of his effective cultural representation, was the most convincing attractor for those forms of life and practice which strove 'towards Him' - and this towards-Him was identical to 'upwards'. Nietzsche's concern to preserve vertical tension after the death of God proves how seriously he took his task as the 'last metaphysician', without overlooking the comical aspect of his mission. He had found his great role as a witness to the vertical dimension without God.

I hesitate to mention this social dimension of sexism, racism, and class since it can be so easily used as an escape hatch by those too tired, too annoyed, too harried, or too comfortable to want to change. But it is true that although people are responsible for their actions, they are not responsible for the social context in which they must act or the social resources available to them. All of us must perforce accept large chunks of our culture readymade; there is not enough energy and time to do otherwise. Even so, the results of such nonthought can be appalling. At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act in a way that is both sexist and racist, to maintain one’s class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.

The second of the dimensions that Hofstede's team added to their original four was long-term–short-term orientation, based on the Chinese Values Survey. In addition, Michael Minkov identified a similar dimension using the World Values Survey. While the precise nature of the constructs varies, African nations tend to score strongly toward the short-term end of the spectrum in all of them. For example, Ghana is the second most short-term oriented society out of 93 countries in the World Values Survey; Nigeria the fifth most and, out of the bottom 20 countries, 6 are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Chinese Values Survey construct of long-term orientation, the only two Sub-Saharan countries out of 23 studied were Zimbabwe and Nigeria, which respectively scored fifth and second from bottom. Although a different construct, African societies also score very low on the Globe measure of future orientation.9 Experimental

For realists, the state is the main actor and sovereignty is its distinguishing trait. The meaning of the sovereign state is inextricably bound up with the use of force. In terms of its internal dimension, to illustrate this relationship between violence and the state we need to look no further than Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(M. J. Smith 1986: 23).3 Within this territorial space, sovereignty means that the state has supreme authority to make and enforce laws. This is the basis of the unwritten contract between individuals and the state. According to Hobbes, for example, we trade our liberty in return for a guarantee of security. Once security has been established, civil society can begin. But in the absence of security, there can be no art, no culture, no society. The first move, then, for the realist is to organize power domestically. Only after power has been organized, can community begin.

Knowledge of revelation cannot interfere with ordinary knowledge. Likewise, ordinary knowledge cannot interfere with knowledge of revelation. There is no scientific theory which is more favorable to the truth of revelation than any other theory. It is disastrous for theology if theologians prefer one scientific view to others on theological grounds. And it was humiliating for theology when theologians were afraid of new theories for religious reasons, trying to resist them as long as possible, and finally giving in when resistance had become impossible. This ill-conceived resistance of theologians from the time of Galileo to the time of Darwin was one of the causes of the split between religion and secular culture in the past centuries. The same situation prevails with regard to historical research. Theologians need not be afraid of any historical conjecture, for revealed truth lies in a dimension where it can neither be confirmed nor negated by historiography. Therefore, theologians should not prefer some results of historical research to others on theological grounds, and they should not resist results which finally have to be accepted if scientific honesty is not to be destroyed, even if they seem to undermine the knowledge of revelation. Historical investigations should neither comfort nor worry theologians. Knowledge of revelation, although it is mediated primarily through historical events, does not imply factual assertions, and it is therefore not exposed to critical analysis by historical research. Its truth is to be judged by criteria which lie within the dimension of revelatory knowledge. Psychology, including depth psychology, psychosomatics, and social psychology, is equally unable to interfere with knowledge of revelation. There are many insights into the nature of man in revelation. But all of them refer to the relation of man to what concerns him ultimately, to the ground and meaning of his being. There is no revealed psychology just as there is no revealed historiography or revealed physics. It is not the task of theology to protect the truth of revelation by attacking Freudian doctrines of libido, repression, and sublimation on religious grounds or by defending a Jungian doctrine of man in the name of revelatory knowledge.

It is not possible for human beings to outgrow loneliness. Nor can someone from a culture that condescends to nature easily escape the haunting thought that one’s life is meaningless. Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere. The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.

The process of simplifying man's environment and rendering it increasingly elemental and crude has a cultural as well as a physical dimension. The need to manipulate immense urban populations—to transport, feed, employ, educate and somehow entertain millions of densely concentrated people—leads to a crucial decline in civic and social standards. A mass concept of human relations—totalitarian, centralistic and regimented in orientation—tends to dominate the more individuated concepts of the past. Bureaucratic techniques of social management tend to replace humanistic approaches. All that is spontaneous, creative and individuated is circumscribed by the standardized, the regulated and the massified. The space of the individual is steadily narrowed by restrictions imposed upon him by a faceless, impersonal social apparatus. Any recognition of unique personal qualities is increasingly surrendered to the manipulation of the lowest common denominator of the mass. A quantitative, statistical approach, a beehive manner of dealing with man, tends to triumph over the precious individualized and qualitative approach which places the strongest emphasis on personal uniqueness, free expression and cultural complexity.

These same experiences are occurring to people all over the planet. After we grasp the first nine Insights, each of us is left at the same place—trying to live this reality day-to-day, in the face of what seems to be a growing pessimism and divisiveness all around us. But at the same time, we are continuing to gain a greater perspective and clarity about our spiritual situation, about who we really are. We know we are awakening to a much larger plan for planet Earth. “The Tenth is about maintaining our optimism and staying awake. We’re learning to better identify and believe in our own intuitions, knowing that these mental images are fleeting recollections of our original intention, of how we wanted our lives to evolve. We wanted to follow a certain path in life, so that we could finally remember the truth that our life experiences are preparing us to tell, and bring this knowledge into the world. “We are now seeing our lives from the higher perspective of the Afterlife. We know that our individual adventures are occurring within the context of the long history of human awakening. With this memory, our lives are grounded, put into context; we can see the long process through which we have been spiritualizing the physical dimension, and what we have left to do.” Wil paused momentarily and moved closer to us. “Now we will see if enough groups like this one come together and remember, if enough people around the world grasp the Tenth. As we have seen, it is now our responsibility to keep the intention, to ensure the future. “The polarization of Fear is still rising, and if we are to resolve it and move on, each of us must participate personally. We must watch our thoughts and expectations very carefully, and catch ourselves every time we treat another human being as an enemy. We can defend ourselves, and restrain certain people, but if we dehumanize them, we add to the Fear. “We all are souls in growth; we all have an original intention that is positive; and we can all remember. Our responsibility is to hold that idea for everyone we meet. That’s the true Interpersonal Ethic; that’s how we uplift, that’s the contagion of the new awareness that is encircling the planet. We either fear that human culture is falling apart, or we can hold the Vision that we are awakening. Either way, our expectation is a prayer that goes out as a force that tends to bring about the end we envision. Each of us must consciously choose between these two futures.

Of all of Hofstede’s Dimensions, though, perhaps the most interesting is what he called the “Power Distance Index” (PDI). Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority. To measure it, Hofstede asked questions like “How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?” To what extent do the “less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally?” How much are older people respected and feared? Are power holders entitled to special privileges? “In low–power distance index countries,” Hofstede wrote in his classic text Culture’s Consequences: power is something of which power holders are almost ashamed and they will try to underplay. I once heard a Swedish (low PDI) university official state that in order to exercise power he tried not to look powerful. Leaders may enhance their informal status by renouncing formal symbols. In (low PDI) Austria, Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky was known to sometimes take the streetcar to work. In 1974, I actually saw the Dutch (low PDI) prime minister, Joop den Uyl, on vacation with his motor home at a camping site in Portugal. Such behavior of the powerful would be very unlikely in high-PDI Belgium or France.*

Genar-Hofoen found himself wondering again about the trade-off between skill-honing and distraction that took place in the development of any species likely to end up as one of those in play in the great galactic civilisation game. The Culture’s standard assessment held that the Affront spent far too much time hunting and not nearly enough time getting on with the business of being a responsible space-faring species (though of course the Culture was sophisticated enough to know that this was just its, admittedly subjective, way of looking at things; and besides, the more time the Affront spent dallying in their hunting parks and regaling each other with hunting tales in their carousing halls, the less they had for rampaging across their bit of the galaxy being horrible to people). But if the Affront didn’t love hunting as much as they did, would they still be the Affront? Hunting, especially the highly cooperative form of hunting in three dimensions which the Affront had evolved, required and encouraged intelligence, and it was generally - though not exclusively - intelligence that took a species into space. The required mix of common sense, inventiveness, compassion and aggression required was different for each; perhaps if you tried to make the Affront just a little less enraptured by hunting you would only be able to do so by making them much less intelligent and inquisitive. It was like play; it was fun at the time, when you were a child, but it was also training for when you became an adult. Fun was serious.

It is no surprise, then, that the earth deities of the Old Religion were demonized or co-opted. A typical task for Greek heroes was to rid the civilized world of those “earth-born bogeys.” The Gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turned men to stone, became an obvious target. Nevertheless, on the periphery of the Greek world, there is evidence that She was venerated in her ancient powers. During the 6th century BCE on the island of Corfu, an eight-foot-high full-bodied sculpture of Medusa was placed at the highest point on the pediment of the temple of Artemis. This Medusa is not raging, but is radiant in her full potency. Snakes with open jaws extend from each side of her head and two copulating serpents encircle her waist, carrying the potential for both death and new life. She wears winged sandals, her great wings are fully extended, sheltering her two children, and her bent-knee posture suggests that she is flying. All shamanic dimensions are Hers—the Great Above, the Great Below, the Primordial Waters, and the entire expanse of the Earth. She is flanked by great felines, just as the Phrygian Mountain Goddess Cybele and the seated Ancestral Mother from Çatalhöyük before her.'' ''The establishment of the Greek patriarchal world shifted the previous cultural valence from the egalitarian continuity of the Old Religion to the extreme imposition of male dominance and the cult of the hero. Under this new world order, all challenges to male hegemonic systems were to be crushed. As the classicist Eva Keuls emphasizes, “the suppression of women, the military expansionism and the harshness in the conduct of civic affairs all sprang from a common aggressive impulse.” That impulse was the expression of “male supremacy and the cult of power and violence.

Questioner: In the tradition, we were always taught to be reverential towards God or the highest aspect. So how to reconcile this with Mirabai or Akka Mahadevi who took God as their lover? Sadhguru: Where there is no love, how can reverence come? When love reaches its peak, it naturally becomes reverence. People who are talking about reverence without love know neither this nor that. All they know is fear. So probably you are referring to God-fearing people. These sages and saints, especially the seers like Akka Mahadevi, Mirabai or Anusuya and so many of them in the past, have taken to this form of worship because it was more suitable for them – they could emote much more easily than they could intellectualize things. They just used their emotions to reach their Ultimate nature. Using emotion and reaching the Ultimate nature is what is called bhakti yoga. In every culture, there are different forms of worship. Some people worship God as the master and themselves as the slaves. Sometimes they even take God as their servant or as a partner in everything that they do. Yet others worship him as a friend, as a lover, or as their own child like Balakrishna. Generally, you become the feminine and you hold him as the ultimate purusha – masculine. How you worship is not at all the point; the whole point is just how deeply you relate. These are the different attitudes, but whatever the attitude, the love affair is such that you are not expecting anything from the other side. Not even a response. You crave for it. But if there is no response, you are not going to be angry, you are not going to be disappointed – nothing. Your life is just to crave and make something else tremendously more important than yourself. That is the fundamental thing. In the whole path of bhakti, the important thing is just this, that something else is far more important than you. So Akka, Mirabai and others like them, their bhakti was in that form and they took this mode of worship where they worshipped God – whether Shiva or Krishna – as their husband. In India, when a woman comes to a certain age, marriage is almost like a must, and it anyway happens. They wanted to eliminate that dimension of being married once again to another man, so they chose the Lord himself as their husband so that they don’t need any other relationship in their lives. How a devotee relates to his object of devotion does not really matter because the purpose of the path of devotion is just dissolution. The only objective of a devotee is to dissolve into his object of devotion. Whichever way they could relate best, that is how they would do it. The reason why you asked this question in terms of reverence juxtaposed with being a lover or a husband is because the word “love” or “being a lover” is always understood as a physical aspect. That is why this question has come. How can you be physical with somebody and still be reverential? This has been the tragedy of humanity that lovers have not known how to be reverential to each other. In fact the very objective of love is to dissolve into someone else. If you look at love as an emotion, you can see that love is a vehicle to bring oneness. It is the longing to become one with the other which we are referring to as love. When it is taken to its peak, it is very natural to become reverential towards what you consider worthwhile being “one” with. For whatever sake, you are willing to dissolve yourself. It is natural to be reverential towards that. Otherwise how would you feel that it is worthwhile to dissolve into? If you think it is something you can use or something you can just relate to and be benefited by, there can be no love. Always, the object of love is to dissolve. So, whatever you consider is worthwhile to dissolve your own self into, you are bound to be reverential towards that; there is no other way to be.

Eurêka. Poe attachait une grande importance à cette œuvre, à la fois cosmogonie et poème, qui commence par un discours de la méthode et se termine par une métaphysique. L’influence des idées de Poe, qui se répandent en Europe à partir de 1845, est si considérable, et se fait sentir avec une telle intensité sur certains écrivains (tels que Baudelaire ou Dostoïevski) que l’on peut dire qu’il donne un sens nouveau à la littérature. Poe joignait en lui des éléments de culture assez hétérogènes ; d’une part, élève de l’École polytechnique de Baltimore (où passa aussi Whistler), il avait une formation scientifique ; de l’autre, ses lectures l’avaient mis en contact avec le romantisme allemand des Lumières, et avec tout le XVIIIe siècle français, représenté souvent par des ouvrages oubliés aujourd’hui, tels que conteurs, poètes mineurs, etc. Ne pas négliger chez Poe l’élément cabaliste (de même que chez Goethe), la magie, telle qu’elle devait hanter, en France, l’esprit d’un Nerval, en Allemagne, Hoffmann, et bien d’autres. Enfin, l’influence de la poésie anglaise (Milton, Shelley, etc.). Poe avait lu tout jeune les deux ouvrages les plus répandus de Laplace qui l’avaient beaucoup frappé. Le calcul des probabilités intervient constamment chez lui. Dans Eurêka, il développe l’idée de la nébuleuse (de Kant), que reprendra plus tard Henri Poincaré. Poe introduit dans la littérature l’esprit d’analyse. À ce propos, il convient de répéter que pensée réfléchie et pensée intuitive peuvent et doivent coexister et se coordonner. Le travail littéraire pouvant se décomposer en plusieurs « temps », on doit faire collaborer ces deux états de l’esprit, l’état de veille où la précision, la netteté sont portées à leur point le plus haut, et une autre phase, plus confuse, où peuvent naître spontanément des éléments mélodiques ou poétiques. Du reste, quand un poème est long (cf., dans « La Genèse d’un poème », le passage ayant trait à la « dimension »), ce « bonheur de l’instant » ne saura se soutenir pendant toute sa durée. Il faut donc toujours aller d’une forme de création à l’autre, et elles ne s’opposent pas.

There is also a still deeper reason for which a growth in the tensions in the human universe - and indeed not despite, but during the simultaneous spreading of universal-ethical principles - can be presumed. The ethically-normatively charged word "human" functioned linguistically as an honorific adjective so long a one demarcated it against other adjectives which seemed to indicate the merely historically determined, abolishable and to be abolished distinctions between humans; in the language of ethical universalism "human" always meant something nobler and higher than words like Jew or Greek, Christian or heathen, black or white, communist or liberal. If all particular counter concepts in respect of the universalism "human" cease to apply, the word "human" will no longer constitute an adjective, that is, it will no longer point to a higher quality, but it will be converted into a noun for the description of a certain animal species. Humans will all be called "humans" just as lions lions and mice - mice without further national or ideological differentiation. It may sound paradoxical and yet it is so, that man differentiated himself from all the other animal species exactly because he was not merely man free of all other attributes (i.e. without any other predicate or complement). Not only did culture come into being through the overcoming of bare humanness and the gradual attainment of historically determined attributes, but also altercations and the struggles between humans gained, thanks to the presence and the effect exactly of these attributes, emotional and ideological dimensions which went far beyond the what is merely animal. That is why it is not excluded that the reduction of man to his mere humanness will inaugurate and will accompany an epoch in which humans will have to fight against one another for goods which are absolutely necessary for the naked survival of the animal species "man" - in the worst case for air and water. In accordance with a well-known paradox of historical action, the imposition of universal ethics will then bring about effects entirely different to the originally intended effects.

The liberal notion that more government programs can solve racial problems is simplistic—precisely because it focuses solely on the economic dimension. And the conservative idea that what is needed is a change in the moral behavior of poor black urban dwellers (especially poor black men, who, they say, should stay married, support their children, and stop committing so much crime) highlights immoral actions while ignoring public responsibility for the immoral circumstances that haunt our fellow citizens. The common denominator of these views of race is that each still sees black people as a “problem people,” in the words of Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow American citizens with problems. Her words echo the poignant “unasked question” of W. E. B. Du Bois, who, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), wrote: They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town.… Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. Nearly a century later, we confine discussions about race in America to the “problems” black people pose for whites rather than consider what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation. This paralyzing framework encourages liberals to relieve their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at “the problems”; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism of black people, liberals deny them the freedom to err. Similarly, conservatives blame the “problems” on black people themselves—and thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public attention. Hence, for liberals, black people are to be “included” and “integrated” into “our” society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be “well behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by “our” way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life.

They were able to step back from their automatic responses and glimpse the full scope of existence. Life, they knew, endured through the cycles of the sun and moon and seasons, but as the dead around them attested, it also had an end. What was the purpose? Looking closely at these reflective individuals, I realized I could perceive their Birth Visions; they had come into the Earthly dimension with the specific purpose of initiating humanity’s first existential awakening. And, even though I couldn’t see its full scope, I knew that in the back of their minds was held the larger inspiration of the World Vision. Before their birth, they were aware that humanity was embarking on a long journey that they could already see. But they also knew that progress along this journey would have to be earned, generation by generation—for as we awakened to pursue a higher destiny, we also lost the calm peace of unconsciousness. Along with the exhilaration and freedom of knowing we were alive came the fear and uncertainty of being alive without knowing why. I could see that humanity’s long history would be moved by these two conflicting urges. On the one hand, we would be moved past our fears by the strength of our intuitions, by our mental images that life was about accomplishing some particular goal, of moving culture forward in a positive direction that only we, as individuals, acting with courage and wisdom, could inspire. From the strength of these feelings we would be reminded that, as insecure as life appeared, we were, in fact, not alone, that there was purpose and meaning underlying the mystery of existence. Yet, on the other hand, we would often fall prey to the opposite urge, the urge to protect ourselves from the Fear, at times losing sight of the purpose, falling into the angst of separation and abandonment. This Fear would lead us into a frightened self-protection, fighting to retain our positions of power, stealing energy from each other, and always resisting change and evolution, regardless of what new, better information might be available. As the awakening continued, millennia passed, and I watched as humans gradually began to coalesce into ever-larger groups, following a natural drive to identify with more people, to move into more complex social organizations. I could see that this drive came from the vague intuition, known fully in the Afterlife, that human destiny on Earth was to evolve toward unification.

When you say, ‘I love you’ to other people you may be actually saying: •  I don’t want to feel certain emotions hidden deep within me. •  I love you because I don’t want to feel heavy. •  I love you because I don’t want to feel shitty. •  I love you because I don’t want to feel lonely. •  I love you so I do not have to feel the huge gaping hole within me. •  I love you because I don’t want to feel out of control. •  I love you so I can stay in control. •  I love you so I don’t have to feel angry. •  I love you so I can feel angry. •  I love you because I really don’t want to feel lost. •  I love you because I don’t want to feel how hopeless my life is. •  I love you because I don’t want to feel my own pain. •  I love you because you fit the fantasy in my head of what my lover should be like. •  I love you because I do not want to feel empty. •  I love you because I do not love myself. •  I love you because someone in my past did not love me. •  I love you because I am addicted to sex, to comfort. •  I love you because you make me feel good and stop me feeling other emotions I do not wish to feel. •  I love you because you fill me up. •  I love you because you make me feel scared and that’s what love is for me. •  I love you because you remind me of how I have been abused and how I have abused others. •  I love you because you serve me and do not bother me. •  I love you because other people say I do, and we look good together. •  I love you because society demands that I should, and it is right to. •  I love you because I am too scared to be myself and step out into the world alone. •  I love you because you give me security, stability and because I am obliged to because we have children and a home. •  I love you because my parents, friends and culture want me to. •  I love you because you make me feel needed. •  I love you because I need you. •  I love you because I want to take care of you and make you, and me, feel good. •  I need to do something to deserve love. •  I need to do something to give love. •  I need to do something to receive love. •  Love is need. Need is love. •  I can only love when I am perfect and good. •  I can only love and be loved when I am perfect and good. •  I can only love myself when I am perfect and good. Is any of this really love? Does love use anything? Does love manipulate anybody? So why are you doing it everyday? Why do you grab hold of anyone else to stop you feeling these things?

I have come to think of the UFO problem in terms of three distinct levels. The first level is physical. We now know that the UFO behaves like a region of space, of small dimensions (about ten meters), within which a very large amount of energy is stored. This energy is manifested by pulsed light phenomena of intense colors and by other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The second level is biological. Reports of UFOs show all kinds of psychophysiological effects on the witnesses. Exposure to the phenomenon causes visions, hallucinations, space and time disorientation, physiological reactions (including temporary blindness, paralysis, sleep cycle changes), and long-term personality changes. The third level is social. Belief in the reality of UFOs is spreading rapidly at all levels of society throughout the world. Books on the subject continue to accumulate. Documentaries and major films are being made by men and women who grew up with flying-saucer stories. Expectations about life in the universe have been revolutionized. Many modern themes in our culture can be traced back to the "messages from space" coming from UFO contactees of the forties and fifties. The experience of a close encounter with a UFO is a shattering physical and mental ordeal. The trauma has effects that go far beyond what the witnesses recall consciously. New types of behavior are conditioned, and new types of beliefs are promoted. Aside from any scientific consideration, the social, political, and religious consequences of the experience are enormous if they are considered over the timespan of a generation. Faced with the new wave of experiences of UFO contact that are described in books like Communion and Intruders and in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, our religions seem obsolete. Our idea of the church as a social entity working within rational structures is obviously challenged by the claim of a direct communication in modern times with visible beings who seem endowed with supernatural powers. This idea can shake our society to the very roots of its culture. Witnesses are no longer afraid to come forward with personal stories of abductions, of spiritual exchanges with aliens, even of sexual interaction with them. Such reports are folklore in the making. I have discovered that they form a striking parallel to the tales of meetings with elves and jinn of medieval times, with the denizens of "Magonia," the land beyond the clouds of ancient chronicles. But they are something else, too: a portent of important things to come.

This curious effect was noticed as far back as 1892, when textbooks on mental illness noted a link between “religious emotionalism” and epilepsy. It was first clinically described in 1975 by neurologist Norman Geschwind of Boston Veterans Administration Hospital. He noticed that epileptics who had electrical misfirings in their left temporal lobes often had religious experiences, and he speculated that the electrical storm in the brain somehow was the cause of these religious obsessions. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran estimates that 30 to 40 percent of all the temporal lobe epileptics whom he has seen suffer from hyperreligiosity. He notes, “Sometimes it’s a personal God, sometimes it’s a more diffuse feeling of being one with the cosmos. Everything seems suffused with meaning. The patient will say, ‘Finally, I see what it is all really about, Doctor. I really understand God. I understand my place in the universe—the cosmic scheme.’ ” He also notes that many of these individuals are extremely adamant and convincing in their beliefs. He says, “I sometimes wonder whether such patients who have temporal lobe epilepsy have access to another dimension of reality, a wormhole of sorts into a parallel universe. But I usually don’t say this to my colleagues, lest they doubt my sanity.” He has experimented on patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, and confirmed that these individuals had a strong emotional reaction to the word “God” but not to neutral words. This means that the link between hyperreligiosity and temporal lobe epilepsy is real, not just anecdotal. Psychologist Michael Persinger asserts that a certain type of transcranial electrical stimulation (called transcranial magnetic simulation, or TMS) can deliberately induce the effect of these epileptic lesions. If this is so, is it possible that magnetic fields can be used to alter one’s religious beliefs? In Dr. Persinger’s studies, the subject places a helmet on his head (dubbed the “God helmet”), which contains a device that can send magnetism into particular parts of the brain. Afterward, when the subject is interviewed, he will often claim that he was in the presence of some great spirit. David Biello, writing in Scientific American, says, “During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language—terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence, or the wonder of the universe.” Since this effect is reproducible on demand, it indicates that perhaps the brain is hardwired in some way to respond to religious feelings.

The German Volk will believe me when I say that I would have chosen peace over war. Because for me, peace meant a multitude of delightful assignments. What I was able to do for the German Volk in the few years from 1933 to 1939, thanks to Providence and the support of numerous excellent assistants, in terms of culture, education, as well as economic recovery, and, above all, in the social organization of our lives, this can surely one day be compared with what my enemies have done and achieved in the same period. In the long years of struggle for power, I often regretted that the realization of my plans was spoiled by incidents that were not only relatively unimportant, but also, above all, completely insignificant. I regret this war not only because of the sacrifices that it demands of my German Volk and of other people, but also because of the time it takes away from those who intend to carry out a great social and civilizing work and who want to complete it. After all, what Mr. Roosevelt is capable of achieving, he has proved. What Mr. Churchill has achieved, nobody knows. I can only feel profound regret at what this war will prevent me and the entire National Socialist movement from doing for many years. It is a shame that a person cannot do anything about true bunglers and lazy fellows stealing the valuable time that he wanted to dedicate to cultural, social, and economic projects for his Volk. The same applies to Fascist Italy. There, too, one man has perpetuated his name for all time through a civilizing and national revolution of worldwide dimensions. In the same way it cannot be compared to the democratic-political bungling of the idlers and dividend profiteers, who, in the Anglo-American countries, for instance, spend the wealth accumulated by their fathers or acquire new wealth through shady deals. It is precisely because this young Europe is involved in the resolution of truly great questions that it will not allow the representatives of a group of powers who tactfully call themselves the “have” states to rob them of everything that makes life worth living, namely, the value of one’s own people, their freedom, and their social and general human existence. Therefore, we understand that Japan, weary of the everlasting blackmail and impudent threats, has chosen to defend itself against the most infamous warmongers of all time. Now a mighty front of nation-states, reaching from the Channel to East Asia, has taken up the struggle against the international Jewish-capitalist and Bolshevik conspiracy. New Year’s Proclamation to the National Socialists and Party Comrades January 1, 1942

The society’s ‘look’ is a self-publicizing one. The American flag itself bears witness to this by its omnipresence, in fields and built-up areas, at service stations, and on graves in the cemeteries, not as a heroic sign, but as the trademark of a good brand. It is simply the label of the finest successful international enterprise, the US. This explains why the hyperrealists were able to paint it naively, without either irony or protest (Jim Dine in the sixties), in much the same way as Pop Art gleefully transposed the amazing banality of consumer goods on to its canvases. There is nothing here of the fierce parodying of the American anthem by Jimi Hendrix, merely the light irony and neutral humour of things that have become banal, the humour of the mobile home and the giant hamburger on the sixteen-foot long billboard, the pop and hyper humour so characteristic of the atmosphere of America, where things almost seem endowed with a certain indulgence towards their own banality. But they are indulgent towards their own craziness too. Looked at more generally, they do not lay claim to being extraordinary; they simply are extraordinary. They have that extravagance which makes up odd, everyday America. This oddness is not surrealistic (surrealism is an extravagance that is still aesthetic in nature and as such very European in inspiration); here, the extravagance has passed into things. Madness, which with us is subjective, has here become objective, and irony which is subjective with us has also turned into something objective. The fantasmagoria and excess which we locate in the mind and the mental faculties have passed into things themselves. Whatever the boredom, the hellish tedium of the everyday in the US or anywhere else, American banality will always be a thousand times more interesting than the European - and especially the French - variety. Perhaps because banality here is born of extreme distances, of the monotony of wide-open spaces and the radical absence of culture. It is a native flower here, asis the opposite extreme, that of speed and verticality, of an excess that verges on abandon, and indifference to values bordering on immorality, whereas French banality is a hangover from bourgeois everyday life, born out of a dying aristocratic culture and transmuted into petty-bourgeois mannerism as the bourgeoisie shrank away throughout the nineteenth century. This is the crux: it is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality, whereas the Americans have succeeded in preserving some humour in the material signs of manifest reality and wealth. This also explains why Europeans experience anything relating to statistics as tragic. They immediately read in them their individual failure and take refuge in a pained denunciation of the merely quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as representing the dimensions of their good fortune, their joyous membership of the majority. Theirs is the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction.

Making the most of an experience: Living fully is extolled everywhere in popular culture. I have only to turn on the television at random to be assailed with the following messages: “It’s the best a man can get.” “It’s like having an angel by your side.” “Every move is smooth, every word is cool. I never want to lose that feeling.” “You look, they smile. You win, they go home.” What is being sold here? A fantasy of total sensory pleasure, social status, sexual attraction, and the self-image of a winner. As it happens, all these phrases come from the same commercial for razor blades, but living life fully is part of almost any ad campaign. What is left out, however, is the reality of what it actually means to fully experience something. Instead of looking for sensory overload that lasts forever, you’ll find that the experiences need to be engaged at the level of meaning and emotion. Meaning is essential. If this moment truly matters to you, you will experience it fully. Emotion brings in the dimension of bonding or tuning in: An experience that touches your heart makes the meaning that much more personal. Pure physical sensation, social status, sexual attraction, and feeling like a winner are generally superficial, which is why people hunger for them repeatedly. If you spend time with athletes who have won hundreds of games or with sexually active singles who have slept with hundreds of partners, you’ll find out two things very quickly: (1) Numbers don’t count very much. The athlete usually doesn’t feel like a winner deep down; the sexual conqueror doesn’t usually feel deeply attractive or worthy. (2) Each experience brings diminishing returns; the thrill of winning or going to bed becomes less and less exciting and lasts a shorter time. To experience this moment, or any moment, fully means to engage fully. Meeting a stranger can be totally fleeting and meaningless, for example, unless you enter the individual’s world by finding out at least one thing that is meaningful to his or her life and exchange at least one genuine feeling. Tuning in to others is a circular flow: You send yourself out toward people; you receive them as they respond to you. Notice how often you don’t do that. You stand back and insulate yourself, sending out only the most superficial signals and receive little or nothing back. The same circle must be present even when someone else isn’t involved. Consider the way three people might observe the same sunset. The first person is obsessing over a business deal and doesn’t even see the sunset, even though his eyes are registering the photons that fall on their retinas. The second person thinks, “Nice sunset. We haven’t had one in a while.” The third person is an artist who immediately begins a sketch of the scene. The differences among the three are that the first person sent nothing out and received nothing back; the second allowed his awareness to receive the sunset but had no awareness to give back to it—his response was rote; the third person was the only one to complete the circle: He took in the sunset and turned it into a creative response that sent his awareness back out into the world with something to give. If you want to fully experience life, you must close the circle.

We may therefore propose a working hypothesis for Judah: a culture with a diminished lineage system, one less embedded in traditional family patrimonies due to societal changes in the eighth through sixth centuries, might be more predisposed both to hold to individual human accountability for behavior and to see an individual deity accountable for the cosmos. (This individual accountability at the human and divine levels may be viewed as concomitant developments.) Accordingly, later Israelite monotheism was denuded of the divine family, a development perhaps intelligible in light of Israel’s weakening family lineages and patrimonies. This is only one dimension of Israelite monotheism, a complex matter that the last chapter of this book addresses in detail.

Hofstede argued, for example, that cultures can be usefully distinguished according to how much they expect individuals to look after themselves. He called that measurement the “individualism-collectivism scale.” The country that scores highest on the individualism end of that scale is the United States. Not surprisingly, the United States is also the only industrialized country in the world that does not provide its citizens with universal health care. At the opposite end of the scale is Guatemala. Another of Hofstede’s dimensions is “uncertainty avoidance.” How well does a culture tolerate ambiguity? Here are the top five “uncertainty avoidance” countries, according to Hofstede’s database—that is, the countries most reliant on rules and plans and most likely to stick to procedure regardless of circumstances: Greece Portugal Guatemala Uruguay Belgium The bottom five—that is, the cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity—are: 49. Hong Kong 50. Sweden 51. Denmark 52. Jamaica 53. Singapore

One of the characteristics of oppressive cultural action which is almost never perceived by the dedicated but naïve professionals who are involved is the emphasis on a focalized view of problems rather than on seeing them as dimensions of a totality. In “community development” projects the more a region or area is broken down into “local communities,” without the study of these communities both as totalities in themselves and as parts of another totality (the area, region, and so forth)—which in its turn is part of a still larger totality (the nation, as part of the continental totality)—the more alienation is intensified. And the more alienated people are, the easier it is to divide them and keep them divided. These focalized forms of action, by intensifying the focalized way of life of the oppressed (especially in rural areas), hamper the oppressed from perceiving reality critically and keep them isolated from the problems of oppressed women and men in other areas.

Sophisticated people tend to scorn. They are afraid that such enthusiasms might be evidence of a failure to acknowledge or understand the awful dimensions of the world.

All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games—those which can be played in any sense ‘perfectly,’ such as grid, Prallian scope, ’nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions—can be traced to civilizations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.