Designing The Mind Book Quotes

The scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God made the rock and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture.

Note to Self – Thoughts design my energy! My thoughts WILL design the energy that moves me!

I didn’t mind because I had my own boxes —beautiful boxes that I’d imagined, created, and designed. My boxes were full of endless possibilities! 

Don't die with the music on your tongue unsung! Don't die with the apps in your mind undesigned! Don't die with the books in your head unpublished! Don't die with the sermons in your heart unpreached! Live well and die well!

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides. What other creature in God's wide domain would carry the memory of you, Fanny, dust these nine hundred years, and allow it to eat away at him even as consumption does the same work with its effortless efficiency? Words assail me. The thought of books makes me ache. Poetry echoes in my mind, and if I had the ability to banish it, I would do so at once.

Don't rush to design your face to look beautiful, attractive and charming. Rather, be quicker to decorate your mind to appear as goal-oriented, passion-embedded and action-driven.

The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation—the role of chance…What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.

England once there lived a big And wonderfully clever pig. To everybody it was plain That Piggy had a massive brain. He worked out sums inside his head, There was no book he hadn't read. He knew what made an airplane fly, He knew how engines worked and why. He knew all this, but in the end One question drove him round the bend: He simply couldn't puzzle out What LIFE was really all about. What was the reason for his birth? Why was he placed upon this earth? His giant brain went round and round. Alas, no answer could be found. Till suddenly one wondrous night. All in a flash he saw the light. He jumped up like a ballet dancer And yelled, "By gum, I've got the answer!" "They want my bacon slice by slice "To sell at a tremendous price! "They want my tender juicy chops "To put in all the butcher's shops! "They want my pork to make a roast "And that's the part'll cost the most! "They want my sausages in strings! "They even want my chitterlings! "The butcher's shop! The carving knife! "That is the reason for my life!" Such thoughts as these are not designed To give a pig great piece of mind. Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland, A pail of pigswill in his hand, And piggy with a mighty roar, Bashes the farmer to the floor… Now comes the rather grizzly bit So let's not make too much of it, Except that you must understand That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland, He ate him up from head to toe, Chewing the pieces nice and slow. It took an hour to reach the feet, Because there was so much to eat, And when he finished, Pig, of course, Felt absolutely no remorse. Slowly he scratched his brainy head And with a little smile he said, "I had a fairly powerful hunch "That he might have me for his lunch. "And so, because I feared the worst, "I thought I'd better eat him first.

Jesper had never really been a great reader. He loved stories but he hated sitting still. And the books assigned to him for school seemed designed to make his mind wander.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

This has been the point of much of this book. The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings via tanha—via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.

Keep creating new chapters in your personal book and never stop re-inventing and perfecting yourself. Try new things. Pick up new hobbies and books. Travel and explore other cultures. Never stay in the same city or state for more than five years of your life. There are many heavens on earth waiting for you to discover. Seek out people with beautiful hearts and minds, not those with just beautiful style and bodies. The first kind will forever remain beautiful to you, while the other will grow stale and ugly. Learn a new language at least twice. Change your career at least thrice, and change your location often. Like all creatures in the wild, we were designed to keep moving. When a snake sheds its old skin, it becomes a more refined creature. Never stop refining and re-defining yourself. We are all beautiful instruments of God. He created many notes in music so we would not be stuck playing the same song. Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your journey and play on. Nobody will ever reach ultimate perfection in this lifetime, but trying to achieve it is a full-time job. Start now and don't stop. Make your book of life a musical. Never abandon obligations, but have fun leaving behind a colorful legacy. Never allow anybody to be the composer of your own destiny. Take control of your life, and never allow limitations implanted by society, tell you how your music is supposed to sound — or how your book is supposed to be written.

Acting on desire is more like a craft, a science, an art. It takes careful mindful practice. Be patient and quiet. Listen, observe, take notes. Figure out what you want, privately, and then choose to want it, publicly. Put your desire out in the open. I want to go swimming. I want to bake bread. I want to paint a picture. I want to build a chair. I want to write a book. You act and then you fail. Over and over. And it’s better to start failing when you’re young, when all you lose is an ice-cream cone or a basketball game or an afternoon of fun. When you’re older, the stakes are higher. If adults don’t know how to want, then they lose a love, a career, a life.

Your life success is well designed by the mental transformation you experience. That mental transformation guides you to construct powerful decisions. You can't live life so well without mental make-ups.

He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, “mildly unbalanced.” He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Especially he didn’t like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious.

The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically—that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections.

Having a sensitive nervous system is normal,” Aron writes in The Highly Sensitive Person, “[it’s] a basically neutral trait.” In the book she details what the trait is, how to figure out whether you possess it, and ways to handle heightened sensitivity and overstimulation in a world that is often too fast, too bright, too loud, and simply too much. “What seems ordinary to others, like loud music or crowds, can be highly stimulating and thus stressful for HSPs.

Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so? We will discuss the point in Chapter 11 but here is a possible explanation: Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny. If they were made for us to understand things, then we would have a machine in it that would run the past history as in a VCR, with a correct chronology, and it would slow us down so much that we would have trouble operating. Psychologists call this overestimation of what one knew at the time of the event due to subsequent information the hindsight bias, the “I knew it all along” effect.

A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that his money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world's playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.

I remarked in the original Preface to this Book, that I did not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from it, in the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal heading would seem to require. My interest in it was so recent and strong, and my mind was so divided between pleasure and regret - pleasure in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many companions - that I was in danger of wearying the reader with personal confidences and private emotions.

The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts: and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.” – Montaigne

Stress in the mind has an effect on the body because it causes us to physically be in a “survival mode.” This can cause serious physical problems over time because we were not designed to function in fight or flight mode on an everyday basis.

1. Those who first set themselves to discover nature’s secrets and designs, fearlessly opposing mankind’s early ignorance, deserve our praise;   2. For they began the quest to measure what once was unmeasurable, to discern its laws, and conquer time itself by understanding.   3. New eyes were needed to see what lay hidden in ignorance, new language to express the unknown,   4. New hope that the world would reveal itself to inquiry and investigation.   5. They sought to unfold the world’s primordial sources, asking how nature yields its abundance and fosters it,   6. And where in its course everything goes when it ends, either to change or cease.   7. The first inquirers named nature’s elements atoms, matter, seeds, primal bodies, and understood that they are coeval with the world;   8. They saw that nothing comes from nothing, so that discovering the elements reveals how the things of nature exist and evolve.   9. Fear holds dominion over people when they understand little, and need simple stories and legends to comfort and explain; 10. But legends and the ignorance that give them birth are a house of limitations and darkness. 11. Knowledge is freedom, freedom from ignorance and its offspring fear; knowledge is light and liberation, 12. Knowledge that the world contains itself, and its origins, and the mind of man, 13. From which comes more know­ledge, and hope of knowledge again. 14. Dare to know: that is the motto of enlightenment.  

Evil is termed as sin because it has the power to attract the mind. It acts upon our mind and heart to do what nature desires, even when such acts are prohibited by the laws of society. We feel guilty doing things that nature has designed as perfectly natural.

Any chemist reading this book can see, in some detail, how I have spent most of my mature life. They can become familiar with the quality of my mind and imagination. They can make judgements about my research abilities. They can tell how well I have documented my claims of experimental results. Any scientist can redo my experiments to see if they still work—and this has happened! I know of no other field in which contributions to world culture are so clearly on exhibit, so cumulative, and so subject to verification.

Tina Fey’s Bossypants. It’s the funniest book I’ve ever read. The first book that made me cry was The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby simply for that fact it will always stick in my mind. Lastly, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose by Mick Short, which is not designed to teach creative writing, but is one of the most useful books I’ve ever read. It picks apart literature to show how language is used in fiction to create certain effects. It changed the way I write, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes writing.

I make so many plans but fail at follow-through. Gemini mind once a mat for you to wipe your feet. I’d beg for it. I’d plead 'Here! I’m here waiting for you to be the one. Take my heart, my life, my air: rip them to shreds and hand them back.No need to worry. I have enough superglue and tears to keep me busy for months...

We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness.

I needed to learn the wisdom of my body and my heart, not just the wisdom of my mind. […] My body was not just some biological machine designed to carry my consciousness around. I was beginning to understand that, contrary to a culture which called the body sinful, it had intrinsic value, intelligence, and spiritual wisdom to offer me, if I would honor it.

It is possible that librarians will be robots, controlled by Master Minds having mastery of a master computer at the Library of Congress. Or there will be no libraries and librarians, flesh-and-blood or otherwise. The onetime library patron will press a button and turn a dial on his TV, whereupon the requested book, in the desired language, will appear on the screen, the pages turning at the designated speed.

Well, there are lot of people who make a lot of money off the fifth- and sixth-life crises. All of a sudden they have a ton of consumers scared out of their minds and willing to buy facial cream, designer jeans, SAT test prep courses, condoms, cars, scooters, self-help books, watches, wallets, stocks, whatever…all the crap that the twenty-somethings used to buy, they now have the ten-somethings buying. They doubled their market!

And are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad’s coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance – but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end? Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try his luck at it, yet within that immutable little square it is able to bring forth a particular species of masters who cannot be compared to anyone else, people with a gift solely designed for chess, geniuses in their specific field who unite vision, patience and technique in just the same proportions as do mathematicians, poets, musicians, but in different stratifications and combinations. In the old days of the enthusiasm for physiognomy, a physician like Gall might perhaps have dissected a chess champion’s brain to find out whether some particular twist or turn in the grey matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump, is more developed in such chess geniuses than in the skulls of other mortals. And how intrigued such a physiognomist would have been by the case of Czentovic, where that specific genius appeared in a setting of absolute intellectual lethargy, like a single vein of gold in a hundredweight of dull stone. In principle, I had always realized that such a unique, brilliant game must create its own matadors, but how difficult and indeed impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active human being whose world is reduced entirely to the narrow one-way traffic between black and white, who seeks the triumphs of his life in the mere movement to and fro, forward and back of thirty-two chessmen, someone to whom a new opening, moving knight rather than pawn, is a great deed, and his little corner of immortality is tucked away in a book about chess – a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!

In Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler writes of what she calls “psychiatric imperialism,” whereby normal responses to trauma are methodically pathologized in science and medicine. At the time of the book’s publication in 1972, few women were coming forward about gender biases in the study and practice of psychology. Chesler felt compelled to bring forward a conversation around gender, race, class, and medical ethics because “modern female psychology reflects a relatively powerless and deprived condition.” Of sensitivity she writes: “Many intrinsically valuable female traits, such as intuitiveness or compassion, have probably been developed through default or patriarchal-imposed necessity, rather than through either biological predisposition or free choice. Female emotional ‘talents’ must be viewed in terms of the overall price exacted by sexism.” Regardless of causation, of note here is that women’s internal lives were barely acknowledged or considered.

I do not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from this Book, in the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal heading would seem to require. My interest in it, is so recent and strong; and my mind is so divided between pleasure and regret—pleasure in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many companions—that I am in danger of wearying the reader whom I love, with personal confidences, and private emotions.

Teachers lose credibility with students when they ignore the cultural trends & issues that interest them & instead design classroom reading instruction around books that are "good for you." There is a certain amount of disdain from teachers in regard to popular fiction for children because some of those books are mind candy, but I’d bet that some of those teachers go home & read escapist books like Shopaholic or a James Patterson thriller & never make a connection. Are we teaching books or teaching readers?

PREFACE TO 1850 EDITION I do not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from this Book, in the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal heading would seem to require. My interest in it, is so recent and strong; and my mind is so divided between pleasure and regret - pleasure in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many companions - that I am in danger of wearying the reader whom I love, with personal confidences, and private emotions.

The “joy of discovery” is one of the fundamental joys of play itself. Not just the joy of discovering secrets within the game, but also the joy of uncovering the creator’s vision. It’s that “Aha!” moment where it all makes sense, and behind the world the player can feel the touch of another creative mind. In order for it to be truly joyful, however, it must remain hidden from plain view—not carved as commandments into stone tablets but revealed, piece by piece, through the player’s exploration of the game’s rules.

Do not localize your attention Not to localize or partialize the mind is the end of spiritual training. When it is nowhere it is everywhere. When it occupies one tenth, it is absent in the other nine tenths. Let the gung fu man discipline himself to have the mind go on its own way, instead of trying deliberately to confine it somewhere. Therefore, during chi sao, you should have nothing purposely designed, nothing consciously calculated, no anticipation, no expectation. In short, you should be standing there like a dead man. To be conscious is characteristic of the human mind as distinguished from the mind of the lower animals. But when the mind becomes conscious of its doings, it ceases to be instinctual and its commands are colored with calculations and deliberations—which means that the connection between itself and the limbs is no longer direct because the identity of the commander and his executive agent is lost. When dualism (yang against yang) takes place, the whole personality never comes out as it is in itself (letting go itself from itself).

(…) it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.(…) Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding. (…) One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performer acceptably without having had to think.

A book on steam engine design lay next to one of poems by the poet laureate Tennyson. Lenore traced the poetry book’s cover design. A finely made book with its gold-tooled leather and gilt-edged vellum pages. A beautiful book. An expensive one given to her by a man who’d likely spent three months’ hard-earned wages to obtain it. Lenore made a mournful sound in her throat. Nathaniel. She closed her eyes, remembering his ready smile and eyes as blue as bachelor’s button. She thought of him every day, but lately, in the weeks following her father’s death, he was constantly on her mind.

The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece. Our good craftsman writes. He’s absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the page. His wife, though he doesn’t know it, is watching him. It really is he who’s writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of being present at an exercise of literary creation, she’s witnessing a session of hypnosis. There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There’s nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing. Nothing, I mean to say, that his wife, at a given moment, might recognize. He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter! Excuse the metaphors. Sometimes, in my excitement, I wax romantic. But listen. Every work that isn’t a masterpiece is, in a sense, a part of a vast camouflage. You’ve been a soldier, I imagine, and you know what I mean. Every book that isn’t a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot soldier, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece. When I came to this realization, I gave up writing. Still, my mind didn’t stop working. In fact, it worked better when I wasn’t writing. I asked myself: why does a masterpiece need to be hidden? what strange forces wreath it in secrecy and mystery?

Fifteen years later, in 1601, Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde was devoted to showing man how wretched he had become through his inability to control his passions. This study, designed to help man know himself in all his depravity, emphasised sin rather than salvation, claiming that the animal passions prevented reason, rebelled against virtue and, like ‘thornie briars sprung from the infected roote of original sinne’, caused mental and physical ill health.20 Despite its punitive message, the book went into further editions in 1604, 1620, 1621 and 1628, suggesting that the seventeenth-century reader was a glutton for punishment.

In this book I contend that even when school appears to be successful, even when it elicits the performances for which it has apparently been designed, it typically fails to achieve its most important missions. Evidence for this startling claim comes from a by now overwhelming body of educational research that has been assembled over the last decades. These investigations document that even students who have been well trained and who exhibit all the overt signs of success—faithful attendance at good schools, high grades and high test scores, accolades from their teachers—typically do not display an adequate understanding of the materials and concepts with which they have been working.

A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult. What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges.

[About her father's friend Lilian Pirie] She was one of the few people I have met whom I consider had a really interesting mind. . . . Young people always flocked to her house and were happy to talk to her. To spend an afternoon with her, even when she was well over seventy, was a wonderful refreshment. I think she had, more perfectly than anyone I have ever known, the art of leisure. You found her sitting in a high-backed chair in her beautiful room, usually engaged with some needlework of her own design, some interesting book or other by her side. She had the air of having time to talk with you all day, all night, for months on end. Her criticisms were caustic and clear. Although she would talk about any abstract subject under the sun she seldom indulged in personalities.

In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.... The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. ... Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life--indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. ... The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact. The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. ... In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As (Susan) Brownmiller put it, "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ... Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate. Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust--it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not reinstatement of the patriarchy.")

As little, I should think, can it matter whether the writer so designated is a man, or a woman, as one or two of my critics profess to have discovered. I take the imputation in good part, as a compliment to the just delineation of my female characters; and though I am bound to attribute much of the severity of my censors to this suspicion, I make no effort to refute it, because, in my own mind, I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.  July 22nd, 1848.

I hope you'll make mistakes. If you make mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I could become the writer I wanted to be, seemed stifling. I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it all up as I went along. They just read what I wrote and they paid me for it or they didn't. The nearest thing I had, was a list I made when I was about 15, of everything I wanted to do. I wanted to write an adult novel, a children's book, a comic, a movie, record an audio-book, write an episode of Doctor Who, and so on. I didn't have a career, I just did the next thing on the list. When you start out in the arts, you have no idea what you're doing. This is great. People who know what they're doing, know the rules, and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not, and you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts, were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible, by going beyond them, and you can. If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do, and because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that particular thing again. That's much harder than it sounds, and sometimes, in the end, so much easier than you might imagine, because normally, there are things you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be. When you start out, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned. The things I did because I was excited and wanted to see them exist in reality have never let me down, and I've never regretted the time I spent on any of them. If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that, whether you're a musician or a photographer, a fine artist, or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, singer, a designer, whatever you do, you have one thing that's unique, you have the ability to make art. For me, for so many of the people I've known, that's been a lifesaver the ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times, and it gets you through the other ones. The one thing that you have, that nobody else has, is you! Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw, and build, and play, and dance and live, as only you can. Do what only you can do best, make good art.

Before the troops left Rome, the consul Varro made a number of extremely arrogant speeches. The nobles, he complained, were directly responsible for the war on Italian soil, and it would continue to prey upon the country's vitals if there were any more commanders on the Fabian model. He himself, on the contrary, would bring it to an end on the day he first caught sight of the enemy. His colleague Paullus spoke only once before the army marched, and in words which though true were hardly popular. His only harsh criticism of Varro was to express his surprise about how any army commander, while still at Rome, in his civilian clothes, could possibly know what his task on the field of battle would be, before he had become acquainted either with his own troops or the enemy's or had any idea of the lie and nature of the country where he was to operate--or how he could prophesy exactly when a pitched battle would occur. As for himself, he refused to recommend any sort of policy prematurely; for policy was moulded by circumstance, not circumstance by policy. . . . [T]o strengthen [Paullus'] determination Fabius (we are told) spoke to him at his departure in the following words. 'If, Lucius Aemilius, you were like your colleague, or if--which I should much prefer--you had a colleague like yourself, anything I could now say would be superfluous. Two good consuls would serve the country well in virtue of their own sense of honour, without any words from me; and two bad consuls would not accept my advice, nor even listen to me. But as things are, I know your colleague's qualities and I know your own, so it is to you alone I address myself, understanding as I do that all your courage and patriotism will be in vain, if our country must limp on one sound leg and one lame one. With the two of you equal in command, bad counsels will be backed by the same legal authority as good ones; for you are wrong, Paullus, if you think to find less opposition from Varro than from Hannibal. Hannibal is your enemy, Varro your rival, but I hardly know which will prove the more hostile to your designs; with the former you will be contending only on the field of battle, but with the latter everywhere and always. . . . [I]t is not the enemy who will make it difficult and dangerous for you to tread, but your fellow-countrymen. Your own men will want precisely what the enemy wants; the wishes of Varro, the Roman consul, will play straight into the hands of Hannibal, commander-in-chief of the Carthaginian armies. You will have two generals against you; but you will stand firm against both, if you can steel yourself to ignore the tongues of men who will defame you--if you remain unmoved by the empty glory your colleague seeks and the false infamy he tries to bring upon yourself. . . . Never mind if they call your caution timidity, your wisdom sloth, your generalship weakness; it is better that a wise enemy should fear you than that foolish friends should praise. Hannibal will despise a reckless antagonist, but he will fear a cautious one. Not that I wish you to do nothing--all I want is that your actions should be guided by a reasoned policy, all risks avoided; that the conduct of the war should be controlled by you at all times; that you should neither lay aside your sword nor relax your vigilance but seize the opportunity that offers, while never giving the enemy a chance to take you at a disadvantage. Go slowly, and all will be clear and sure. Haste is always improvident and blind.

Why do people go to church on Sundays? A question that is very complicated because I know what the answer is supposed to be but I do not really know the answer. . I think people go because it is a kind of tradition . I think some goes because someone told them if tgey do not they might go to hell . Maybe some go to look for a wife or husband ☺ . Maybe some go to church to display their latest designer shoes or handbags . Some goes just to please their Pastor . Some people go to church because they love the music or the preaching . Some goes because of some social reasons and friendship . Some have it in their mind that they will experience the presence of God in the church . Some goes to church because of miracle . Some goes to church when they are expecting something maybe child, comfort, marriage, work etc. . Some felt it is an obligation to give God a day out of the seven days he created Let me tell you that church is not there to entertain you, Ephesians 3:20... there are things going on in the church that some people barely know about. Ask yourself today why do I go to church. I am sure a sincere answer will help you.

There was however one real romance in his [J. Gresham Machen's] life, though unhappily it was not destined to blossom into marriage. One would never have learned of it from the files of his personal letters since it seems that he did not trust himself to write on the subject, extraordinary though that may seem when one considers how fully he confided in his mother. He did tell his brother Arthur about it, and in a conference concerning the projected biography in March, 1944, the elder brother told me that the story to be complete would have to include a reference to Gresham's one love affair. He identified the lady by name, as a resident of Boston, and as "intelligent, beautiful, exquisite." He further stated that apparently they were utterly devoted to each other for a time, but that the devotion never developed into an engagement to be married because she was a Unitarian. Miss S., as she may be designated, made a real effort to believe, but could not bring her mind and heart to the point where she could share his faith. On the other hand, as Arthur Machen hardly needed to add, Gresham Machen could not possibly think of uniting his life with one who could not come to basic agreement with him with regard to the Christian faith. . . . Machen had been advising her with respect to study of the Bible. He must have counseled her to read the Gospels through consecutively. He had a copy of his course of Bible study prepared for the Board of Christian education especially bound for her. He sent her copies of his books as they appeared. He had copies of Dr. Erdman's little commentaries and other books sent to her. On her part she indicated an interest in these things, but evidently it was stimulated more by the desire to please Machen than by an earnest agitation of spirit. At any rate her mind was set awhirl as she read some of the books and she was forced to come to the conclusion that, judged by his views as set forth for example in Christianity and Liberalism, published in 1923, if she was a Christian at all, she was a pretty feeble one. How tragic an ending to Machen's one real romance or approach to it! It does serve to underscore once again, however, how utterly devoted he was to his Lord. He could be counted upon in the public and conspicuous arenas of conflict but also in the utterly private relations of life to be true to his dearly-bought convictions.

The book originated in the suggestion of a publisher; as many more good books have done than the arrogance of the man of letters is commonly inclined to admit. Very much is said in our time about Apollo and Admetus, and the impossibility of asking genius to work within prescribed limits or assist an alien design. But after all, as a matter of fact, some of the greatest geniuses have done it, from Shakespeare botching up bad comedies and dramatising bad novels down to Dickens writing a masterpiece as the mere framework for a Mr. Seymour’s sketches. Nor is the true explanation irrelevant to the spirit and power of Dickens. Very delicate, slender, and bizarre talents are indeed incapable of being used for an outside purpose, whether of public good or of private gain. But about very great and rich talent there goes a certain disdainful generosity which can turn its hand to anything. Minor poets cannot write to order; but very great poets can write to order. The larger the man’s mind, the wider his scope of vision, the more likely it will be that anything suggested to him will seem significant and promising; the more he has a grasp of everything the more ready he will be to write anything. It is very hard (if that is the question) to throw a brick at a man and ask him to write an epic; but the more he is a great man the more able he will be to write about the brick.

Our parents never structured our studies. "Let 'em learn what they like," my father used to say. "A child will eat a well-balanced diet if she's given a choice of wholesome foods and left alone. If a kid's body knows what it needs to grow and stay healthy, why wouldn't her mind, too?" To his friends he explained, "My girls have free run of the forest and public library. They have a mother who is around to fix them lunch and define any words don't know. School would only get in the way of that. Besides, if they went to school, they'd spend over two hours a day in the car. Lord knows I could use the company on those drives, but it's better for my kids to stay in the woods." So while other children were reciting their times tables and asking permission to get drinks of water, Eva and I were free to roam and learn as we pleased. Together we painted murals and made up plays, built forts, raised butterflies, and designed computer games. We made paper, concocted new recipes for cookies, edited newsletters, and caught minnows. We grew gourds and nursed fledglings and played with prisms, and our parents told the state that what we did was school. For years I studied what I wanted to, when and how I wanted to study it. One book led to another in a random pattern, meandering from interest to interest like a good conversation, and the only thing that connected them was their juxtaposition on the bookshelves in mother's workroom.

ONLY IMAGINE   In his classic self-help book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill wrote, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, he can achieve.” His premise, and that of many others, is that once the human mind is programmed with a certain expectation, it will begin to fulfill that expectation. The Scriptures declared this principle long before Hill wrote his book. Faith believes and then sees. It is the expectation of a miracle before it occurs. The Aluminum Company of America coined an interesting word: imagineering. They combined the idea of imagining a product or service, with the idea that the dream would then be engineered into a reality. Throughout history we’ve seen this principle at work.   A primitive ancestor came up with the idea that it was easier to roll objects than drag them—and he carved a wheel from stone.   A man named Gutenberg imagined that letters might be set in metal and combined to create words, which then could be printed repeatedly with the application of ink. He set about to make such a machine.   Men designed cathedrals that took decades to build—but build them they did. Ideas and dreams you have today will directly influence your future. What you begin to believe for, and then how you act on that belief, will result in what you have, do, and are in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead. Let your “faith imagination” soar today. Believe for God’s highest and best in your life. Then begin to live and work as if that miracle is on its way.   FAITH IS THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR, THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN. HEBREWS 11:1 NKJV

Grabbing my hair and pulling it to the point my skull throbs, I rock back and forth while insanity threatens to destroy my mind completely. Father finally did what Lachlan started. Destroyed my spirit. The angel is gone. The monster has come and killed her. Lachlan Sipping his whiskey, Shon gazes with a bored expression at the one-way mirror as Arson lights the match, grazing the skin of his victim with it as the man convulses in fear. “Show off,” he mutters, and on instinct, I slap the back of his head. He rubs it, spilling the drink. “The fuck? We are wasting time, Lachlan. Tell him to speed up. You know if you let him, he can play for hours.” All in good time, we don’t need just a name. He is saving him for a different kind of information that we write down as Sociopath types furiously on his computer, searching for the location and everything else using FBI databases. “Bingo!” Sociopath mutters, picking up the laptop and showing the screen to me. “It’s seven hours away from New York, in a deserted location in the woods. The land belongs to some guy who is presumed dead and the man accrued the right to build shelters for abused women. They actually live there as a place of new hope or something.” Indeed, the center is advertised as such and has a bunch of stupid reviews about it. Even the approval of a social worker, but then it doesn’t surprise me. Pastor knows how to be convincing. “Kids,” I mutter, fisting my hands. “Most of them probably have kids. He continues to do his fucked-up shit.” And all these years, he has been under my radar. I throw the chair and it bounces off the wall, but no one says anything as they feel the same. “Shon, order a plane. Jaxon—” “Yeah, my brothers will be there with us. But listen, the FBI—” he starts, and I nod. He takes a beat and quickly sends a message to someone on his phone while I bark into the microphone. “Arson, enough with the bullshit. Kill him already.” He is of no use to us anyway. Arson looks at the wall and shrugs. Then pours gas on his victim and lights up the match simultaneously, stepping aside as the man screams and thrashes on the chair, and the smell of burning flesh can be sensed even here. Arson jogs to a hose, splashing water over him. The room is designed security wise for this kind of torture, since fire is one of the first things I taught. After all, I’d learned the hard way how to fight with it. “On the plane, we can adjust the plan. Let’s get moving.” They spring into action as I go to my room to get a specific folder to give to Levi before I go, when Sociopath’s hand stops me, bumping my shoulder. “Is this a suicide mission for you?” he asks, and I smile, although it lacks any humor. My friend knows everything. Instead of answering his question, I grip his shoulder tight, and confide, “Valencia is entrusted to you.” We both know that if I want to destroy Pastor, I have to die with him. This revenge has been twenty-three years in the making, and I never envisioned a different future. This path always leads to death one way or another, and the only reason I valued my life was because I had to kill him. Valencia will be forever free from the evils that destroyed her life. I’ll make sure of it. Once upon a time, there was an angel. Who made the monster’s heart bleed.

And by the end of March one of them had already begun his journey. Twenty-two years old, an A.B. and LL.B. of Harvard, Francis Parkman was back from a winter trip to scenes in Pennsylvania and Ohio that would figure in his book and now he started with his cousin, Quincy Adams Shaw, for St. Louis. He was prepared to find it quite as alien to Beacon Hill as the Dakota lands beyond it, whither he was going. He was already an author (a poet and romancer), had already designed the great edifice his books were to build, and already suffered from the mysterious, composite illness that was to make his life a long torture. He hoped, in fact, that a summer on the prairies might relieve or even cure the malady that had impaired his eyes and, he feared, his heart and brain as well. He had done his best to cure it by systematic exercise, hard living in the White Mountains, and a regimen self-imposed in the code of his Puritan ancestors which would excuse no weakness. But more specifically Parkman was going west to study the Indians. He intended to write the history of the conflict between imperial Britain and imperial France, which was in great part a story of Indians. The Conspiracy of Pontiac had already taken shape in his mind; beyond it stretched out the aisles and transepts of what remains the most considerable achievement by an American historian. So he needed to see some uncorrupted Indians in their native state. It was Parkman’s fortune to witness and take part in one of the greatest national experiences, at the moment and site of its occurrence. It is our misfortune that he did not understand the smallest part of it. No other historian, not even Xenophon, has ever had so magnificent an opportunity: Parkman did not even know that it was there, and if his trip to the prairies produced one of the exuberant masterpieces of American literature, it ought instead to have produced a key work of American history. But the other half of his inheritance forbade. It was the Puritan virtues that held him to the ideal of labor and achievement and kept him faithful to his goal in spite of suffering all but unparalleled in literary history. And likewise it was the narrowness, prejudice, and mere snobbery of the Brahmins that insulated him from the coarse, crude folk who were the movement he traveled with, turned him shuddering away from them to rejoice in the ineffabilities of Beacon Hill, and denied our culture a study of the American empire at the moment of its birth. Much may rightly be regretted, therefore. But set it down also that, though the Brahmin was indifferent to Manifest Destiny, the Puritan took with him a quiet valor which has not been outmatched among literary folk or in the history of the West.

The translucent, golden punch tastes velvety, voluptuous and not off-puttingly milky. Under its influence, I stage a party for my heroines in my imagination, and in my flat. It's less like the glowering encounter I imagined between Cathy Earnshaw and Flora Poste, and more like the riotous bash in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Not everyone is going to like milk punch. So there are also dirty martinis, and bagels and baklava, and my mother's masafan, Iraqi marzipan. The Little Mermaid is in the bath, with her tail still on, singing because she never did give up her soaring voice. Anne Shirley and Jo March are having a furious argument about plot versus character, gesticulating with ink-stained hands. Scarlett is in the living room, her skirts taking up half the space, trying to show Lizzy how to bat her eyelashes. Lizzy is laughing her head off ut Scarlett has acquired a sense of humour, and doesn't mind a bit. Melanie is talking book with Esther Greenwood, who has brought her baby and also the proofs of her first poetry collection. Franny and Zooey have rolled back the rug and are doing a soft shoe shuffle in rhinestone hats. Lucy Honeychurch is hammering out some Beethoven (in this scenario I have a piano. A ground piano. Well, why not?) Marjorie Morningstar is gossiping about directors with Pauline and Posy Fossil. They've come straight from the shows they're in, till in stage make-up and full of stories. Petrova, in a leather aviator jacket, goggles pushed back, a chic scarf knotted around her neck, is telling the thrilling story of her latest flight and how she fixed an engine fault in mid-air. Mira, in her paint-stained jeans and poncho, is listening, fascinated, asking a thousand questions. Mildred has been persuaded to drink a tiny glass of sherry, then another tiny glass, then another and now she and Lolly are doing a wild, strange dance in the hallway, stamping their feet, their hair flying wild and electric. Lolly's cakes, in the shape of patriarchs she hates, are going down a treat. The Dolls from the Valley are telling Flora some truly scandalous and unrepeatable stories, and she is firmly advising them to get rid of their men and find worthier paramours. Celie is modelling trousers of her own design and taking orders from the Lace women; Judy is giving her a ten-point plan on how to expand her business to an international market. She is quite drunk but nevertheless the plan seems quite coherent, even if it is punctuated by her bellowing 'More leopard print, more leopard print!' Cathy looks tumultuous and on the edge of violent weeping and just as I think she's going to storm out or trash my flat, Jane arrives, late, with an unexpected guest. Cathy turns in anticipation: is it Heathcliff? Once I would have joined her but now I'm glad it isn't him. It's a better surprise. It's Emily's hawk. Hero or Nero. Jane's found him at last, and has him on her arm, perched on her glove; small for a bird of prey, he is dashing and patrician looking, brown and white, observing the room with dark, flinty eyes. When Cathy sees him, she looks at Jane and smiles. And in the kitchen is a heroine I probably should have had when I was four and sitting on my parents' carpet, wishing it would fly. In the kitchen is Scheherazade.

ever. Amen. Thank God for self-help books. No wonder the business is booming. It reminds me of junior high school, where everybody was afraid of the really cool kids because they knew the latest, most potent putdowns, and were not afraid to use them. Dah! But there must be another reason that one of the best-selling books in the history of the world is Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray. Could it be that our culture is oh so eager for a quick fix? What a relief it must be for some people to think “Oh, that’s why we fight like cats and dogs, it is because he’s from Mars and I am from Venus. I thought it was just because we’re messed up in the head.” Can you imagine Calvin Consumer’s excitement and relief to get the video on “The Secret to her Sexual Satisfaction” with Dr. GraySpot, a picture chart, a big pointer, and an X marking the spot. Could that “G” be for “giggle” rather than Dr. “Graffenberg?” Perhaps we are always looking for the secret, the gold mine, the G-spot because we are afraid of the real G-word: Growth—and the energy it requires of us. I am worried that just becoming more educated or well-read is chopping at the leaves of ignorance but is not cutting at the roots. Take my own example: I used to be a lowly busboy at 12 East Restaurant in Florida. One Christmas Eve the manager fired me for eating on the job. As I slunk away I muttered under my breath, “Scrooge!” Years later, after obtaining a Masters Degree in Psychology and getting a California license to practice psychotherapy, I was fired by the clinical director of a psychiatric institute for being unorthodox. This time I knew just what to say. This time I was much more assertive and articulate. As I left I told the director “You obviously have a narcissistic pseudo-neurotic paranoia of anything that does not fit your myopic Procrustean paradigm.” Thank God for higher education. No wonder colleges are packed. What if there was a language designed not to put down or control each other, but nurture and release each other to grow? What if you could develop a consciousness of expressing your feelings and needs fully and completely without having any intention of blaming, attacking, intimidating, begging, punishing, coercing or disrespecting the other person? What if there was a language that kept us focused in the present, and prevented us from speaking like moralistic mini-gods? There is: The name of one such language is Nonviolent Communication. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication provides a wealth of simple principles and effective techniques to maintain a laser focus on the human heart and innocent child within the other person, even when they have lost contact with that part of themselves. You know how it is when you are hurt or scared: suddenly you become cold and critical, or aloof and analytical. Would it not be wonderful if someone could see through the mask, and warmly meet your need for understanding or reassurance? What I am presenting are some tools for staying locked onto the other person’s humanness, even when they have become an alien monster. Remember that episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk was turned into a Klingon, and Bones was freaking out? (I felt sorry for Bones because I’ve had friends turn into Cling-ons too.) But then Spock, in his cool, Vulcan way, performed a mind meld to determine that James T. Kirk was trapped inside the alien form. And finally Scotty was able to put some dilithium crystals into his phaser and destroy the alien cloaking device, freeing the captain from his Klingon form. Oh, how I wish that, in my youth or childhood,

THE VISION EXERCISE Create your future from your future, not your past. WERNER ERHARD Erhard Founder of EST training and the Landmark Forum The following exercise is designed to help you clarify your vision. Start by putting on some relaxing music and sitting quietly in a comfortable environment where you won’t be disturbed. Then, close your eyes and ask your subconscious mind to give you images of what your ideal life would look like if you could have it exactly the way you want it, in each of the following categories: 1. First, focus on the financial area of your life. What is your ideal annual income and monthly cash flow? How much money do you have in savings and investments? What is your total net worth? Next . . . what does your home look like? Where is it located? Does it have a view? What kind of yard and landscaping does it have? Is there a pool or a stable for horses? What does the furniture look like? Are there paintings hanging in the rooms? Walk through your perfect house, filling in all of the details. At this point, don’t worry about how you’ll get that house. Don’t sabotage yourself by saying, “I can’t live in Malibu because I don’t make enough money.” Once you give your mind’s eye the picture, your mind will solve the “not enough money” challenge. Next, visualize what kind of car you are driving and any other important possessions your finances have provided. 2. Next, visualize your ideal job or career. Where are you working? What are you doing? With whom are you working? What kind of clients or customers do you have? What is your compensation like? Is it your own business? 3. Then, focus on your free time, your recreation time. What are you doing with your family and friends in the free time you’ve created for yourself? What hobbies are you pursuing? What kinds of vacations do you take? What do you do for fun? 4. Next, what is your ideal vision of your body and your physical health? Are you free of all disease? Are you pain free? How long do you live? Are you open, relaxed, in an ecstatic state of bliss all day long? Are you full of vitality? Are you flexible as well as strong? Do you exercise, eat good food, and drink lots of water? How much do you weigh? 5. Then, move on to your ideal vision of your relationships with your family and friends. What is your relationship with your spouse and family like? Who are your friends? What do those friendships feel like? Are those relationships loving, supportive, empowering? What kinds of things do you do together? 6. What about the personal arena of your life? Do you see yourself going back to school, getting training, attending personal growth workshops, seeking therapy for a past hurt, or growing spiritually? Do you meditate or go on spiritual retreats with your church? Do you want to learn to play an instrument or write your autobiography? Do you want to run a marathon or take an art class? Do you want to travel to other countries? 7. Finally, focus on the community you’ve chosen to live in. What does it look like when it is operating perfectly? What kinds of community activities take place there? What charitable, philanthropic, or volunteer work? What do you do to help others and make a difference? How often do you participate in these activities? Who are you helping? You can write down your answers as you go, or you can do the whole exercise first and then open your eyes and write them down. In either case, make sure you capture everything in writing as soon as you complete the exercise. Every day, review the vision you have written down. This will keep your conscious and subconscious minds focused on your vision, and as you apply the other principles in this book, you will begin to manifest all the different aspects of your vision.

joke around—nothing serious—as I work to get my leg back to where it was. Two weeks later, I’m in an ankle-to-hip leg brace and hobbling around on crutches. The brace can’t come off for another six weeks, so my parents lend me their townhouse in New York City and Lucien hires me an assistant to help me out around the house. Some guy named Trevor. He’s okay, but I don’t give him much to do. I want to regain my independence as fast as I can and get back out there for Planet X. Yuri, my editor, is griping that he needs me back and I’m more than happy to oblige. But I still need to recuperate, and I’m bored as hell cooped up in the townhouse. Some buddies of mine from PX stop by and we head out to a brunch place on Amsterdam Street my assistant sometimes orders from. Deacon, Logan, Polly, Jonesy and I take a table in Annabelle’s Bistro, and settle in for a good two hours, running our waitress ragged. She’s a cute little brunette doing her best to stay cheerful for us while we give her a hard time with endless coffee refills, loud laughter, swearing, and general obnoxiousness. Her nametag says Charlotte, and Deacon calls her “Sweet Charlotte” and ogles and teases her, sometimes inappropriately. She has pretty eyes, I muse, but otherwise pay her no mind. I have my leg up on a chair in the corner, leaning back, as if I haven’t a care in the world. And I don’t. I’m going to make a full recovery and pick up my life right where I left off. Finally, a manager with a severe hairdo and too much makeup, politely, yet pointedly, inquires if there’s anything else we need, and we take the hint. We gather our shit and Deacon picks up the tab. We file out, through the maze of tables, and I’m last, hobbling slowly on crutches. I’m halfway out when I realize I left my Yankees baseball cap on the table. I return to get it and find the waitress staring at the check with tears in her eyes. She snaps the black leather book shut when she sees me and hurriedly turns away. “Forget something?” she asks with false cheer and a shaky smile. “My hat,” I say. She’s short and I’m tall. I tower over her. “Did Deacon leave a shitty tip? He does that.” “Oh no, no, I mean…it’s fine,” she says, turning away to wipe her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I just…um, kind of a rough month. You know how it is.” She glances me up and down in my expensive jeans and designer shirt. “Or maybe you don’t.” The waitress realizes what she said, and another round of apologies bursts out of her as she begins stacking our dirty dishes. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Really. I have this bad habit…blurting. I don’t know why I said that. Anyway, um…” I laugh, and fish into my back pocket for my wallet. “Don’t worry about it. And take this. For your trouble.” I offer her forty dollars and her eyes widen. Up close, her eyes are even prettier—large and luminous, but sad too. A blush turns her skin scarlet “Oh, no, I couldn’t. No, please. It’s fine, really.” She bustles even faster now, not looking at me. I shrug and drop the twenties on the table. “I hope your month improves.” She stops and stares at the money, at war with herself. “Okay. Thank you,” she says finally, her voice cracking. She takes the money and stuffs it into her apron. I feel sorta bad, poor girl. “Have a nice day, Charlotte,” I say, and start to hobble away. She calls after me, “I hope your leg gets better soon.” That was big of her, considering what ginormous bastards we’d been to her all morning. Or maybe she’s just doing her job. I wave a hand to her without looking back, and leave Annabelle’s. Time heals me. I go back to work. To Planet X. To the world and all its thrills and beauty. I don’t go back to my parents’ townhouse; hell I’m hardly in NYC anymore. I don’t go back to Annabelle’s and I never see—or think about—that cute waitress with the sad eyes ever again. “Fucking hell,” I whisper as the machine reads the last line of

There is some feeling nowadays that reading is not as necessary as it once was. Radio and especially television have taken over many of the functions once served by print, just as photography has taken over functions once served by painting and other graphic arts. Admittedly, television serves some of these functions extremely well; the visual communication of news events, for example, has enormous impact. The ability of radio to give us information while we are engaged in doing other things—for instance, driving a car—is remarkable, and a great saving of time. But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live. Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding. One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.

I declare a war against my Parasite for the freedom to use my own mind and body, for the freedom to become the architect of my own life, to design the life of my dreams, and to create a masterpiece of art.

coincidence or a design of arcane wizards that once took harbor there. Or it was a massive scarecrow created by dwarves that wanted to be left alone. It was, without question in my mind, the face of a dragon. A massive cave filled with rows of teeth could be seen, smoke rolling

Your mind controls your actions and that means when your mind gives you designed thoughts, your actions too are going to be designed actions!

I wanted to be a spy,” Olga said, shrugging. “I applied to the CIA. I was turned down. I did not meet the psychological profile. Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Basically, I have a hard time taking orders from idiots.” “Don’t think of me as an idiot and I won’t give you an idiotic order,” Sophia said. “But if I give you one, you’d better do it. Because it’s probably going to mean surviving or dying.” “You I don’t mind,” Olga said. “Or I wouldn’t have joined your crew. Don’t ask me about Nazar. So I was in Spain with the troupe. When the Plague hit, they shut down travel. And all my guns were in America. In a zombie apocalypse. I was quite upset.” “You should have seen Faith when they told her she had to be disarmed in New York,” Sophia said. “Then they gave her a taser and that was mistake. What kind of guns?” “I like that your family prefers the AK series,” Olga said. “I really do think it’s superior to the M16 series in many ways. Much more reliable. They say it is less accurate but that is at longer ranges. The round is not designed for long range.” “I can hit at a thousand meters with my accurized AK,” Sophia said. “It’s a matter of knowing the ballistics. It’s not real powerful at that range, but try doing the same thing with an M4. I’ll wait.” “Oh, jeeze, you two,” Paula said. “Get a room.” “So continue with how you got on the yacht,” Sophia said. “We don’t want our cook getting all woozy with gun geeking.” “We were called by the agency and asked if anyone wanted to ‘catch a ride’ on a yacht,” Olga said. “When they said who owned the boat… I nearly said no. We all knew Nazar. Or at least of him. Not a nice man, as you might have noticed. We knew what we were getting into. But then we were told he had vaccine… ” she shrugged again. “Accepting Nazar’s offer was perhaps not the worst decision I have made in my life. I survived. Not how I would have preferred to survive, but I was vaccinated and I survived. But I did not even hint that I knew more about his men’s weapons than they did. They were pigs. Tough guys. But none of them were military and none of them really knew what they were doing with them. When they brought out the RPG, I nearly peed myself. Irinei had no idea what he was doing with it. I don’t think he even knew the safety was off.” “You know how to use an RPG?” Sophia said. “My family liked the United States very much,” Olga said, sadly. “We all like guns and anything that goes boom. And in the US, you could find people who had licenses for anything. I’ve fired an RPG, yes.” “Well, if we find an RPG you can have it,” Sophia said. “Oh, thank you, captain!” Olga said, clapping her hands girlishly. “But we’ll be keeping the rounds and the launcher separate,” Sophia said. “Oh, my, yes,” Olga said. “And both will have to be in a well sealed container. This salt air would cause corrosion quickly.” “I guess you miss your guns?” Paula said. “That’s not a request for an inventory and loving description of each, by the way. Got that enough from Faith.” “I do,” Olga said. “But I miss my books more.” “Books,” Paula said. “Now you’re talking my language.” “I have more books than shelves,” Olga said. “And I had many shelves. I collect old manuscripts when I can afford them.” “If we do any land clearance, look in the libraries and big houses,” Sophia said. “I bet around here you can probably pick up some great stuff.” “This is okay?” Olga said. “We can, salvage?” “If there’s time and if we clear the town,” Sophia said. “Sure.” “Oh, thank you, captain!” Olga said, kissing her on the cheek. “Okay, now you definitely need to get a room.

from Indo-China— put in some wild yeast from the air, ferment it and voilà! you’ve now got Vodka for the Volga, beer for the Brits, Bourbon for Balboa’s kids, Joy-juice for the Kickapoos. Pour this into an Inner City and create your Designated Criminal Class purely to blame for everything, or rub it on the Reservations and

You said that you had a theory about why it wouldn’t have mattered whether or not you’d kept your promise the day you met the asshole for a drink.  I’d like to hear it if you don’t mind.” “You were never going to marry me Anton.  We both know that.  It’s not your style.  Or maybe it is, but you haven’t met the right girl yet.  I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.  I’m not her and never have been.  You proposed because you felt pressured to do so.  If it hadn’t been my mistake with Tony, it would have been something else.  You’d have found a good reason to leave because I’m not perfect and never will be.  You’re a “bottom line” kind of guy, so here it is: I’ve loved you so long I don’t know how to stop.  And every time you break my heart, you break my spirit just a little bit more.  Ten days ago you walked away from me and I gave up.  You wanna know why I didn’t answer my phone?  I had nothing to say.  I quit working, I quit eating and I quit caring.

One wonders, then, why God allowed literally tons and mountains of evidence to remain in verification of the Bible. Church leaders have become very concerned by the questions being raised due to the absence of evidence, and the fact that descriptions of cities, rivers, mountains, and journeys in the Book of Mormon cannot be correlated at all with topography and geography. To quiet these questions, for which The Brethren have no answers, an article was published in the Church Section of the Deseret News cautioning Church members about putting too much importance upon facts and evidence: The geography of the Book of Mormon has intrigued some readers of that volume ever since its publication. But why worry about it? Efforts to pinpoint certain places from what is written in the book are fruitless.... Attempts to designate certain areas as the Land Bountiful or the site of Zarahemla or the place where the Nephite city of Jerusalem sank into the sea "and waters have I caused to come up in the stead thereof" can bring no definitive results. So why speculate? To guess where Zarahemla stood can in no wise add to anyone's faith. But to raise doubts in people's minds about the location of the Hill Cumorah, and thus challenge the words of the prophets concerning the place where Moroni buried the records, is most certainly harmful. And who has the right to raise doubts in anyone's mind? Our position is to build faith, not to weaken it, and theories concerning the geography of the Book of Mormon can most certainly undermine faith if allowed to run rampant. Why not leave hidden the things that the Lord has hidden? If He wants the geography of the Book of Mormon revealed, He will do so through His prophet....

To do things differently, we need to perceive things differently. In discussing where we want to be, breakthrough ideas often come when people look at the world through a fresh lens. One of the most important design challenges I pose in this book is to make the processes and systems that surround us intelligible and knowable. We need to design microscopes, as well as microscopes, to help us understand where things come from and why: the life story of a hamburger, or time pressure, or urban sprawl. Equipped with a fresh understanding of why our present situations are as they are, we can better describe where we want to be. With alternative situations evocatively in mind, we can design our way from here to there. Macroscopes can help us understand complex systems, but our own eyes, unaided, are just as important. All over the world, alternative models of organizing daily life are being tried and tested right now. We just need to look for them. When Ezio Manzini ran design workshops in Brazil, China, and India to develop new design ideas for an exhibition about daily life, he encountered dozens of examples of new services for daily life he had never thought of before-and also new attitudes. In many different cultures, he discovered, "an obsession with things is being replaced by a fascination with events." Both young and old people are designing activities and environments in which energy and material consumption is modest and more people are used, not fewer, in the ways we take care of people, work, study, move around, find food, eat, and share equipment.12 In a less-stuff-more-people world, we still

I DESIGNED YOU to live in union with Me. This union does not negate who you are; it actually makes you more fully yourself. When you try to live independently of Me, you experience emptiness and dissatisfaction. You may gain the whole world and yet lose everything that really counts. Find fulfillment through living close to Me, yielding to My purposes for you. Though I may lead you along paths that feel alien to you, trust that I know what I am doing. If you follow Me wholeheartedly, you will discover facets of yourself that were previously hidden. I know you intimately —far better than you know yourself. In union with Me, you are complete. In closeness to Me, you are transformed more and more into the one I designed you to be. “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” MARK 8 : 36 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. PSALM 139 : 13 – 16 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. 2 CORINTHIANS 3 : 17 – 18 September 17 YOU WILL NOT FIND MY PEACE by engaging in excessive planning: attempting to control what will happen to you in the future. That is a commonly practiced form of unbelief. When your mind spins with multiple plans, Peace may sometimes seem to be within your grasp; yet it always eludes you. Just when you think you have prepared for all possibilities, something unexpected pops up and throws things into confusion. I did not design the human mind to figure out the future. That is beyond your capability. I crafted your mind for continual communication with Me. Bring Me all your needs, your hopes and fears. Commit everything into My care. Turn from the path of planning to the path of Peace. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. 1 PETER 5 : 6 – 7 In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps. PROVERBS 16 : 9 Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, And He shall bring it to pass. PSALM 37 : 5 (NKJV)

The same thing appears in the nature and design of the sacraments, which God hath appointed. God, considering our frame, hath not only appointed that we should be told of the great things of the gospel, and of the redemption of Christ, and instructed in them by his word; but also that they should be, as it were, exhibited to our view, in sensible representations, in the sacraments, the more to affect us with them. And the impressing divine things on the hearts and affections of men, is evidently one great and main end for which God has ordained that his word delivered in the holy Scriptures, should be opened, applied, and set home upon men, in preaching. And therefore it does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend as well as preaching to give men a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the things of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word to men in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of the things of religion, and their own misery, and necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; and to stir up the pure minds of the saints, and quicken their affections, by often bringing the great things of religion to their remembrance, and setting them before them in their proper colors, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already, 2 Pet. 1:12, 13. And particularly, to promote those two affections in them, which are spoken of in the text, love and joy: "Christ gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; that the body of Christ might be edified in love," Eph. 4:11, 12, 16. The apostle in instructing and counseling Timothy concerning the work of the ministry, informs him that the great end of that word which a minister is to preach, is love or charity, 1 Tim. 3, 4, 5. And another affection which God has appointed preaching as a means to promote in the saints, is joy; and therefore ministers are called "helpers of their joy," 2 Cor. 1:24.

Paul Costelloe One of the most established and experienced names in British fashion, Irish-born Paul Costelloe has maintained a highly successful design label for more than twenty-five years. He was educated in Paris and Milan, and has since become known for his expertise in fabrics, primarily crisp linen and tweed. I remember another moment, in the pouring rain in Hyde Park, when Pavarotti was singing for an audience. Diana went up to him in a design of mine, a double-breasted suit consisting of a jacket and skirt. She was absolutely soaked and she was beautifully suntanned. To me, the most radiant photograph of her that has ever appeared anywhere was taken then. If you ever get a chance to look at it, you must. It is featured in a couple of books about her. It really is something special to me--I have it on my wall, in my studio, at this very moment. Whenever I look at it, I get a lump in my throat. There was another occasion when she wore something of mine that stands out in my mind. Diana was wearing a very sheer skirt and jacket and was standing in the sun. She was in India, in front of the Taj Mahal, and her skirt was see-through. Of course, the press went full out on that. My last memory of her is when she was wearing a linen dress of mine in Melbourne and was surrounded by a large group of Australian swimmers. That, for me, was a very exciting moment. She was always incredibly polite, incredibly generous. There is simply no comparison. She had a completely different manner from everyone else. I have been to Buckingham Palace, and she was always far above the rest. I must have been the one and only Irishman ever to dress a member of the Royal Family!

Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic narrative than no narrative at all.*1 The mind can be a wonderful tool for self-delusion—it was not designed to deal with complexity and nonlinear uncertainties.*2 Counter to the common discourse, more information means more delusions: our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age: there is this mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events, derived in a simpler ancestral habitat. Our mental architecture is at an increased mismatch with the world in which we live.

They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self-pitying, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe.

et al. (2000), Bonifaci et al. (2012), Tero et al. (2010), and Oettmeier et al. (2017). In Advances in Physarum Machines (Adamatzky [2016]), researchers detail many surprising properties of slime molds. Some use slime molds to make decision gates and oscillators, some simulate historical human migrations and model possible future patterns of human migrations on the moon. Mathematical models inspired by slime molds include a non-quantum implementation of Shor’s factorization, calculation of shortest paths, and the design of supply-chain networks. Oettmeier et al. (2017) note that Hirohito, the emperor of Japan between 1926 and 1989, was fascinated by slime molds and in 1935 published a book on the subject. Slime molds have been a high-prestige subject of research in Japan ever since.

Man is made or unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.

It became forbidden to use rational thought. Early Church leader Tertullian, advocating faith rather than rational thought said, “The son of god died: It must needs be believed because it is absurd”. He (Christ) was buried and rose again: it is certain because it is impossible”. Early Catholic leaders consciously proscribed and established as heretical any thinking that might incite challenge. Theodosius I, Emperor of Byzantium issued an edict allowing worship only of the Christian father and son, banning the worship of any deities or pagan ideas, in 389 CE. The writings of the early Church fathers were thus left undisputed by rival philosophies and in time they came to have the same weight as the Bible itself. All of this was revealed “truth”. It is of great importance to understand that most of what has passed down to Christians as “sin” especially sexual sin, had nothing to do with the man called Christ or even of the books (new testament) written by those who never knew him (Mark 60 CE., Mathew 90 CE, Luke 90 CE., John 90 CE.). Instead these views of sin and what it was to be Christian came from a few influential fathers of the early Church, writing as the Roman empire died.Augustine, the greatest early Christian “thinker” of them all said: “This is the disease of curiosity… It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.” With these words, Augustine set the spirit and tone for the Dark Ages to come. Early Church fathers greatly feared any challenge to their ideas. Their fear of knowledge led to a shutting down of all free thought. Bishops deliberately outlawed and declared heretical any thoughts that might lead to a more open minded atmosphere. They strove to codify as fact, a narrow interpretation of the gospels. To do so they altered some gospels and outlawed hundreds of others to project the particular “truth” they had chosen. Their thought centered on sin, the depravity of sex and the merit of suffering as much as Christ. Since Christian fathers had little interest in the vast wealth of learning compiled by the pagan Greeks and Romans, they simply stopped copying and disseminating these works and substituted a carefully edited and selected group of books to comprise the Bible. Almost the only other learning that was supported were the works of the early Church fathers designating a selected and censored Christianity.

The world is rotten,' he said to me one day, as we picked apart a stick of olive bread we had bought from a street-hawker. 'Do not pretend it is not. Lover of books, do you think they do not rape their maids? And philosophers, do they not whip their slaves? They are every bit as ugly and nasty as me, but they laurel themselves with illuminate crowns and pronounce: 'oh, high-minded acolytes, do you not admire me?' and don't people rush forwards, bowing and scraping, and muttering, 'oh, yes, great poet, yes!' They claim to deliver freedom, but freedom strictly of their own design. Freedom conditional to rules - especially rules like politeness and fairness and being equal, all those horrors - is no kind of freedom at all. I will take my own freedom, thank you, where I please, and what philosophers offer me in consolation of my sorrow, they can...'He paused, sighed, smiled'...they can stick it up their puckered arses

You may steal my abstract designed frame but remember that, it is but a copy. I will design another one even better than the one! Because the original is in my mind.

Look into the bastard's mind." "I can't do that, Ziller." "Why not?" "It is one of the very few more-or-less unbreakable rules of the Culture. Nearly a law. If we had laws, it would be of the first on the statue book." "Only more-or-less unbreakable?" "It is done very, very rarely, and the results tend to be ostracism. There was a ship called the Grey Area, once. It used to do that sort of thing. It became known as the Meatfucker as a result. When you look up the catalogs that's the name it's listed under, with its original, chosen name as a footnote. To be denied your self-designated name is a unique insult in the Culture, Ziller. The vessel disappeared some time ago. Probably killed itself, arguably as a result of the shame attached to such behavior and resulting disrespect." "All it is is looking inside an animal brain." "That's just it. It is so easy, and it would mean so little, really. That is why the not-doing of it is probably the most profound manner in which we honor our biological progenitors. This prohibition is a mark of our respect. And so I cannot do it." "You mean you won't do it." "They are almost the same thing." "You have the ability." "Of course.

This book is designed to help anyone who is burdened by fear, worry, anxiety, or panic and would like to do something to improve the situation.

Basking day by day in the sunshine of my guru’s love, unspoken but keenly felt, I banished from my conscious mind the various hints he had given of his approaching passing.

Like the team at the FDA, the EIR team enlisted entrepreneurs familiar with the obstacles, including SoftLayer senior executive Paul Ford, to work alongside the USCIS personnel committed to removing or clearing them. “You get fresh thinking, you get a very low-cost way of trying to impact the situation because the people doing this are committed to try to find what’s not working and propose solutions, rather than take a partisan or political or hierarchical or structural view to the environment,” Feld said. “They’re short-timers, so they’re committed for a period of time to come do something, but they’re not here for career advancement, so they are going to speak their mind.” Feld also believed that the presence of Ford and other outside entrepreneurs made the participants feel more comfortable to speak freely than if they had been working with government officials alone. In the spring of 2012, the team began building a prototype of an alternative application process for entrepreneurs and by fall had achieved a significant breakthrough: the launch of the Entrepreneurship Pathways web portal, designed to close the information gap between USCIS and those in the entrepreneurial community, by letting them know which visa may be most appropriate—including the O-1—for their situation.24 While the results of this exercise were not empirically conclusive at the time of an interview for this book, Feld did offer his anecdotal assessment “that there’s an increased number of people who I know have been able to get into the country and get valid visas who are entrepreneurs. I’ve definitely heard a decrease in the negative.

The Vision that you glorify in your mind, the Ideal that you enthrone in your heart—this you will build your life by, this you will become.

If you’ve ever played Destiny, Diablo, or EverQuest, or even games like Call of Duty, you know leveling systems are beyond addicting. You’ll play a game far after it’s stopped being fun simply because there’s the possibility of an increased level, a new achievement, or additional item. That’s why you’ll spend five hours killing rats just to get to the next level, as you’ll then unlock a new sword or spell that gives you a chance to gain . . . yup, another level. These leveling systems are designed specifically with human behavioral psychology in mind. As I told you earlier in the book, our brains love progress, and we love to be rewarded when we make progress. It’s the same psychology behind why we feel good when somebody likes the photos we post to Facebook: we take an action, and we are rewarded for it. What’s going on here? When these activities take place, our brains release dopamine, which makes us feel better and more accomplished. And then we chase that feeling. In fact, our brains can actually create new pathways with each repeated cue and reward. Once we understand this process, it becomes our responsibility to use it for good rather than for evil. Although I don’t play games like EverQuest very often anymore due to the time commitment they require and to my own admitted addiction to these types of games, I am still addicted to progress and leveling up. I just do it in real life now.

When I put down Lance Armstrong’s book, I understood something profoundly. Edie, if you can move, you’re not sick. I decided right then and there that no matter what cancer did to me I would continue to move. Movement was what the physical body was designed to do; it was how it coped and functioned. Movement was vitality. It was life. I would move. Always. No matter what. Until my last breath, I would move.

BORN TO BE RIGHTEOUS I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to “do” morality, just as it’s designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

When they reached the top level, Susan turned to the left. The corridor had raised wallpaper in a classic floral design and nothing else. No small tables, no chairs, no pictures in frames, no Oriental runners. They passed by maybe a dozen rooms, only two with doors open. Myron noticed that the doors were extra wide and he remembered his visit to Babies and Children’s Hospital. Extra wide doors there too. For wheelchairs and stretchers and the like. When they reached the end of the corridor, Susan stopped, took a deep breath, looked back at Myron. “Are you ready?” He nodded. She opened the door and stepped inside. Myron followed. A four-poster antique bed, like something you’d see on a tour of Jefferson’s Monticello, overwhelmed the room. The walls were warm green with woodwork trim. There was a small crystal chandelier, a burgundy Victorian couch, a Persian rug with deep scarlets. A Mozart violin concerto was playing a bit too loudly on the stereo. A woman sat in the corner reading a book. She too started upright when she saw who it was. “It’s okay,” Susan Lex said. “Would you mind leaving us for a few moments?” “Yes, ma’am,” the woman said. “If you need anything—” “I’ll ring, thank you.” The woman did a semi-curtsy/semi-bow and hurried out. Myron looked at the man in the bed. The resemblance to the computer rendering was uncanny, almost perfect. Even, strangely enough, the dead eyes. Myron moved closer. Dennis Lex followed him with the dead eyes, unfocused, empty, like windows over a vacant lot.

Many NT spouses/partners report a variety of psychosomatic and immunodeficiency illnesses, such as migraines, arthritis, gastric reflux, and fibromyalgia. Even weight gain occurs as a result of the hypervigilance required to parent with an Aspie. When the body is regularly thrown into a state of alarm, the over-production of adrenalin and cortisol wreaks havoc with the body’s natural defense mechanisms. These alarm systems are designed for short-term emergencies, not for the daily crises regimen common to NT parents married to Aspies. Left unchecked, real physical illness can emerge in NT parents.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about - yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries of time, space and gravity. These were not just areas of scientific ignorance, but of utter bafflement and wonder. We do not yet have the final answers to any of the questions of cosmology and particle physics, molecular genetics and evolutionary theory, but we do know how to think about them. The mysteries haven't vanished, but they have been tamed. They no longer overwhelm our efforts to think about the phenomena, because now we know how to tell the misbegotten questions from the right questions, and even if we turn out to be dead wrong about some of the currently accepted answers, we know how to go about looking for better answers. With consciousness, however, we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness. Mysteries are exciting, after all, part of what makes life fun. No one appreciates the spoilsport who reveals whodunit to the moviegoers waiting in line. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can never regain the state of delicious mystification that once enthralled you. So let the reader beware. If I succeed in my attempt to explain consciousness, those who read on will trade mystery for the rudiments of scientific knowledge of consciousness, not a fair trade for some tastes. Since some people view demystification as a desecration, I expect them to view this book at the outset as an act of intellectual vandalism, an assault on the last sanctuary of humankind. I would like to change their minds.

when you breathe in your air, it is going to be clean. Imagine the color of clean. This is so clean and so pure that when you feel it enter your body, it wants to get out anything that is bad. As you breathe out, it gets rid of the bad air that dissolves into nothing. Then you breathe in some crisp, pure air and breathe out the bad nasty air again. Just focus on your body and breathing. Good in, bad out. Feel it go through your entire body, especially up through your head. We are going to start going into your brain. Imagine a hallway, it is a long hallway. Picture it. Is it tall or short? Wide or narrow? It has a lot of doors, see the details on the door. The handle is made of what material? Any particular designs? See the hinges, the numbers and vividly see all of it. How much detail can you put into this? Find the detail. You walk down the hall you will notice some doors have a good energy coming from them while others do not.

It was this hierarchy—so central to Western cosmology for so long that, even today, a ten-year-old could intuitively get much of it right—that was challenged by the most famous compendium of all: Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s eighteen-thousand-page Encyclopédie. Published between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie was sponsored by neither the Catholic Church nor the French monarchy and was covertly hostile to both. It was intended to secularize as well as to popularize knowledge, and it demonstrated those Enlightenment commitments most radically through its organizational scheme. Rather than being structured, as it were, God-down, with the whole world flowing forth from a divine creator, it was structured human-out, with the world divided according to the different ways in which the mind engages with it: “memory,” “reason,” and “imagination,” or what we might today call history, science and philosophy, and the arts. Like alphabetical order, which effectively democratizes topics by abolishing distinctions based on power and precedent in favor of subjecting them all to the same rule, this new structure had the effect of humbling even the most exalted subjects. In producing the Encyclopédie, Diderot did not look up to the heavens but out toward the future; his goal, he wrote, was “that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier.” It is to Diderot’s Encyclopédie that we owe every modern one, from the Britannica and the World Book to Encarta and Wikipedia. But we also owe to it many other kinds of projects designed to, in his words, “assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.” It introduced not only new ways to do so but new reasons—chief among them, the diffusion of information prized by an élite class into the culture at large. The Encyclopédie was both the cause and the effect of a profoundly Enlightenment conviction: that, for books about everything, the best possible audience was the Everyman.

Now, in this generation, the entirety of the globe is facing an ideological and socio-political collapse on a grand scale. This is by design, it is man-made. The outcome is still carefully assessed with little room for error or improvement. There is only one flaw: the divine element in humanity. Our sentient consciousness bestows with the capacity to support the freedom of thought and movement with the inherent awareness that both come at a cost. When we speak our minds, we are going to offend and be offended. There are no safe spaces in conversation. People will say things we don't like. We have to accept this is the price of freedom of speech. When we allow for freedom of movement during times of war, we have to accept that we are inviting in enemies as well as refugees, especially when we don't bother to discern which is which. Even the best, most selfless intentions can pave the way to our downfall...

Every single second is an opportunity to change your life because in any moment, you can change the way you feel.” – Rhonda Byrne

Poverty hides itself in thought before it surrenders to purses.” – Khalil Gibran

Keep creating new chapters in your personal book and never stop re-inventing and perfecting yourself. Try new things. Pick up new hobbies and books. Travel and explore other cultures. Never stay in the same city or state for more than five years of your life. There are many heavens on earth waiting for you to discover. Seek out people with beautiful hearts and minds, not those with just beautiful style and bodies. The first kind will forever remain beautiful to you, while the other will grow stale and ugly. Learn a new language at least twice. Change your career at least thrice, and change your location often. Like all creatures in the wild, we were designed to keep moving. When a snake sheds its old skin, it becomes a more refined creature. Never stop refining and re-defining yourself. Transformations are an integral part of life. Just look at the seasons or the weather.

This book explained why people are divided by politics and religion. The answer is not, as Manichaeans would have it, because some people are good and others are evil. Instead, the explanation is that our minds were designed for groupish righteousness. We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. This makes it difficult—but not impossible—to connect with those who live in other matrices, which are often built on different configurations of the available moral foundations. FIGURE 13.1.

As I’ve said throughout this book, networked products tend to start from humble beginnings—rather than big splashy launches—and YouTube was no different. Jawed’s first video is a good example. Steve described the earliest days of content and how it grew: In the earliest days, there was very little content to organize. Getting to the first 1,000 videos was the hardest part of YouTube’s life, and we were just focused on that. Organizing the videos was an afterthought—we just had a list of recent videos that had been uploaded, and you could just browse through those. We had the idea that everyone who uploaded a video would share it with, say, 10 people, and then 5 of them would actually view it, and then at least one would upload another video. After we built some key features—video embedding and real-time transcoding—it started to work.75 In other words, the early days was just about solving the Cold Start Problem, not designing the fancy recommendations algorithms that YouTube is now known for. And even once there were more videos, the attempt at discoverability focused on relatively basic curation—just showing popular videos in different categories and countries. Steve described this to me: Once we got a lot more videos, we had to redesign YouTube to make it easier to discover the best videos. At first, we had a page on YouTube to see just the top 100 videos overall, sorted by day, week, or month. Eventually it was broken out by country. The homepage was the only place where YouTube as a company would have control of things, since we would choose the 10 videos. These were often documentaries, or semi-professionally produced content so that people—particularly advertisers—who came to the YouTube front page would think we had great content. Eventually it made sense to create a categorization system for videos, but in the early years everything was grouped in with each other. Even while the numbers of videos was rapidly growing, so too were all the other forms of content on the site. YouTube wasn’t just the videos, it was also the comments left by viewers: Early in we saw that there were 100x more viewers than creators. Every social product at that time had comments, so we added them to YouTube, which was a way for the viewers to participate, too. It seems naive now, but we were just thinking about raw growth at that time—the raw number of videos, the raw number of comments—so we didn’t think much about the quality. We weren’t thinking about fake news or anything like that. The thought was, just get as many comments as possible out there, and the more controversial the better! Keep in mind that the vast majority of videos had zero comments, so getting feedback for our creators usually made the experience better for them. Of course now we know that once you get to a certain level of engagement, you need a different solution over time.

No one person knows everything; that has never been God’s design. It matters not how wise we become, no one person has the right answers all of the time. God is the source of all wisdom, yet our levels of understanding are not equal. No single mind can contain all of God’s wisdom, which is why He disperses His wisdom among people. God is wisdom and knowledge, and anyone who really knows Him will never deny, that to receive instructions from God is to receive wisdom, but to obey God’s instructions makes us wise. "Wisdom," From the book, 'Perspective: Lessons from the Journey' by Nicole A. Jones

The excellent Mr. Edwards was settled there, with his grandfather Stoddard, upon the opinion that the Lord’s supper was a converting ordinance, and he had gone on fifteen years in that way, until he was fully convinced that it was contrary to the Word of God; and he also found that gospel discipline could not be practiced in such a way. No sooner was his change of mind discovered, in 1744, than most of his people were inflamed against him, and never would give him a hearing upon the reasons of his change of sentiments; but they were resolute to have him dismissed. As he could not get them to hear him preach upon the subject, he printed his thoughts upon it, in 1749, though most of them would not read his book. In it he says, “that baptism, by which the primitive converts were admitted into the church, was used as an exhibition and token of their being visibly regenerated, dead to sin, and alive to God. The saintship, godliness, and holiness of which, according to Scripture, professing Christians and visible saints do make a profession and have a visibility, is not any religion and virtue that is the result of common grace, or moral sincerity, (as it is called), but saving grace.” And to prove this, he referred to Rom. 2:29; 6:1-4; Phil. 3:3; Col. 2:11, 12. [On a right to Sacraments, p. 20-23.] Though he did not design it, yet many others have been made Baptists by the same scriptures, and the same ideas from them.