Digest Facts Quotes

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

The important thing is not to shout at this point, Vimes told himself. Do not…what do they call it…go postal? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. THEN go postal. But with precision.

Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.

You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!

Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?

Babies are born without knee-caps.

The room was full of people. “Ninety-eight days,” said the queen, folding her hands in her lap. “You said it would take six months.” Eugenides picked at a nub in the coverlet. “I like to give myself a margin. When I can.” “I didn’t believe you,” the queen admitted with a delicate smile. “Now you know better.” The king smiled back. They might as well have been alone. The queen turned her head to listen. There was shouting in the guardroom. Costis tensed. His hand went to his belt, looking for his sword. “That will be Dite,” said the king. “He must have been in the outer rooms. I may as well see him.” The queen rose and stepped behind the embroidered screen in front of the fireplace. Her attendants withdrew. The king’s attendants remained, digesting the fact that their helpless, inept king had promised his wife to destroy the house of Erondites in six months and had done it in ninety-eight days.

Forgetfulness is not just a vis inertiae, as superficial people believe, but is rather an active ability to suppress, positive in the strongest sense of the word, to which we owe the fact that what we simply live through, experience, take in, no more enters our consciousness during digestion (one could call it spiritual ingestion) than does the thousand-fold process which takes place with our physical consumption of food, our so-called ingestion. To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and battle which our underworld of serviceable organs work with and against each other;a little peace, a little tabula rasa of consciousness to make room for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, predicting, predetermining (our organism runs along oligarchic lines, you see) - that, as I said, is the benefit of active forgetfulness, like a doorkeeper or guardian of mental order, rest and etiquette: from which can immediately see how there could be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness.

The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does dome tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend. It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.

The most difficult adjustment an expatriate has to make, on returning to his native land, is in this realm of conversation. The impression one has, at first, is that there is no conversation. We do not talk—we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines, and digests.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. What a wondrous place this was - crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course. How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.

Viscosity occurs on a cellular level. And so does velocity.In contrast to viscosity's cellular coma, velocity endows every platelet and muscle fiber with a mind of its own, a means of knowing and commenting on its own behavior. There is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the fact of having perceptions. Digestion could kill you! What I mean is the unceasing awareness of the processes of digestion could exhaust you to death. And digestion is just an involuntary sideline to thinking, which is where the real trouble begins

Isn't the information about your ability enough to digest right now?" "The info is digested, Michael. As a matter of fact, it's so digested it's getting ready to come out as a big pile of sh-" "Don't get snippy with me." His eyes flashed a warning. "I'm not snippy. I'm mad," I returned through gritted teeth. "And your personal health is in danger if you don't fess up about what's going on.

The king’s attendants remained, digesting the fact that their helpless, inept king had promised his wife to destroy the house of Erondites in six months and had done it in ninety-eight days.

Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

Wisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by knowledge, the digestion and assimilation of whatever in the material world the man comes in contact with.

How much of what we think of as an admirable response to trauma - the "stiff upper lip" - is actually dissociation, the mind's attempt to protect us from experiences that are too painful to digest? I can recall the facts, at least some of them. But I don't feel very much. At least, the feelings I have are not kind. They are not sympathetic toward my fifteen-year-old self. It happened. It happens to a lot of women. I survived. Most women do. I am "strong," but in those moments of strength, I don't feel. I will admit that I am very afraid of one thing. Not just afraid. Ashamed. I am afraid that I am incapable of love.

I submit a body of facts which cannot be invalidated. My opinions may be doubted, denied, or approved, according as they conflict or agree with the opinions of each individual who may read them; but their worth will be best determined by the foundation on which they rest—the incontrovertible facts.

Man, naturally, should be a vegetarian because the whole body is made for vegetarian food. Even scientists concede to the fact that the whole structure of the human body shows that man should not be a nonvegetarian. Man comes from the monkeys and monkeys are vegetarians – absolute vegetarians. If Darwin is correct, then man should be a vegetarian. Now, there are ways to judge whether a certain species of animal is vegetarian or nonvegetarian: it depends on the length of the intestine. Nonvegetarian animals have a very small intestine. Tigers and lions have a very small intestine because meat is already a digested food. It does not need a long intestine to digest it. The work of digestion has been done by the animal and now you are eating the animal’s meat. It is already digested; a long intestine is not needed. Man has one of the longest intestines – that means man is a vegetarian. A long digestion is needed and there will be much excreta which has to be thrown out.

Nothing reminds one of how shitty inequality is more often than the fact that there are companies who make and people who use 1-ply toilet papers.

Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.

In the 60s, political correctness became not a guideline for living, but a new set of shackles. A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity—Black people are not some standardly digestible quantity. In order to work together we do not have to become a mix of indistinguishable particles resembling a vat of homogenized chocolate milk.

She felt livid. They'd all lost so many powers. It was ridiculous to have to communicate by flapping bits of your skin, and as for the tongue... Yuerkkk ... As far as she knew, in the whole life of the universe, no Auditor had ever experienced the sensation of yuerkkk. This wretched body was full of opportunities for yuerkkk. She could leave it at any time and yet, and yet... part of her didn't want to. There was this horrible desire, second by second, to hang on. And she felt hungry. And that also made no sense. The stomach was a bag for digesting food. It wasn't supposed to issue commands. The Auditors could survive quite well by exchanging molecules with their surroundings and making use of any local source of energy. That was a fact. Try telling that to the stomach. She could feel it. It was sitting there, grumbling. She was being harassed by her internal organs. Why the ... why the. . why had they copied internal organs? Yuerkkk. It was all too much. She wanted to... she wanted to... express herself by shouting some, some, some terrible words...

In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their corrosive function—just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. Yet the simile is not accurate enough; for the copper and the nitric acid used in etching are on a par with each other, both being extracted from nature, while the relation of words to reality is not that of the acid to the plate. Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to that of excess stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.

If we are to understand consciousness—the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us—we need to turn our backs on the orthodox assumption that consciousness is something that happens inside us, like digestion. It is now clear, as it has not been before, that consciousness, like a work of improvisational music, is achieved in action, by us, thanks to our situation in and access to a world we know around us. We are in the world and of it.

In the hierarchy of man's activities, eating was the lowest. Eating had become the object of a cult, but in fact it was but the preliminary to other, utterly contemptible motions. It occurred to him that he wanted to perform one of these too.

While conversion of sugars to ethanol is the predominant reaction, it is only one of potentially thousands of biochemical reactions taking place during fermentation. As a result, wine contains trace amounts of a large number of organic acids, esters, sugars, alcohols, and other molecules. Wine is, in fact, one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman.

In fact, according to physicians, the functioning of the digestion depends less on the brain than on hormonal mechanisms and autoregulators. However, during a fast, the digestive system gets an increasing rest. About ten hours after a meal, the contractions stop and the feeling of hunger disappears; five or six hours later the glucose stops coming directly from the intestines and begins to produce itself from the reserve of glycogen contained in the liver. From then on, the body works on itself in a closed circuit, becoming itself the source of the energy it uses. Instead of destroying an appropriating to himself nourishment taken from outside, man enters a state of nonviolence and detachment relative to the outside world.

My afternoon comp class is not persuaded. In fact, they feel ill-treated...I've read three short essays aloud, anonymously, for the purpose of inspiring discussion or, failing discussion, private misgiving. It's my hope that if the majority of these intellectually addled young folk actually hear their words aloud, if they are forced to digest not only their advice to me but the logic that led to this advice, they will, if not change their minds, at least become acquainted with doubt.

...Hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, “Make me a healthy animal.” But here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, “the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on...

You could pretend that Guenever was a sort of man-eating lioncelle herself, or that she was one of those selfish women who insist on ruling everywhere. In fact, this is what she did seem to be to a superficial inspection. She was beautiful, sanguine, hot-tempered, demanding, impulsive, acquisitive, charming - she had all the proper qualities for a man-eater. But the rock on which these easy explanations founder, is that she was not promiscuous. There was never anybody in her life except Lancelot and Arthur. She never ate anybody except these. And even these she did not eat in the full sense of the word. People who have been digested by a man-eating lioncelle tend to become nonentities - to live no life except within the vitals of the devourer. Yet both Arthur and Lancelot, the people whom she apparently devoured, lived full lives, and accomplished things of their own. She lived in warlike times, when the lives of young people were as short as those of airmen in the twentieth century. In such times, the elderly moralists are content to relax their moral laws a little, in return for being defended. The condemned pilots, with their lust for life and love which is probably to be lost so soon, touch the hearts of young women, or possibly call up an answering bravado. Generosity, courage, honesty, pity, the faculty to look short life in the face - certainly comradeship and tenderness - these qualities may explain why Guenever took Lancelot as well as Arthur. It was courage more than anything else - the courage to take and give from the heart, while there was time. Poets are always urging women to have this kind of courage. She gathered her rose-buds while she might, and the striking thing was that she only gathered two of them, which she kept always, and that those two were the best.

Sokolov was favorable impressed by the fact that he had not yet shit his pants. Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov's experience, shitting the pants was more common if it was a straightforward matter of extreme emotional stress. Pants pissing was completely unproductive and suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowls and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion. Sokolov could have forgiven Peter for shitting his pants, but if he had pissed his pants, then it really would have been necessary to get rid of him. In any case, Peter had done neither of these things yet.

The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.

You see,” he said turning to Mr Norton, “he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It’s worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it. Already he is—well, bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!

Initiation asks the son to move his love energy away from the attractive mother to the relatively unattractive serpent father. All that is ashes work. When a man enters this stage he regards Descent as a holy thing, he increases his tolerance for ashes, eats dust as snake do, increases his stomach for terrifying insights, deepens his ability to digest the evil facts of history, accepts the job of working seven years under the ground, leaves the granary at will through the rat’s hole, bites on cinders, learns to shudder, and follows the voice of the old mole below the ground.

And this is the sense of the word "grammar" which our inaccurate student detests, and this is the sense of the word which every sensible tutor will maintain. His maxim is "a little, but well"; that is, really know what you say you know: know what you know and what you do not know; get one thing well before you go on to a second; try to ascertain what your words mean; when you read a sentence, picture it before your mind as a whole, take in the truth or information contained in it, express it in your own words, and, if it be important, commit it to the faithful memory. Again, compare one idea with another; adjust truths and facts; form them into one whole, or notice the obstacles which occur in doing so. This is the way to make progress; this is the way to arrive at results; not to swallow knowledge, but (according to the figure sometimes used) to masticate and digest it.

He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spellbound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow.

From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would not be realised now. And the days on which, by a lucky chance, she had once more shewn herself kind and loving to him, or if she had paid him any attention, he recorded those apparent and misleading signs of a slight movement on her part towards him with the same tender and sceptical solicitude, the desperate joy that people reveal who, when they are nursing a friend in the last days of an incurable malady, relate, as significant facts of infinite value: "Yesterday he went through his accounts himself, and actually corrected a mistake that we had made in adding them up; he ate an egg to-day and seemed quite to enjoy it, if he digests it properly we shall try him with a cutlet to-morrow,"--although they themselves know that these things are meaningless on the eve of an inevitable death.

As a boy I was saved from a life of ignorance by my little hometown library. As a college student I was educated in the stacks of the Swarthmore library. And as an adult I use libraries daily in my search for the facts and the enlightenment I use in writing my books. In fact, I like libraries so much that I married a librarian.

Forces of digestion and metabolism are at work within me that are utterly beyond my perception or control. Most of my internal organs may as well not exist for all I know of them directly, and yet I can be reasonably certain that I have them, arranged much as any medical textbook would suggest. The taste of the coffee, my satisfaction at its flavor, the feeling of the warm cup in my hand—while these are immediate facts with which I am acquainted, they reach back into a dark wilderness of facts that I will never come to know... Where am I, that I have such a poor view of things? And what sort of thing am I that both my outside and my inside are so obscure?

The multiplicity of human identity is not just a spiritual principle, it’s a biological fact—a basic ecological reality. ... only 10% of the cells in your body belong to you. The rest are the cells of bacteria and microorganisms that call your body home, and without these symbionts living on and within your physical self, you would be unable to digest and process the nutrients necessary to keep you alive. Your physical body is teeming with a microscopic diversity of life that rivals a rainforest. The insight of the Gaia Theory—that “the Earth system behaves as a single self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components”—is as much a statement about our own physical bodies as it is about the planet. If we imagine the Earth as the body of a goddess, we can also imagine our own bodies as a sacred home to an ecologically complex and diverse array of microscopic life." -- Alison Leigh Lilly, "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective

Everyone, he knew for a fact, was populated by billions of microbes, and not simply the flora in their digestive tracts. People played host to mites and viruses that all wanted to reproduce and continue life elsewhere. They jumped ship with every handshake. It was folly to imagine we were anything more than vessels, carting around our bossy passengers. We were nothing.

I am getting incredibly high on a single, astounding fact: that it’s always sunny above the clouds. Always. That every day on earth—every day I have ever had—was secretly sunny, after all. However shitty and rainy it is in Wolverhampton—on the days where the clouds feel low, like a lid, and the swarf bubbles and the gutters churn to digest—it’s always been sunny up here.

Fiction is a set of observable manifestations, as represented and frozen in language, that triggers a profoundly subjective and individual experience. Ultimately, this is the kind of productive dilemma that can allow fiction to get to places that other media does not. Fiction is exceptionally good at providing models for consciousness, and at putting readers in a position to take upon themselves the structure of another consciousness for a short while. It is better at this than any other genre or media, and can do it in any number of modes (realistic or metafictional, reliably or unreliably, representationally or metafictionally, etc.). But for it to be able to do this as well as it possibly can, it must clear a space. This is where, for me, doing without becomes most crucial. The subtractions that we find in innovative fictions (even when those subtractions, as in Joyce's work, are followed by further ornamentations and encrustations) are there to facilitate the simulation of consciousness. What is subtracted is the significance and meaning designed to let us classify an experience without entering into it. Doing without such things opens the door wider for experience, putting the reader in a position where they are experiencing fiction in lieu of understanding it. By paying more attention to what we leave out than to how readers are going to interpret or work after the fact, we refuse to let fiction be assimilable, digestible, and safe. We keep it from being mere fodder for criticism and instead accept it as valid, vital experience.

... the only difference between carnivores and plants is that the latter eat meat through ‘translator’ organisms. Maggots and bacteria ‘pre-chew’ dead animal matter, which plants then absorb as nutrients. So if eating pre-chewed food does not change the fact that a baby is human, why should a plant be any less of a carnivore because it out-sources the digestion of animal protein to organisms of decay?

Obsession is a pair of blinders, and Beaumont wore his tightly. He far overstated the role of gastric acid, ignoring the digestive contributions of pepsin and of pancreatic enzymes introduced in the small intestine. As is regularly evidenced by tens of thousands of gastric reflux sufferers—their acid production pharmaceutically curtailed—humans can get by with very little gastric acid. The acid’s main duty, in fact, is to kill bacteria—a fact that never occurred to Beaumont. What, for all his decades of experimenting, did he teach us? That digestion is chemical, not mechanical—but European experimenters, using animals, had shown this to be true two centuries earlier. That protein is easier to digest than vegetable matter. That gastric juices don’t require the “vital forces” of the body. Not, in short, all that much.

St. Thomas was one of the great liberators of the human intellect. Thomas was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it towards experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies.

Adults tend to forget – or perhaps never appreciated in the first place if lifelong non-readers themselves – what a vital part of the process rereading is for children. As adults, rereading seems like backtracking at best, self-indulgence at worst. Free time is such a scarce resource that we feel we should be using it only on new things. But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot – to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It’s like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven’t understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can’t wear out a book’s patience. And for a child there is so much information in a book, so much work to be done within and without. You can identify with the main or peripheral character (or parts of them all). You can enjoy the vicarious satisfaction of their adventures and rewards. You also have a role to play as interested onlooker, able to observe and evaluate participants’ reactions to events and to each other with a greater detachment, and consequent clarity sometimes, than they can. You are learning about people, about relationships, about the variety of responses available to them and in many more situations and circumstances (and at a much faster clip) than one single real life permits. Each book is a world entire. You’re going to have to take more than one pass at it.

When the wind stops, the trees still move, the way my heart creaks long after it bends. Iam always surprised at the aftereffect of being moved deeply by something. I can be hurt or disappointed or feel the warmth of being loved or the gentle sway of being temporarily left, and then I'm ready to chew on something else, seldom allowing for the feelings to digest completely. In fact, I've come to see that much of my confusion in life comes from giving my attention to the next thing too soon, and then wrapping new experience in the remnants of feeling that are not finished with me. For example, the other day I felt sad because an old friend is ill. I addressed my sadness directly and thought I'd been with this mood enough, so I continued on my way. The next day I found myself in the usual frustration of traffic and shopping, and the indifferent reactions of waitresses and clerks were suddenly making me sad. Or so I thought. Though it seems obvious here in the telling, it wasn't in the happening, and I spent a good deal of misguided energy wondering if it was time to change my lifestyle. But really I was feeling ripples of sadness about my friend's illness. The deeper lesson involves nature's sway: its approach, its impact, and, especially, its echo. Everything living encounters it, especially us in the unseeable ripples of what we think and feel. Being alive takes time.

Why do some folks insist that the first draft is crap? I’ve heard a couple of answers for this question. One is to blame Hemingway, which I’m rather fond of. A lot of the bad advice being passed around for writers can be laid at his feet. He got tired of new writers coming to him and asking him for the secret formula for success, so he started making up outrageously bad advice to tell them. Sadly, much of that has ended up in Writer’s Digest articles over the last few decades and is now accepted as fact.

Asia is rising against me. I haven't got a chinaman's chance. I'd better consider my national resources. My national resources cousist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & V anzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don't really want to go to war. America it's them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers' Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I'd better get right down to the job. It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

ANA. Thank you: I am going to heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough of reality on earth. DON JUAN. Then you must stay here; for hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century anew generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer “Make me a healthy animal.” But here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, “the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on”—without getting us a step farther. And yet you want to leave this paradise!

Healthy thoughts can enhance the effects of good nutrition and mitigate the effects of bad nutrition—to a degree. In fact, healthy thoughts lead to better food choices. Eating and thinking are so intertwined that what you are thinking about before, during, and after eating will impact every single one of the 75–100 trillion cells in your body, including the cells of your digestive system. Your state of mind will have a negative or positive influence on your digestive health, and your digestive health will also have a negative or positive influence on your state of mind.

Official historians have long depicted wu zetian as a sort of chinese version of the Red Queen from The Alice and Wonderland, by focusing on her secret police and fondness by bumping off enemies. "And she slept her way to the top". An interesting angle given that her brief dynasty was one of the most prosperious periods in many respects (in terms of peace, arts, and social progress.) On the other hand, what is always pointed out (and emphasized as fact) is that she was fearsome, ambitious, and ruthless. Common (and valued)character traits in just about every emperor...but clearly not easy to digest in an empress

As he plods behind Cameron and Summer, he can’t help but stare at Summer’s exposed, glistening skin. His thoughts aren’t depraved or even mildly in the splasher. In fact, he focuses on the marks of cruelty crisscrossing her back, stomach, and shoulders. He trudges along, drenched, feet swollen, constantly searching for even a hint of a breeze, all while being forced to stare at the alarming network of burns traversing Summer’s delicate skin. This latticework of hate reveals a brutal truth—one he can scarcely comprehend. Yes, he’s glimpsed and felt her scars before, but this is the first time he’s really, truly seen the severity and extent of her life as a slave. With each step, he must digest the monstrosities of her past, leaving him utterly devastated.

So let us be clear once and for all that Jesus is not suggesting that certain classes of people are to be viewed as pigs or dogs. Nor is he saying that we should not give good things and do good deeds to people who might reject or misuse them. In fact, his teaching is precisely the opposite. We are to be like the Father in the heavens, “who is kind to the unthankful and the evil” (Luke 6:35). The problem with pearls for pigs is not that the pigs are not worthy. It is not worthiness that is in question here at all, but helpfulness. Pigs cannot digest pearls, cannot nourish themselves upon them. Likewise for a dog with a Bible or a crucifix. The dog cannot eat it. The reason these animals will finally “turn and rend you,” when you one day step up to them with another load of Bibles or pearls, is that you at least are edible. Anyone who has ever had serious responsibilities of caring for animals will understand immediately what Jesus is saying. And what a picture this is of our efforts to correct and control others by pouring our good things, often truly precious things, upon them—things that they nevertheless simply cannot ingest and use to nourish themselves. Often we do not even listen to them. We “know” without listening. Jesus saw it going on around him all the time, as we do today. And the outcome is usually exactly the same as with the pig and the dog. Our good intentions make little difference. The needy person will finally become angry and attack us. The point is not the waste of the “pearl” but that the person given the pearl is not helped.

walked away from the training grounds, I let out a huge breath of relief. Whew… that was something else. I hope the rest of my talks aren’t like that at all. I wandered over to the potion shop, but it was completely empty. Hm… where could she be? Ah! Maybe she’s with Arceus. Right when I had that thought, someone called out my name. “Hey, Steve.” I turned around and saw Bob. “Hey, Bob! Where have you been? I haven’t been seeing much of you lately.” “Oh, I’ve been busy staying over at Cole’s workshop. As a matter of fact, I’m headed over there now.” “Cole’s workshop? What are you doing over there?” “Did you forget already? He’s helping me out by developing a taste buds and digestive system, remember?” “Oh, that! I totally forgot about that. How’s it going?” “Great! We’re going to install the finished product today.” “Oh, wow, it’s done already? That’s great news, man.” “Yeah, for real. Want to come see?” “Um, well, I’m supposed to be looking for Cindy, but I guess a slight detour is okay.” “Why are you looking for Cindy?” “Er, I have an odd request for her.

Starting from Descartes’ commitment to a few absolutely certain innate ideas and reason’s ability to determine some facts about reality a priori, Leibniz ended up making all ideas innate and deducing how God must have set up the universe. On the other side, Hume continued Locke’s emptying out of the mind until there was no longer a there there, that is, not even a substantial mind to be emptied. Far from being rationally justifiable, Hume demonstrated that most of our beliefs are determined by an arational reflex, a process that has roughly the epistemological status of digestion. Perhaps Kant’s greatest accomplishment was reconciling these deeply heterogeneous schools, weaving a seamless system out of ideas taken from both sides. The linchpin of this synthesis was what he called his Copernican Revolution: the epoch-making claim that the mind actively processes or organizes experience in constructing knowledge, rather than passively reflecting an independent reality. To speak metaphorically, the mind is more like a factory than a mirror or soft wax. It is this idea that enabled Kant to incorporate the empiricist dependence on experience into the rationalist ideal of universal and necessary knowledge.

Freud’s incest theory describes certain fantasies that accompany the regression of libido and are especially characteristic of the personal unconscious as found in hysterical patients. Up to a point they are infantile-sexual fantasies which show very clearly just where the hysterical attitude is defective and why it is so incongruous. They reveal the shadow. Obviously the language used by this compensation will be dramatic and exaggerated. The theory derived from it exactly matches the hysterical attitude that causes the patient to be neurotic. One should not, therefore, take this mode of expression quite as seriously as Freud himself took it. It is just as unconvincing as the ostensibly sexual traumata of hysterics. The neurotic sexual theory is further discomfited by the fact that the last act of the drama consists in a return to the mother’s body. This is usually effected not through the natural channels but through the mouth, through being devoured and swallowed (pl. LXII), thereby giving rise to an even more infantile theory which has been elaborated by Otto Rank. All these allegories are mere makeshifts. The real point is that the regression goes back to the deeper layer of the nutritive function, which is anterior to sexuality, and there clothes itself in the experiences of infancy. In other words, the sexual language of regression changes, on retreating still further back, into metaphors derived from the nutritive and digestive functions, and which cannot be taken as anything more than a façon de parler. The so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency changes at this level into a “Jonah-and-the-Whale” complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on. Fear of incest turns into fear of being devoured by the mother. The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the “mysteries” (“représentations collectives”) in the whale’s belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life.

Just as calories differ according to how they affect the body, so too do carbohydrates. All carbohydrates break down into sugar, but the rate at which this occurs in the digestive tract varies tremendously from food to food. This difference forms the basis for the glycemic index (GI). The GI ranks carbohydrate-containing foods according to how they affect blood glucose, from 0 (no affect at all) to 100 (equal to glucose). Gram for gram, most starchy foods raise blood glucose to very high levels and therefore have high GI values. In fact, highly processed grain products – like white bread, white rice, and prepared breakfast cereals – and the modern white potato digest so quickly that their GI ratings are even greater than table sugar (sucrose). So for breakfast, you could have a bowl of cornflakes with no added sugar, or a bowl of sugar with no added cornflakes. They would taste different but, below the neck, act more or less the same. A related concept is the glycemic load (GL), which accounts for the different carbohydrate content of foods typically consumed. Watermelon has a high GI, but relatively little carbohydrate in a standard serving, producing a moderate GL. In contrast, white potato has a high GI and lots of carbohydrate in a serving, producing a high GL. If this sounds a bit complicated, think of GI as describing how foods rank in a laboratory setting, whereas GL as applying more directly to a real-life setting. Research has shown that the GL reliably predicts, to within about 90 percent, how blood glucose will change after an actual meal – much better than simply counting carbohydrates as people with diabetes have been taught to do.

Unfortunately, many of us begin life on this planet with toxins in our cells. Some we inherited from our parents and grandparents, and even more toxins entered our cells at birth. In fact, in those days general anesthesia for women in the delivery room was standard practice! As infants, we received vaccinations, many of which contained mercury. Later, we probably took antibiotics that destroyed the beneficial bacteria we needed for healthy digestion. And as the years passed, we Boomers continued to be assaulted by a “chemical soup” of pollutants—from processed foods in aluminum foil (TV dinners) to household pesticides. I actually remember one summer my brother and I entertained ourselves by taking the mercury from a thermometer, rolling it into a ball, and playing with it—our own version of toxic Play-Doh. No one knew… .

I don't think that, when future generations look at the apartheid struggle, they will see it as quite the momentous literary cauldron that recent history has suggested. In fact, as well as recording the struggle for human rights, the literary account, which Gordimer has kept so faithfully and truthfully, may be seen as something of a storm in a teacup. Of course it was true that South Africa preserved in much-condensed form all the nasty prejudices and cruelties of an earlier age, and so it was of particular interest to the liberal West. How, it wondered, could something so obscenely and obviously wrong persist? But this was also obvious to every educated white person in South Africa. Certainly, in my family there were never any misconceptions about the nakedly discriminatory nature of Nationalist rule from 1948 to 1994. Those of us who left had many motives, but one of them was a reluctance to spend our lives attacking the indefensible, particularly in Marxist terms. The point I am making, and have been making for a few years, is that white South African writing rode a wave, whether consciously or not. The big issues that it tackled were in fact long since resolved: The South African Afrikaner government was a blind appendix loosely attached to the western digestive system.

Inverting the Problem: Think about problems in reverse. It is not enough to think about them one way. You need to think about problems forward and backward, which forces you to uncover hidden beliefs about the problem you are trying to solve. For instance, instead of thinking about what would make a good life, think about what would make your life miserable, and then avoid those things. Or here’s another example. Do you want to be a good leader? If so, then think about all of the bad leaders you’ve met in your life and list the reasons why they were bad. Think about the ways you don’t want to be like those bad leaders, and you’ll be more likely to succeed at being a good leader. Second- and Subsequent-Order Thinking: Ask yourself, “And then what?” First-order thinkers stay on the surface. They tend to look for things that are easy and simple. Second-order thinkers don’t accept the first conclusion. They go deeper and push harder. Have you ever been in a meeting where a good idea is suggested, everyone agrees on it, and then that’s the end of the discussion? No one asks deeper questions. No one goes to the next level. No one asks what will happen if new problems arise. Second-order thinking is hard work. The Map Is Not the Territory: Our minds create maps of our world in order to understand it, because the only way we can process the complexity of everything is to simplify it in our minds. Businesses use maps all the time. These are the strategic plans, the budgets, even profit and loss statements. And we can’t avoid them. We need to use maps in order to pass information around in an easily digestible way. Sometimes, in fact, we are so reliant on simplification that we will frequently use an incorrect model because we feel any model is preferable to no model.

The Bradford Exchange—a knockoff of [Joseph] Segel’s [Franklin Mint] business—created a murky secondary market for its collector plates, complete with advertisements featuring its “brokers” hovering over computers, tracking plate prices. To underscore the idea of these mass-produced tchotchkes as upmarket, sophisticated investments, the company deployed some of its most aggressive ads (which later led to lawsuits) in magazines like Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Architectural Digest. A 1986 sales pitch offered “The Sound of Music,” the first plate in a new series from the Edwin M. Knowles China Company, at a price of $19.50. Yet the ad copy didn’t emphasize the plate itself. Rather, bold type introduced two so-called facts: “Fact: ‘Scarlett,’ the 1976 first issue in Edwin M. Knowles’ landmark series of collector’s plates inspired by the classic film Gone With the Wind, cost $21.60 when it was issued. It recently traded at $245.00—an increase of 1,040% in just seven years.” And “Fact: ‘The Sound of Music,’ the first issue in Knowles’ The Sound of Music series, inspired by the classic film of the same name, is now available for $19.50.” Later the ad advised that “it’s likely to increase in value.” Currently, those plates can be had on eBay for less than $5 each. In 1993 U.S. direct mail sales of collectibles totaled $1.7 billion

we were still conducting Oval briefings modeled for President Bush, who wanted to have the articles briefed in detail, absorb the material, and ask briefers questions at the same session. President Obama preferred to read and digest the material ahead of time. There was almost a mystical aura around the PDB, with people apparently reluctant to make changes to it, but I knew we could make better use of the president’s precious time.

The addition of new neurons to handle new operations is only a part of the process of encephalization. The other parts are the gradual modification of ancient reflex patterns, the diversion of neural flow from the older channels, and the creation of new chains of command in the ordering of specific sequences of motor activity. The net result has been that the higher cognitive centers have become increasingly influential, while the older time-worn patterns have become less authoritative, more variable. Conscious mental states have begun to condition the system just as much as the system conditions these higher states of consciousness. But new powers and new subtleties do not appear without new complications, new conflicts. In bodywork we continually feel the muscular results of the intrusion of newer mental faculties into older, more stable response patterns. A good deal of the work is simply reminding minds that they are supported by bodies, bodies that suffer continual contortions under the pressure of compelling ideas and emotions as much as from weight and physical stresses, bodies that can and will in turn choke off consciousness if consciousness does not regard them with sufficient attention and respect. It is possible—in fact it is common—for the mass of new possibilities to wreak havoc with older processes that are both simpler and more vital to our physical health. Thus with our newer powers we are free to nurture ulcers as well as new skills, free to inspire paranoia and schizophrenia as well as rapture, free to become lost in our own labyrinths as well as explore new pathways. We have unleashed the human imagination, to discover that there is no internal force as potent to do us either good or ill. With the addition of these new cortical faculties, the quality of our muscular responses—from digestion, to posture, to locomotion, to expressive gesture, to chronic constriction—is dependent not only upon stimulations from the environment, and not only upon patterns characteristic of the species, but also upon individual experiences, memories, unique associations, personal emotions, expectations, apprehensions, the entire legion of personal psychological states.

Claims that the inhospitable Herman Hesse possessed a 'genius for friendship' relate first and foremost to his books, not to relationships with real people. Little wonder that he could become extremely irritable when anything unforeseen disturbed his quiet dialogue with books: namely, a third party who was just as passionate a reader as he was - Ninon! Hesse was beside himself with rage: anyone who dared to make free with his books without permission would feel the full weight of his righteous anger. But the fact that Ninon removed books from his shelves that the would later look for in vain would often have a quite plausible reason that should actually have made him more conciliatory toward her: she was planning to read them aloud to him because of his bad eyes. She had also increasingly taken to reading books that Hesse had been sent to review, digesting the contents and giving him a summary of what she thought of them. In 1929 she started to keep a record of all the books she had read to Hesse on long evenings spent together: they totalled some 1,500! One is reminded of Nietzsche, who, thanks to an eye condition similar to Hesse's, expressed a wish to have 'a reading machine' - in the shape of his companion Lou Andreas-Salomé, whom he was even prepared to marry if need be.

Denying truth hinders our ability to be in right relationship with the world and with our loved ones in a variety of ways. While confronting the root and digesting the fruit of our pain and grief is a bitter experience, when we refuse to deny the truth, we may find that we are, in fact, embraced and held fast by a God who offers the unchangeable truth of love.

[C]hange is not merely a force of destruction. Every form is really a pattern of movement, and every living thing is like the river, which, if it did not flow out, would never have been able to flow in. Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer. The human body lives because it is a complex of motions, of circulation, respiration, and digestion. To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself. In thinking of ourselves as divided into “I” and “me,” we easily forget that consciousness also lives because it is moving. It is as much a part and product of the stream of change as the body and the whole natural world. If you look at it carefully, you will see that consciousness— the thing you call “I”— is really a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion. But because these experiences include memories, we have the impression that “I” is something solid and still, like a tablet upon which life is writing a record. Yet the “tablet” moves with the writing finger as the river flows along with the ripples, so that memory is like a record written on water— a record, not of graven characters, but of waves stirred into motion by other waves which are called sensations and facts.

You have come to Cambridge to study the interdependence of matter and energy. Please remember that energy and matter are in no way something distinct from yourselves. Remember, too, that scientists are not dispassionate. Your judgement and your ability to do good work will be in part dependent on your digestion, your prejudices and above all, your emotional life. You must face the fact that if another human being, whose welfare means considerably more to you than your own, behaves in a very different way from anything you had expected, then your efficiency may be impaired. When the heart is breaking, it is nothing but an absurd illusion to think you can taste the blood. Still I repeat, your efficiency may be impaired.

The core principle of the trial is simple and can be traced back as far as the 13th century, when the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II conducted an experiment to find out the effects of exercise on digestion. Two knights consumed identical meals, and then one went hunting while the other rested in bed. Several hours later, both knights were killed and the contents of their alimentary canals were examined. This revealed that digestion had progressed further in the sleeping knight. It was crucial to have two knights undergoing different levels of exercise, active and at rest, as it allowed the degree of digestion in one to be compared against the other.

Anxiety is a fact of life! Everyone experiences it. It began in our cave-dweller days as a fight-or-flight response. Think of it this way: If you were walking through the woods and you ran into a bear, it would be normal for your body to activate the fight-or-flight response. Your heart would race, your muscles would tense up, your pupils would dilate, you would breathe more rapidly. The same thing would happen today if you were walking down the street and ran into a mugger. There is a simple, scientific explanation of this response: Your mind and body are preparing to protect you—whether you can feel it happening or not. Let us briefly examine this process. Your nervous system is divided into two basic parts: The voluntary nervous system controls actions that require thought, such as using the different parts of your body to drive a car; the autonomic nervous system, among its many functions, suspends all nonessential activity of the body and increases the physiological activity needed to confront the situation—either by fighting or by fleeing the external threat. Here is what it is responsible for: -increase muscle tension -accelerated heartbeat -rapid breathing -constriction of peripheral blood vessels (this is what causes cold hands) -dilation of the pupils -suspension of the digestive process -dry mouth -a voiding of bladder and bowels In addition, the fight-or-flight response causes a marked increase in the flow of adrenaline through the bloodstream and therefore added strength.

fact is, your gut drives your day in ways that few other parts of your body do—it influences your mood, energy, and overall wellness. And when it’s disrupted, so is your life. Certainly, your digestive

Most people think of stomach acid as bad, the sort of thing that causes heartburn. In fact, sufficient stomach acid prevents heartburn by thoroughly digesting your food. (The burning sensation from heartburn is actually from the poorly digested food rotting in your gut and shooting up into your esophagus, not from excess stomach acid). Sufficient stomach acid, or hydrochloric acid (HCl), prevents food poisoning, parasites, and other bad bugs from gaining a foothold in your digestive tract. Lastly, plenty of HCl stimulates the gallbladder and pancreas to complete digestion and preserve the integrity of the whole gastrointestinal tract. The production of HCl depends on the hormone gastrin, which diminishes with hypothyroidism. This can cause such digestive complaints as heartburn, bloating, and gas; hinder the absorption of such vital nutrients as B12, iron, and calcium; and lead to inflammation, lesions, and infections of the intestines. Hypothyroidism and low HCl often go hand in hand.

Retire from the world each day to some private spot, even if it be only the bedroom (for a while I retreated to the furnace room for want of a better place). Stay in the secret place till the surrounding noises begin to fade out of your heart and a sense of God's presence envelops you. Deliberately tune out the unpleasant sounds and come out of your closet determined not to hear them. Listen for the inward Voice till you learn to recognize it. Stop trying to compete with others. Give yourself to God and then be what and who you are without regard to what others think. Reduce your interests to a few. Don't try to know what will be of no service to you. Avoid the digest type of mind—short bits of unrelated facts, cute stories and bright sayings. Learn to pray inwardly every moment. After a while you can do this even while you work. Practice candor, childlike honesty, humility. Pray for a single eye. Read less, but read more of what is important to your inner life. Never let your mind remain scattered for very long. Call home your roving thoughts. Gaze on Christ with the eyes of your soul. Practice spiritual concentration.

In fact, there are many lines of evidence to suggest that apes were specially selected to have unusually low levels of physical activity to help them thrive in the rain forest. As we saw, apes usually don’t need to travel far to get food, and their highly fibrous diet requires them to spend much time resting and digesting between bouts of feeding. In addition, their adaptations to climb trees make them outlandishly inefficient at walking. A typical chimpanzee spends more than twice as much energy to walk a mile as most mammals, including humans.23 When walking is so calorically costly, natural selection inevitably pushes apes to spend as little energy as possible schlepping about the forest so they can devote as much energy as possible to reproduction. Apes are adapted to be couch potatoes.

Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood Lying by omission turns inevitably into positive lying. The implications of literature are that human beings are controlled, if not by reason, at least by comprehensible, well-organized, avowable sentiments. Whereas the facts are quite different. Sometimes the sentiments come in, sometimes they don’t. All for love, or the world well lost; but love may be the title of nobility given to an inordinate liking for a particular person’s smell or texture, a lunatic desire for the repetition of a sensation produced by some particular dexterity. Or consider those cases (seldom published, but how numerous, as anyone in a position to know can tell!), those cases of the eminent statesmen, churchmen, lawyers, captains of industry—seemingly so sane, demonstrably so intelligent, publicly so high-principled; but, in private, under irresistible compulsion towards brandy, towards young men, towards little girls in trains, towards exhibitionism, towards gambling or hoarding, towards bullying, towards being whipped, towards all the innumerable, crazy perversions of the lust for money and power and position on the one hand, for sexual pleasure on the other. Mere tics and tropisms, lunatic and unavowable cravings—these play as much part in human life as the organized and recognized sentiments. And imaginative literature suppresses the fact. Propagates an enormous lie about the nature of men and women.

For, apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of such a creature. Among other things my proof of this is, that I always instinctively select the proper remedy when my spiritual or bodily health is low; whereas the decadent, as such, invariably chooses those remedies which are bad for him. As a whole I was sound, but in certain details I was a decadent. That energy with which I sentenced myself to absolute solitude, and to a severance from all those conditions in life to which I had grown accustomed; my discipline of myself, and my refusal to allow myself to be pampered, to be tended hand and foot, and to be doctored—all this betrays the absolute certainty of my instincts respecting what at that time was most needful to me. I placed myself in my own hands, I restored myself to health: the first condition of success in such an undertaking, as every physiologist will admit, is that at bottom a man should be sound. An intrinsically morbid nature cannot become healthy. On the other hand, to an intrinsically sound nature, illness may even constitute a powerful stimulus to life, to a surplus of life. It is in this light that I now regard the long period of illness that I endured: it seemed as if I had discovered life afresh, my own self included. I tasted all good things and even trifles in a way in which it was not easy for others to taste them—out of my Will to Health and to Life I made my philosophy.... For this should be thoroughly understood; it was during those years in which my vitality reached its lowest point that I ceased from being a pessimist: the instinct of self-recovery forbade my holding to a philosophy of poverty and desperation. Now, by what signs are Nature's lucky strokes recognised among men? They are recognised by the fact that any such lucky stroke gladdens our senses; that he is carved from one integral block, which is hard, sweet, and fragrant as well. He enjoys that only which is good for him; his pleasure, his desire, ceases when the limits of that which is good for him are overstepped. He divines remedies for injuries; he knows how to turn serious accidents to his own advantage; that which does not kill him makes him stronger. He instinctively gathers his material from all he sees, hears, and experiences. He is a selective principle; he rejects much. He is always in his own company, whether his intercourse be with books, with men, or with natural scenery; he honours the things he chooses, the things he acknowledges, the things he trusts. He reacts slowly to all kinds of stimuli, with that tardiness which long caution and deliberate pride have bred in him—he tests the approaching stimulus; he would not dream of meeting it half-way. He believes neither in "ill-luck" nor "guilt"; he can digest himself and others; he knows how to forget—he is strong enough to make everything turn to his own advantage. Lo then! I am the very reverse of a decadent, for he whom I have just described is none other than myself.

It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.

Can you picture the fly alighting on the plant as the teenager sampling their first shandy? Can you visualize the lager lout just about to throw up as the bloated fly before it tries to take off? And when the alcoholic can no longer close his eyes to the fact that his life is being dominated and ruined by drink, doesn’t he try to cut down and control his intake, rather like someone who is grossly overweight attempts to cut down on food. But does dieting make food appear less precious? Quite the contrary. The more you cut down, the more hungry you get, the hungrier you get the more deprived you feel, the more deprived you feel the more precious each morsel becomes. Exactly the same happens when you try to cut down on your drinking. At the times when you won’t allow yourself to drink, you feel miserable because you can’t drink, and when you do allow yourself to drink, you still feel miserable because you can’t drink enough. Aren’t the struggles of the fly similar to the abortive struggles of the alcoholic who is trying to control his intake? Drinking hasn’t become less precious to him. On the contrary, it now dominates his whole life. The more both the fly and the alcoholic struggle to escape, the more imprisoned they become. Are the semi-digested insects not comparable to the down-and-out meths drinkers of skid row, whose entire existence is now confined to begging or stealing the next fix, and trying to find somewhere warm to sleep off the effects? Does the fact that the fly can see the partially digested bodies prevent it from joining them? Who knows?

What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I’ll feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I’m not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpark, and family traditions like my mother’s beef brisket at Passover. These ritual meals link us to our history along multiple lines—family, religion, landscape, nation, and, if you want to go back much further, biology. For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive (now that we can get our B-12 from fermented foods or supplements), we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth. This fact of evolutionary history is reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare. Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. This isn’t to say we can’t or shouldn’t transcend our inheritance, only that it is our inheritance; whatever else may be gained by giving up meat, this much at least is lost. The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten—of predation—but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity—of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

It is a plain matter of biological fact that, as Grisez says, reproduction is a single function, yet it is carried out not by an individual male or female human being, but by a male and female as a mated pair. 50 So, in respect of reproduction, albeit not in respect of other activities (such as locomotion or digestion), the mated pair is a single organism; the partners form a single reproductive principle: they become “one flesh.” In response to Posner, Grisez proposes a thought experiment. Imagine a type of bodily, rational being that reproduces, not by mating, but by some individual performance. Imagine that for these beings, however, locomotion or digestion is performed not by individuals, but only by biologically complementary pairs that unite for this purpose. Would anybody have difficulty understanding that in respect of reproduction the organism performing the function is the individual, while in respect of locomotion or digestion the organism performing the function is the united pair? Would anybody deny that the unity effectuated for purposes of locomotion or digestion is an organic unity?

A 2005 study by Dr. Barnard and other researchers, which measured the effects of a low-fat vegan diet on body weight, found that people lost significant amounts of weight with no calorie counting. On average, the low-fat vegan diet adopters lost 13 pounds in 14 weeks. This phenomenon can be partly explained by the thermic effects of eating plant-based foods. Vegan diets are higher in complex carbohydrates which cause the body to release some calories as body heat during digestion (the thermic effect) rather than store it as fat. In fact a vegan diet includes a rich variety of foods that have a thermic effect (see list below). We sometimes get a thermic effect with animal protein, but we are also stuck with all the animal fat that comes with it. A whole foods, plant-based diet causes you to burn calories 16 percent faster after meals for about three hours. This revving up of your metabolism causes gradual and healthy weight loss. The thermic effect alone does not cause the weight loss. What it does is help decrease the number of calories that are automatically converted into fat—stopping some fat before it starts. It’s a natural process that is aided significantly by choosing a plant-based diet and hampered by a diet high in animal fats.

Gentlemen,” said Earl Lavender, with perfect complacence, “it becomes you to make a charge of madness against me. I told my friend Lord Brumm a little ago that you have no minds, and I am convinced of it. As you are possibly unaware of the fact, I may as well explain to you how you have arrived at this not altogether unenviable condition. In your youth, I judge from the contour of your heads that you thought and imagined as much as the average young man; but since the strongest convictions you ever entertained were that money makes the mare to go, and that cakes and ale are good, you gradually ceased to think until your minds stopped working altogether, and as your brains grew atrophied your livers increased in power. Now, I suppose, you have digestive apparatuses unmatched in proficiency, while your heads, instead of blossoming like an evergreen in a bowpot, have changed into cinerary urns, containing the ashes of your thought and fancy, and rudely carved with half-intelligible hieroglyphics concerning religion and morality, and copy-book mottoes for the conduct of life. You are perfect types; I recognize that, and would not have you other than you are. I merely wish to let you know that I understand you thoroughly, and to give you the means when you come to die of consoling yourselves with the reflection that you were understood and pardoned by at least one fellow-creature. Most men I have been told die miserable because they think everybody has misunderstood them. Rejoice, therefore, for that lot cannot now be yours.

I wasn’t going to hurt him,” she told the man, earning a huff of clear disbelief from Mr. Victor in the process. “You broke my nose,” Mr. Victor snapped. “Which really does beg the question of why you’ve been allowed in the same room with me.” He narrowed an eye on her that was rapidly turning an interesting shade of black. “It is never permissible for a lady to punch a gentleman, not proper in the least. Although . . . given that you seem to be acquainted with Miss Plum as well, you’re obviously not a proper sort of lady.” “I’ve never claimed to be a proper lady, Mr. Victor. In fact, I’m just the nanny.” “You are a proper lady,” Everett said as he reached up and pulled the rag off his face, sporting not one but two black eyes. “And you’re not just the nanny.” Warmth began traveling up Millie’s neck to settle on her face, but before she could so much as get a word of appreciation out of her mouth, Mr. Victor let out another grunt. “Do not tell me, Mr. Mulberry, that this woman, the one who recently broke my nose, has been hired to watch Fred’s children? Surely you must realize that putting those precious scamps in the direct vicinity of a woman prone to violence is hardly in their best interest.” He mopped at his nose again. “She hit me in a manner that suggests she’s spends quite a bit of time pummeling people. That clearly proves she’s unstable—and proves you’re not fit to see to the children’s basic needs, since you hired her as a nanny in the first place.” “I’ve hardly spent my life pummeling people, sir,” Millie said before Everett could reply. “Well, there was this one boy at the orphanage, Freddy Franklin, but . . . I digest from the topic at hand.” “Digress,” Everett said right before he laughed. “I hate to point this out, Millie, but it might benefit you to go back through all the D words, since they seem to be giving you trouble today.” Millie’s lips twitched. “And that explains why I was so dismayed—another D word that I know means upset—about not having my sensible clothing available. My aprons come in remarkably handy for holding my dictionaries.” Additional warmth spread over her when Everett smiled. Hoping

The gut, in fact, has even more neurons than the brain! The next time you find yourself struggling with mood issues, consider first the quality of your gastrointestinal health and digestion. The brain and gut are inextricably linked.

Leftist literature became available in Burma around 1931. Books brought back by individuals who had been abroad and those circulated by J. S. Furnivall’s Burma Book Club formed the core of socialist and Marxist works introduced into the country. These were eagerly consumed by young Burmese whose eyes had been opened to the exciting political currents which were sweeping across the world. As they were also searching eagerly, perhaps unconsciously, for radical ideas, there was a tendency to swallow much of the whole socialist theory without digesting it properly. The spread of leftist sympathies among the younger Burmese nationalists has often been explained in economic and political terms. In fact, Burmese society with its Buddhist values, lack of extreme poverty and freedom from class exploitation was not a natural candidate for Marxist socialist ideology. It was the view that socialism was opposed to imperialism which made the former attractive to young nationalists.

resistant fiber Resistant fiber is the new kid on the block. It is a unique type of starch that is digested, but only many hours later and only by the good bacteria. Also known as resistant starch, this fiber contains calories, but the majority of its calories are not usable and therefore cannot cause weight gain. Resistant fiber is remarkable since it creates little or no insulin response, unlike any other carbohydrate. In fact, it can even produce less of an insulin response than many non-carbohydrate foods like meat, poultry, and eggs. For this reason, many of the low-carb breakfasts on the Adrenal Reset Diet include foods high in resistant fiber. BEST SOURCES: Boiled potatoes, cannellini beans, navy beans, great northern beans, and unripe bananas.

The fact is, we do not learn how to think. Schools impart to us, ever more zealously, knowledge of which we can use only the smallest part; it burdens our memory, and only tempers our intelligence with a commonplace logic, which one would think ought to equip us for the struggle of life. This hot-house culture does not form our judgment; on the contrary, it troubles it by giving us ready-made opinions to digest, without teaching us to appreciate their accuracy.

In The Inhuman... Lyotard, like Weber, reminds us of the distinction between technological development and 'human' progress. He argues, in particular, that the development of technology, or 'techno-science', is driven by the quest for maximum efficiency and performance, and as such leads to the emergence of new 'inhuman' (technological) forms of control rather than to the emancipation of 'humanity'. Lyotard reasserts the instrumental nature of the modern system, arguing that 'All technology ... is an artefact allowing its users to stock more information, to improve their competence and optimize their performances'. In this view, techno-science may be seen to stand against all instances of the unknown, including the aporia of the future anterior, and thus to have little respect for forms which are different or other to itself. This is compounded by the fact that technological development is intimately connected to the drive for profit. Lyotard proposes that this directs the production of knowledge and conditions the nature of knowledge itself, for information, itself a commodity, is increasingly produced in differentiated, digestible forms ('bits') for ease of mass exchange, transmission and consumption, and with the aim of enabling the optimal performance of the global system.

These categories of treatment in fact overlap considerably and, in addition, there is always the primary task of doing all possible to restore a normal balance and efficiency in the body’s functions as a whole. To repeat a well known expression, we do not treat the dis-ease, we treat the person. Although it often seems as though we were primarily interested in what the new patient should eat and drink, in fact we are concerned with all aspects of the individual’s vital existence. As the Nature Cure symbol expresses it, the physical, the mental and the ethical must all be brought into a harmonious, working unity. ‘It is pointless to give instruction only about dietetics to a person whose illness has been primarily caused by emotional stress. To give simple instances: if the patient has a deep conviction that he is failing to make a fair contribution to society, he may be unable to digest and absorb foods that should normally be adequate. If he feels that society is not giving him proper appreciation he may find it impossible to be satisfied with normal feeding, and be plagued by cravings for all manner of things - even those that he consciously recognises as destructive.

Magistrates often condemn criminals to be kept in prison or in chains. They ought not to do this, for such punishments are forbidden: prisons are for restraining people, not for punishing them (Justinian’s Digest 48.19.8.9).

Grassland ecosystems greatly expanded about 25–30 mya.9 That rumination is a particularly successful way to deal with cellulose is evidenced by the fact that bovids and other ruminants largely replaced other large mammalian plant eaters that employed different digestive methods—such as horses, titanotheres, rhinos, and tapirs—at about this time.10

I can’t believe this,” Kalinske said, digesting the fact that Sega and Sony had abandoned the plans

footballers who come from a poor family, play good football, get rich and go off the rails. Put yourself in their position. Just try to digest it. In fact, hardly any European clubs even look at that kind of issue. Because the worlds are too far apart. The board, the directors and the managers who should be keeping an eye on things like that don’t understand the culture of players from that sort of background. They just don’t have the life experience to be able to imagine themselves in that situation.

There was just something about her that I found intriguing, even compelling. It was not that she was a famous actress—I’d had no idea who she was, had to be told that she was, in fact, a star. Celebrity had never interested me before, and I was quite sure it didn’t now. And I was certainly far too set in my wicked ways to be interested in any kind of dalliance that was merely sexual. When Dexter has a fling, his partner’s afterglow lasts forever. And yet there was Jackie, crowding the screen in my private internal television, tossing her mane of perfect hair and smiling just for me with a gleam of intelligent amusement in her eyes, and for some maddening reason I liked it and I wanted to— Wanted to what? Touch her, kiss her, whisper sweet nothings in her perfect shell-like ear? It was absurd, a cartoon picture, Dexter in Lust. Such things did not happen to our Dreadful Dark Scout. I was beyond the reach of mere mortal desire. I did not feel it, couldn’t feel it; I never had, didn’t want to—and whatever the thought of Jackie Forrest might be doing to me, I never would. This was no more than a Method-actor moment, a fleeting identification with the killer, a confusion of roles, almost certainly brought on because the process of digesting pork had taken all the blood away from my brain.

DECISIONS Useful: Graphical Presentation Monitor Key Indicators Effective Measurements Wisdom Knowledge The Goal: Strategic Thinking Predictive Value Experience and Judgment Automated Exception Notification Information Structured: Voluminous Grouped and Summarized Relationships Not Always Evident Raw Data: Massive Fragmented Meaningless Data EVENTS Figure 1-01. The Pyramid of KnowledgeToyota, this begins with genchi genbutsu, or gemba, which means literally “go see it for yourself. ” Taiichi Ohno, a founding father of Lean, once said, “Data is of course important in manufacturing, but I place the greatest emphasis on facts. ” 2 A direct and intuitive understanding of a situation is far more useful than mountains of data. The raw data stored in a database adds value for decision-making only if the right information is presented in the right format, to the right people, at the right time. A tall stack of printout may contain the right data, but it’s certainly not in an accessible format. Massive weekly batch printouts do not enable timely and proactive decisions. Raw data must be summarized, structured, and presented as digestible information. Once information is combined with direct experience, then the incredible human mind can extract and develop useful knowledge. Over time, as knowledge is accumulated and combined with direct experience and judgment, wisdom develops. This evolution is described by the classic pyramid of knowledge shown in Figure 1-01. BACK TO CHICAGO So what happened in Chicago? We can speculate upon several possible perspectives for why the team and its change leader were far from a true Lean system, yet they refused any help from IT providers: 1. They feared wasteful IT systems and procedures would be foisted on them.

You will be surprised to know that the English word love comes from a Sanskrit word lobha; lobha means greed. It may have been just a coincidence that the English word love grew out of a Sanskrit word that means greed, but my feeling is that it cannot be just coincidence. There must be something more mysterious behind it, there must be some alchemical reason behind it. In fact, greed digested becomes love. It is greed, lobha, digested well, which becomes love.

Chocolate is toxic for dogs. There’s a chemical in it called theobromine that humans can digest, but dogs can’t. In fact, too much could kill him.