Disconnect From Everything Quotes

Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.

It is growing up different. It is extreme hypersensitivity. It is a bottomless pit of feeling you're failing, but three days later, you feel you can do anything, only to end the week where you began. It is not learning from your mistakes. It is distrusting people because you have been hurt enough. It is moments of knowing your pain is self inflicted, followed by blaming the world. It is wanting to listen, but you just can’t anymore because your life has been to full of people that have judged you. It is fighting to be right; so for once in your life someone will respect and hear you for a change. It is a tiring life of endless games with people, in order to seek stimulus. It is a hyper focus, so intense about what bothers you, that you can’t pay attention to anything else, for very long. It is a never-ending routine of forgetting things. It is a boredom and lack of contentment that keeps you running into the arms of anyone that has enough patience to stick around. It wears you out. It wears everyone out. It makes you question God’s plan. You misinterpret everything, and you allow your creative mind to fill the gaps with the same old chains that bind you. It narrows your vision of who you let into your life. It is speaking and acting without thinking. It is disconnecting from the ones you love because your mind has taken you back to what you can’t let go of. It is risk taking, thrill seeking and moodiness that never ends. You hang your hope on “signs” and abandon reason for remedy. It is devotion to the gifts and talents you have been given, that provide temporary relief. It is the latching onto the acceptance of others---like a scared child abandoned on a sidewalk. It is a drive that has no end, and without “focus” it takes you nowhere. It is the deepest anger when someone you love hurts you, and the greatest love when they don't. It is beauty when it has purpose. It is agony when it doesn’t. It is called Attention Deficit Disorder.

All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings of a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was - my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self - disconnected from me in that second - snip, snip, snip - and floated up into space.

The hardest part of letting go is the "uncertainty"--when you are afraid that the moment you let go of someone you will hate yourself when you find out how close you were to winning their affection. Every time you give yourself hope you steal away a part of your time, happiness and future. However, once in a while you wake up to this realization and you have to hold on tightly to this truth because your heart will tear away the foundation of your logic, by making excuses for why this person doesn't try as much as you. The truth is this: Real love is simple. We are the ones that make it complicated. A part of disconnecting is recognizing the difference between being desired and being valued. When someone loves you they will never keep you waiting, give their attention and affection away to others, allow you to continue hurting, or ignore what you have gone through for them. On the other hand, a person that desires you can't see your pain, only what they can get from you with minimal effort in return. They let you risk everything, while they guard their heart and reap the benefits of your feelings. We make so many excuses for the people we fall in love with and they make up even more to remain one foot in the door. However, the truth is God didn't create you to be treated as an option or to be disrespected repeatedly. He wants you to close the door. If someone loves you and wants to be in your life no obstacle will keep them from you. Remember, you are royalty, not a beggar.

No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people. And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth. The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.

Being connected to everything has disconnected us from ourselves and the preciousness of this present moment.

My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally... this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phoning. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.

It would be better to disconnect from everything, to float free from my body, to be nothing in an endless night of nothing.

Doing things for the outcome rather than for the joy of the process disconnects you from yourself. You start chasing. You get desperate. You forget your “why.” But most importantly, you don’t allow yourself to be happy until you get what you want. And if that never comes, you never practice being happy.

We are taught to believe that the ‘alienation’ that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it’s the circuitry within our souls and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I’d be more worried if you didn’t.

Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?

Life is Beautiful? Beyond all the vicissitudes that are presented to us on this short path within this wild planet, we can say that life is beautiful. No one can ever deny that experiencing the whirlwind of emotions inside this body is a marvel, we grow with these life experiences, we strengthen ourselves and stimulate our feelings every day, in this race where the goal is imminent death sometimes we are winners and many other times we lose and the darkness surprises us and our heart is disconnected from this reality halfway and connects us to the server of the matrix once more, debugging and updating our database, erasing all those experiences within this caracara of flesh and blood, waiting to return to earth again. "Life is beautiful gentlemen" is cruel and has unfair behavior about people who looked like a bundle of light and left this platform for no apparent reason, but its nature is not similar to our consciousness and feelings, she has a script for each of us because it was programmed that way, the architects of the game of life they know perfectly well that you must experiment with all the feelings, all the emotions and evolve to go to the next levels. You can't take a quantum leap and get through the game on your own. inventing a heaven and a hell in order to transcend, that comes from our fears of our imagination not knowing what life has in store for us after life is a dilemma "rather said" the best kept secret of those who control us day by day. We are born, we grow up, we are indoctrinated in the classrooms and in the jobs, we pay our taxes, we reproduce, we enjoy the material goods that it offers us the system the marketing of disinformation, Then we get old, get sick and die. I don't like this story! It looks like a parody of Noam Chomsky, Let's go back to the beautiful description of beautiful life, it sounds better! Let's find meaning in all the nonsense that life offers us, 'Cause one way or another we're doomed to imagine that everything will be fine until the end of matter. It is almost always like that. Sometimes life becomes a real nightmare. A heartbreaking horror that we find impossible to overcome. As we grow up, we learn to know the dark side of life. The terrors that lurk in the shadows, the dangers lurking around every corner. We realize that reality is much harsher and ruthless than we ever imagined. And in those moments, when life becomes a real hell, we can do nothing but cling to our own existence, summon all our might and fight with all our might so as not to be dragged into the abyss. But sometimes, even fighting with all our might is not enough. Sometimes fate is cruel and takes away everything we care about, leaving us with nothing but pain and hopelessness. And in that moment, when all seems lost, we realize the terrible truth: life is a death trap, a macabre game in which we are doomed to lose. And so, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, while the shadows envelop us and terror paralyzes us, we remember the words that once seemed to us so hopeful: life is beautiful. A cruel and heartless lie, that leads us directly to the tragic end that death always awaits us.

To become enlightened is not just to slip into some disconnected euphoria, an oceanic feeling of mystic oneness apart from ordinary reality. It is not even to come up with a solution, a sort of formula to control reality. Rather, it is an experience of release from all compulsions and sufferings, combined with a precise awareness of any relevent subject of knowledge. Having attained enlightenment one knows everything that matters, and the precise nature of all that is.

Tone, inflection, timing, volume, pacing—everything you do with your voice communicates something and has the potential to help you connect to or disconnect from others when you speak.

Our disconnection, trauma, lack of resources, lack of compassion, fear, greed, and ego are the sources of our contributions to human suffering, not our bodies. We can accept humans and their bodies without understanding “why” they love, think, move, or look the way they do. Contrary to common opinion, freeing ourselves from the need to understand everything can bring about a tremendous amount of peace.

When we invest ourselves in worrying about what other people think, we lose touch with what we stand for. By seeking others' approval and trying to be perfect at everything we do, we disconnect from our internal compass.

It seemed natural; natural to the moment’s peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk.

I just want to switch myself off. Disconnect from everything.

Mourning with no end, and a sense that I had lost everything - my child, my mother's love and protection, my father's love and protection, the life I had once imagined for myself - hollowed me out. I floated every day alone and disconnected, and could not find comfort or release. I understood clearly that my history had harmed me, had cut me off from the normal connections between people. Every day for five years I had been afraid of this disconnection, feeling the possibility of perfect detachment within my reach, like a river running alongside, inviting me to step into its current.

I feel disconnected from the people who I know have not experienced the exposed nerves of a close loved one yanked by pliers from one's jaws. I am different from them now. They can’t know the festering wound staining my teeth red, can't know the taste of salt and iron in everything I eat.

Oblivion is purgatorial and grey. He is passably conscious, not asleep but not quite awake either, as if disconnected from everything, unable to move or think or receive input, able to exist.

Everything has the quality of a dream when you choose to disconnect yourself from daily interaction with other people, and so, like a dream, you come to question the validity of what you see and hear.

All the lines that help me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was--my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self--disconnected from me in that second--snip, snip, snip--and floated up into space.

I feel the overwhelming ache from surviving day after day in this miserable system that looks like a miserable world. To live is to feel everything, and to feel everything is to ask for an unbearable existence.

I saw an article a couple days ago, titled: 'new scientific research tells us how long sex should last' - I laughed and then moved on with my day, but it's been on my mind. So, while I am extremely grateful for modern conveniences, technology and the abundance of information that is readily available to me via the web, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe we've taken it all too far. There is a gadget for every job, so much technology that we crowd out all stillness, and information and articles about everything from how to properly brush your teeth to how to raise your kids (btw, all contradicting themselves). But how much better off are we really? We may know how long sex should last and how to brush our teeth, but are we any less confused about what the fuck we are doing on this plane and what our purpose here is? No. I don't think. Actually, I'd venture to say that we are more lost than ever before. We are lazy, mind fucked and completely disconnected from source energy. I think maybe we should spend less time worrying about stupid shit like how long you should really be having sex and more time growing our own food, raising our own kids and repairing the Earth plane that we are destroying with all our modern conveniences, technology and useless information.

Svetlana said that I thought of myself as a robot who could act only negatively. She said I had cynical ideas about language. “You think language is an end in itself. You don’t believe it stands for anything. No, it’s not that you don’t believe—it’s that you don’t care. For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system.” “But it is a self-sufficient system.” “Do you see what you’re saying? This is how you get yourself involved with the devil incarnate. Ivan sensed this attitude in you. He’s cynical in the same way you are only more so, because of math. It’s like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there’s this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you’re the elite who speaks it—you can control everything. “Ivan wanted to try an experiment, a game. It would never have worked with someone different, on someone like me. But you, you’re so disconnected from truth, you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language. Naturally, it made him want to see how far he could go. You went further and further—and then something went wrong. It couldn’t continue in the same way. It had to develop into something else—into sex, or something else. But for some reason, it didn’t. The experiment didn’t work. But by now you’re so, so far from all the landmarks. You’re just drifting in space.

The United States is a conceited nation with shallow roots, and what happened before living memory doesn't seem to interest most people I know at home. We like living in our houses with our new furniture, on our new streets in new neighborhoods. Everything is disposable and everything is replaceable. Personal family history can feel simply irrelevant in our new world, beyond the simplest national identifications, and even those who can get sort of vague for people. I remember a boy in high school who told the history teacher he was 'half Italian, half Polish, half English, half German, and one-quarter Swedish.' I think one of the reasons so many of us are disconnected from our histories is because none of it happened where we live in the present; the past, for so many, is a faraway place across an ocean.

The same thoughts produce the same feelings, which produce the same behavior, which leads to the same experiences. And I’ll take this one step further. Having the same experiences cements the same false beliefs. Basically, we live in a loop—a pattern that keeps us stuck and disconnected, not only from ourselves but also from the world.

Thoughts… Be aware of what you’re thinking about. Make sure that you’re not allowing your mind to be preoccupied with a person or a problem so much so that it’s all you think about, talk about, dream about or feel about. If you’re connecting your problems and issues to everything that other people are saying and doing, you’re obsessing and you are disconnected from God.

Creativity’s most important effect is to return you to your true self. Everything you need is already inside and within reach of you. Skill and magic must come together in order to create meaningfully. All people are creative and must express this creativity in order to feel fulfilled. Fear is the most formidable opponent to your creativity. Our deepest fear is disconnection. The threat of disconnection stops us from sharing, from taking risks, from learning, from creating, from loving and from living. Without connection nothing lives. Connection restores us to life. True connection is, in a word, love. You can live a connected, engaged life, whatever your current and ever-changing circumstances. When we share from the heart our work becomes timeless and universal.

Humans want to merge into the data flow because when you are part of the data flow you are part of something much bigger than yourself. Traditional religions told you that your every word and action was part of some great cosmic plan, and that God watched you every minute and cared about all your thoughts and feelings. Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?

What if—is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?” “I’m not sure I see your point.” “Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?

There were more than fifty people camped on the Col that night, huddled in shelters pitched side by side, yet an odd feeling of isolation hung in the air. The roar of the wind made it impossible to communicate from one tent to the next. In this godforsaken place, I felt disconnected from the climbers around me—emotionally, spiritually, physically—to a degree I hadn’t experienced on any previous expedition. We were a team in name only, I’d sadly come to realize. Although in a few hours we would leave camp as a group, we would ascend as individuals, linked to one another by neither rope nor any deep sense of loyalty. Each client was in it for himself or herself, pretty much. And I was no different: I sincerely hoped Doug got to the top, for instance, yet I would do everything in my power to keep pushing on if he turned around. In

Aside from what I feel to be the intrinsic interest of questions that are so fundamental and deep, I would, in this connection, call attention to the general problem of fragmentation of human consciousness, which is discussed in chapter 1. It is proposed there that the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.), which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and ‘broken up’ into yet smaller constituent parts. Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent. When man thinks of himself in this way, he will inevitably tend to defend the needs of his own ‘Ego’ against those of the others; or, if he identifies with a group of people of the same kind, he will defend this group in a similar way. He cannot seriously think of mankind as the basic reality, whose claims come first. Even if he does try to consider the needs of mankind he tends to regard humanity as separate from nature, and so on. What I am proposing here is that man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

There is one note on the page that seems disconnected from everything else. It is a recipe for making blond-brown hair dye: “To make hair tawny, take nuts and boil them in lye and immerse the comb in it, then comb the hair and let it dry in the sun.” This may have been a notation in preparation for a court pageant. But it is more likely, I think, that the recipe is a rare intimate jotting. Leonardo was deep into his thirties by now. Perhaps he was resisting going gray.

Isn't she doing this too? Connecting and disconnecting. Facing grief then turning from it. One minute she is caught up in minutiae. Will her feet get sore standing in heels at the church? Have they made enough food? Will the kitten get scared by dozens of strangers in the house? Should she shut him in a room upstairs? The next moment she is weeping uncontrollably, taken over by pain so profound she can barely move. Then there was the salad bowl incident; her own fury scared her. But maybe these are different ways of dealing with events for all of them. Molly and Luke are infantile echos of her, their emotions paired down, their reactions simpler but similar. For if they have difficulty taking in what has happened, then so too does she. Why is she dressing up, for instance? Why can't she wear clothes to reflect the fact that she is at her lowest end? A tracksuit, a jumper full of holes, dirty jeans? Why can't she leave her hair a mess, her face unmade up? The crazed and grieving Karen doesn't care about her appearance. Yet she must go through with this charade, polish herself and her children to perfection. She, in particular, must hold it together. Oh, she can cry, yes, that's allowed. People expect that. They will sympathize. But what about screaming, howling, and hurling plates like she did yesterday? She imagines the shocked faces as she shouts and swears and smashes everything. But she is so angry, surely others must feel the same. Maybe a plate throwing ceremony would be a more fitting ritual than church, then everyone could have a go...smashing crockery up against the back garden wall.

The quality of our life on planet earth depends on the choices we make every day. Choices about how we spend our time, how we live our lives, and most important, how we treat ourselves and others. I am sad to see how people seem to be more bitter, divided, and overwhelmed than ever these days. We are as a global community, increasingly disconnected from ourselves and other people. The first step toward fixing what ills us, is to embrace feeling better. Habits are a means to this end. They teach us the skills of change and they propel us towards our dreams, and they add more shine to the world.  By embracing feelings of success and adding more goodness to you day-to-day life, you are making the world brighter not only for yourself, but also for others. You are vanquishing shame and guilt and you are freeing yourself and others who have endured a lifetime of self trash talk. The most profound transformations I've shared with you in this book are not about discreet habits being formed, they are about essential shifts in experience, from suffering to less suffering, from fear to hope, from being overwhelmed to feeling empowered.

This combination of rumination and nostalgia emerged from our research as destructive and disconnecting. If you're wondering how dangerous the combination can be, think back to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, or examine the strategy used by every authoritarian leader in history: Exploit fears by photoshopping a picture of yesteryear to be everything people wanted it to be (but never was), seduce people into believing that a make-believe past could exist again, and give them someone to blame for ruining the picture and/or not being able to restore the mythical utopia.

Context is everything in both narrative and real life, and while the accusation is never that these creators deliberately set out to discriminate against gay and female characters, the unavoidable implication is that they should have known better than to add to the sum total of those stories which, en masse, do exactly that. And if the listmakers can identify the trend so thoroughly – if, despite all the individual qualifications, protests and contextualisations of the authors, these problems can still be said to exist – then the onus, however disconnected from the work of any one individual, nonetheless falls to those individuals, in their role as cultural creators, to acknowledge the problem; to do better next time; perhaps even to apologise. This last is a particular sticking point. By and large, human beings tend not to volunteer apologies for things they perceive to be the fault of other people, for the simple reason that apology connotes guilt, and how can we feel guilty – or rather, why should we – if we’re not the ones at fault? But while we might argue over who broke a vase, the vase itself is still broken, and will remain so, its shards ground into the carpet, until someone decides to clean it up. Blog Post: Love Team Freezer

My shaking jerked to a stop; heat flooded through me, stronger than before, but it was a new kind of heat—not a burning. It was a glowing. Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny porcelain face of the half-vampire, half-human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was—my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self—disconnected from me in that second—snip, snip, snip—and floated up into space.

As I talked, I found that no matter how distressing the details I related, I could feel nothing. I was disconnected from my emotions, like a hand severed from a wrist. I talked about painful memories and suicidal impulses—but couldn’t feel them. I would, however, occasionally look up at Ruth’s face. To my surprise, tears would be collecting in her eyes as she listened. This may seem hard to grasp, but those tears were not hers. They were mine. At the time I didn’t understand. But that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist; and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and she feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him. As Ruth fed mine back to me.

Humans want to merge into the data flow because when you are part of the data flow you are part of something much bigger than yourself. Traditional religions assured you that your every word and action was part of some great cosmic plan, and that God watched you every minute and cared about all your thoughts and feelings. Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?

Everything we do and say will either underline or undermine our discipleship process. As long as there is one unsaved person on my campus or in my city, then my church is not big enough. One of the underlying principles of our discipleship strategy is that every believer can and should make disciples. When a discipleship process fails, many times the fatal flaw is that the definition of discipleship is either unclear, unbiblical, or not commonly shared by the leadership team. Write down what you love to do most, and then go do it with unbelievers. Whatever you love to do, turn it into an outreach. You have to formulate a system that is appropriate for your cultural setting. Writing your own program for making disciples takes time, prayer, and some trial and error—just as it did with us. Learn and incorporate ideas from other churches around the world, but only after modification to make sure the strategies make sense in our culture and community. Culture is changing so quickly that staying relevant requires our constant attention. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by focusing on the mechanics of our own efforts rather than our culture, we will become irrelevant almost overnight. The easiest and most common way to fail at discipleship is to import a model or copy a method that worked somewhere else without first understanding the values that create a healthy discipleship culture. Principles and process are much more important than material, models, and methods. The church is an organization that exists for its nonmembers. Christianity does not promise a storm-free life. However, if we build our lives on biblical foundations, the storms of life will not destroy us. We cannot have lives that are storm-free, but we can become storm-proof. Just as we have to figure out the most effective way to engage our community for Christ, we also have to figure out the most effective way to establish spiritual foundations in each unique context. There is really only one biblical foundation we can build our lives on, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Pastors, teachers, and church staff believe their primary role is to serve as mentors. Their task is to equip every believer for the work of the ministry. It is not to do all the ministry, but to equip all the people to do it. Their top priority is to equip disciples to do ministry and to make disciples. Do you spend more time ministering to people or preparing people to minister? No matter what your church responsibilities are, you can prepare others for the same ministry. Insecurity in leadership is a deadly thing that will destroy any organization. It drives pastors and presidents to defensive positions, protecting their authority or exercising it simply to show who is the boss. Disciple-making is a process that systematically moves people toward Christ and spiritual maturity; it is not a bunch of randomly disconnected church activities. In the context of church leadership, one of the greatest and most important applications of faith is to trust the Holy Spirit to work in and through those you are leading. Without confidence that the Holy Spirit is in control, there is no empowering, no shared leadership, and, as a consequence, no multiplication.

Conditional love and acceptance means that we are willing to pull away from our connection under certain circumstances. The minute we happen to scare the other person or they scare us; we will be tempted to withhold our love and disconnect. And because disconnection only produces more fear and anxiety, we will widen our distance at an alarming rate. This threat effectively prevents two people from feeling free to be themselves because they instinctively know the connection won’t be strong enough to handle it. In contrast, when we commit to unconditional love and acceptance, we protect each other’s freedom. Everything that we offer to the relationship comes freely from our hearts, not under coercion. Yes, committing to pursue and protect my connection with you means that I will be thinking about how my decisions will affect you while making

In the very beginning of life, you were acquainted with the exquisite natural resources of your breath, body, and inner life. You breathed deeply into your belly. You loved your body. You were in touch with the wisdom within your own life. Over time, however, the girl-child becomes disconnected from the “home” within her. Caught in the swirls of others, twisted in the shapes of others, depleted by the demands of others, she becomes outer-directed and loses touch with herself. Her breath becomes shallow. She ignores her body. She looks to saviors outside of herself for salvation and validation, forgetting the rich resources within her. In the fullness of time, we become dizzy from swirling; our lives ache from being twisted out of shape; and our spirits become depleted from servicing others with our energy and attention. Weary, we reach out to a counselor, spiritual community, or self-help group. We are offered information, insight, and tools of support. We are inspired by the experience, strength, and hope of others who are turning toward their own lives with vulnerability, courage, and truth. Insight, information, and camaraderie point us in the right direction, but the journey begins as we turn toward our own lives and look within to re-connect to our natural resources: breath, woman-body, and inner life. Home is always waiting. It is as near as a conscious breath, conscious contact with your woman-body, and a descent into the abundant resources of your inner life. The meaning, recovery, and transformation you seek ‘out there’ is found within your own heart, mind, body, and life. It is accessed in the present moment and released into your experience with each mindful breath. Return home often—you have everything you need there.

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

My shaking jerked to a stop; heat flooded through me, stronger than before, but it was a new kind of heat—not a burning. It was a glowing. Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny porcelain face of the half-vampire, half-human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was—my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self—disconnected from me in that second—snip, snip, snip—and floated up into space. I was not left drifting. A new string held me where I was. Not one string, but a million. Not strings, but steel cables. A million steel cables all tying me to one thing—to the very center of the universe. I could see that now—how the universe swirled around this one point. I’d never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain.

Girlfriend!" Blue repeated, and he felt a disconnected thrill to hear her say the word. "How about friend-friend?" "I thought we were friend-friends." "Are we? Friends talk. You go walking to the Pentagon and I find out from Gansey! Your dad's a jerk and I find out from Gansey! Noah knows everything. Ronan knows everything." "They don't know everything. They know what they were there for. Gansey knows because he was there." "Yeah, and why wasn't I?" "Why would you be?" "Because you'd invited me," Blue said. The world tilted. He blinked; it straightened. "But there wasn't any reason for you to be there." "Right, sure. Because there's no girls in politics! I have no interest. Voting? What? I forgot my apron. I think I ought to be in the kitchen right now, actually. My rolling pin -" "I didn't know that you -" "That's my point! Did it even occur to you?" It had not. "You wouldn't have gone someplace without Gansey, though," Blue snapped. "You two make a grand couple! Kiss him!" Adam cocked his head witheringly. "Well, I don't want to be just someone to kiss. I want to be a real friend, too. Not just someone who's fun to have around because - because I have breasts!

Quite simple,” said the chairman, “you haven’t really come into contact with our authorities. All those contacts are merely apparent, but in your case, because of your ignorance of the situation here, you think they’re real. As for the telephone: look, in my own house, though I certainly deal often with the authorities, there’s no telephone. At inns and in places like that it may serve a useful purpose, along the lines, say, of an automated phonograph, but that’s all. Have you ever telephoned here, you have? Well then, perhaps you can understand me. At the Castle the telephone seems to work extremely well; I’ve been told the telephones up there are in constant use, which of course greatly speeds up the work. Here on our local telephones we hear that constant telephoning as a murmuring and singing, you must have heard it too. Well, this murmuring and singing is the only true and reliable thing that the local telephones convey to us, everything else is deceptive. There is no separate telephone connection to the Castle and no switchboard to forward our calls; when anyone here calls the Castle, all the telephones in the lowest-level departments ring, or all would ring if the ringing mechanism on nearly all of them were not, and I know this for certain, disconnected. Now and then, though, an overtired official needs some diversion—especially late in the evening or at night—and turns on the ringing mechanism, then we get an answer, though an answer that’s no more than a joke. That’s certainly quite understandable. For who can claim to have the right, simply because of some petty personal concerns, to ring during the most important work, conducted, as always, at a furious pace? Nor can I understand how even a stranger can believe that if he calls Sordini, for instance, it really is Sordini who answers. Quite the contrary, it’s probably a lowly filing clerk from an entirely different department. But it can happen, if only at the most auspicious moment, that someone telephones the lowly filing clerk and Sordini himself answers. Then of course it's best to run from the telephone before hearing a sound.

Anything to construct a new safe place where the melancholic freeze can’t find you. But all this is done to the detriment of your mind which is so tired from spinning the plates of so many different weights and sizes that it threatens collapse like a universe out of momentum, so you postpone decay by putting the inarguable tenet that it really truly did happen far in the back of your heart where it rots and takes up room that love could be occupying knowing one day it will just be all hard and black like an old rose, and because it is full of such incomprehensible truths, you believe, but will never say, that one day soon it will not serve you in the ways it was meant to serve you. It will pump blood and it will skip occasionally but that doesn’t even matter since it will not love another person well, no matter how hard you beg it to love another person well, and like a car that won’t start, it sits there hopelessly gasping and you know that it is your fault that it can’t be moved, so you drink even more because awareness of a lost way is the worst thing a creature on this earth can possibly have and when you lose sight of beauty you gain ownership of all the knowledge of everything evil that has ever been. You wish only to drown deeper because the acute agony felt in every nerve as you sink into your bottle is a welcomed distraction from the certainty of the pain your lust has howled into the garden. You stand alone in hell looking only into the dead eyes of your grim past. You are so sad and feel so disconnected from joy and love itself that when someone—anyone at all—reaches out to you in the mist that holds you back from the goodness of life like an unbreachable ravine you will become so thankful for her touch that reminds you of the girl you were sent to protect that you will kiss her lips and make yourself believe that interruption from grief might be what love is now but it is not, it is just another cruel trick hell plays on its slaves. It was only more wretchedness, because what even an absent god knows is that love is unmistakable. Love is unmistakable and nobody loves you like the one who waits.

Jesus. Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, Phoenix, L.A., and Seattle, plus two small towns she'd never heard of in the Gulf Coast region. The unit was literally scattered across the map, manpower and resources spread thinner than she'd ever known them to be. And every team was involved in high-risk operations ranging from murder to possible terrorist threats-the latter being investigations the unit had only recently begun to be called into as consultants. As far as Riley could tell, she was the only agent operating without a team, partner, or any kind of backup. But then, she was also the only one who had set off on a very unofficial investigation of a few oddities-not murder or any other major crime. Then. Now the situation was definitely high-risk. And being on her own here now was both a very bad idea, and seemingly unavoidable. Unless she bailed. Returned to Quantico. Nobody would blame her for that, not under the circumstances. Hell, when-if-she told Bishop about this latest wrinkle, he'd undoubtedly recall her without even allowing her time to pack. Riley realized she was fingering the burn at the base of her skull. She forced herself to stop, swore under her breath, and disconnected from the SCU's database. She couldn't bail. Couldn't leave. She had to know. Had to figure out what was going on. "Let's pretend," she whispered. She could do that. It's what she did best, after all. Pretend. Pretend everything was normal. Pretend there was nothing wrong with her. Pretend she wasn't terrified.

Some people manage to perfect the disappearing act well into adulthood. I went out with a girl once, years ago, who would disappear whenever there was conflict. Anytime there was tension she’d just go missing, and when I’d run into her again, or when I’d go over to her house to see what was going on, she’d be all chipper and act like everything was fine. Finally, one night when she was able to be vulnerable, she explained whenever she felt like she’d messed up she could close off that part of her mind and feel an inner peace that was completely disconnected from reality. She drove everybody else crazy because she couldn’t resolve conflict, yet inside the false world of her mind everything was calm.

This is probably going to sound a little weird”—he made a sound like a soft chuckle—“sorry. The accent on your voicemail reminds me of my mom’s sister. She’s from Savannah. She used to call everything bat-shit crazy. That’s what made me laugh just now.” The voice stopped, and Harper thought he’d disconnected. A

So, according to Einstein (Finney says), time is more like a river that flows along, and the only reason we sense it passing is because we’re like bein’ on a boat on that river. So you pass a tree and then it’s behind you, and unless you get off the boat or find some other method to do so, you can’t go back to that tree you saw awhile ago. But (and this is the trick) everything you’ve passed in time is still back there. Still just like it was. That tree is still back there and always will be. So just by gettin’ off the boat, you think you’ve traveled in time, when in reality you just got off and stayed in one moment of it. None of it makes sense to me, I’m just tellin’ you the way it was explained in the books. Finney went on to describe a method of time travel that he believed would actually work. First, you have to disconnect yourself from the millions of little threads of reality that grasp you and hold you in your boat (in your present time, moving forward). These threads are all realities in the time you belong in, not in the time way back before they existed. And get this (since we were talkin’ about trees): when you see a tree every day, its growth and passage through the seasons is part of it bein’ in the boat of time with you. You’re movin’ together to the future. But say you wanted to see that tree when it was still a sapling! You’d have to get off the boat of time and go visit it back where it was, and not where it is in the mobile now (“mobile now” is my phrase, not Finney’s). In a tree’s growth and maturity, it’s a thread holding you into the mobile now too. So the threads belong to a point in time (or to the mobile now), and you have to sever all those, even in your brain, so’s you can go back to another time. Next, you got to immerse yourself in the time you want to be in. Everything has to be perfect. You have to have the right dress, the right money, the right environment. It all has to be just right. Now, even if you can do these two things, and even if you can get your mind convinced completely, only a tiny percentage of the population could ever do it. If the person’s mind isn’t suggestible enough to make the leap, they won’t ever go. The tiny threads of the mobile now in their minds will hold them in the boat, so to speak. But… if someone can do these things… if someone can totally immerse themselves in the time they want to visit, and they can really believe they are sometime else… then they can do it.

Nothing has the same meaning any more once it has been confronted not with its unfinished form, but with its accomplished or even excessive form. We are no longer fighting the spectre of alienation, but that of ultra-reality. We are no longer fighting our shadows, but transparency. And every step in technological progress, every advance in information and communications, brings us closer to that inescapable transparency. All the signs have been reversed as a result of this precession of the end, this irruption of the final term at the very heart of things and their unfolding. The same acts, the same thoughts and the same hopes which brought us nearer to that finality we so longed for now take us away from it, since it is behind us. Similarly, everything changes meaning once the movement of History crosses this fatal demarcation line: the same events have different meanings depending on whether they take place in a history that is being made or in a history being unmade. It's the same with the curve of History as it is with the trajectory of reality. It is the upward movement which gives them force of reality. On the downward curve -- or because the movement is simply continuing as a result of its own inertia -- everything is caught in a different refraction space, as in a gravity alternator. In that new space, as in Alice's looking-glass space, words and effects are stood on their head, and every movement impedes every other. The balance which, by the force of the negative, governed our world has been upset. Events, discourses, subjects or objects exist only within the magnetic field of value, which only exists as a result of the tension between two poles: good or evil, true or false, masculine or feminine. It is these values, now depolarized, which are beginning to spin in the undifferentiated field of reality. And objects, too, are beginning to spin in the undifferentiated field of value. All there is now is a circular form of switching or substitution between disconnected and erratic values. Everything which stood in a fixed relation of opposition is losing its meaning by becoming indistinguishable from its opposite as a result of the upsurge of a reality which is absorbing all differences and conflating opposing terms by promoting them all unreservedly.

Will it help you do what you already want to do? Will it help you feel successful? The answers to those questions is freeing because if the change program doesn't satisfy these two requirements, it's not worth your time.  The quality of our life on planet earth depends on the choices we make every day. Choices about how we spend our time, how we live our lives, and most important, how we treat ourselves and others. I am sad to see how people seem to be more bitter, divided, and overwhelmed than ever these days. We are as a global community, increasingly disconnected from ourselves and other people. The first step toward fixing what ills us, is to embrace feeling better. Habits are a means to this end. They teach us the skills of change and they propel us towards our dreams, and they add more shine to the world.  By embracing feelings of success and adding more goodness to you day-to-day life, you are making the world brighter not only for yourself, but also for others. You are vanquishing shame and guilt and you are freeing yourself and others who have endured a lifetime of self trash talk. The most profound transformations I've shared with you in this book are not about discreet habits being formed, they are about essential shifts in experience, from suffering to less suffering, from fear to hope, from being overwhelmed to feeling empowered.

Everything we've ever assumed, the values and tastes we've acquired, the beliefs and standards we've adopted, the lens through which we've viewed the world ... so much of it manufactured by men, for men, about men. Is it any surprise then, that the global 'forces of dark and furious energy' inside women have burst forth so spectacularly, particularly when the most powerful man in the world doesn't even bother to hide his vile and instinctive contempt for women? Little wonder, too, the temptation for some women to direct their fury at all men, to lump them into one toxic bundle, rather than deconstruct the suffocating models of masculinity that have wrought this damage in the first place; models which, at their deepest level, have disconnected men from their hearts, stripped language of its full range of emotions, and prevented men from expressing their terror, grief or sadness, let alone allowed them to see women in all their humanity.

Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.

Yeah I see,” Syn said quietly. Ro’s phone rang and he picked it up, giving Syn a couple of private minutes, which were needed because his heart was beating a mile a minute. The fates can’t be that cruel. To make the only man, no forget that; the only person that Syn had been interested in in over ten years a suspect in a murder case he was overseeing. On top of everything else, the man is married. This isn’t good. Ro disconnected his call and Syn asked him, “How soon before this one arrives?” “He’s already here in room five. You coming?” Ro asked, taking Furious’ file from his hands. “I’ll watch.” Syn walked beside Ro to the interrogation rooms. Then he thought better of it, and decided he needed to be honest with his men. They worked effectively together, but most of all they had each other's backs. Ro was a good man and Syn felt he could trust him. “Ro wait.” “What’s up?” Syn blew out a breath and scratched at the hair on top of his head, which was grown out enough that it was already starting to curl. “Syn what’s going on?” Ro looked genuinely concerned, his vibrant blue eyes staring intently at him. Syn looked back and forth as uniforms brushed passed them in the hall. Ro clasped a firm grip on Syn’s shoulder and ushered him into one of the vacant offices. “Talk to me man. You’re my Sarge but I consider you a friend first. That’s the way we operate. If you have a problem, then I have a fuckin’ problem, and so do twenty-one other men. But between you and me right now, what’s up?” Syn rubbed the back of his neck and tried to ease some of the tension there. “This guy Furious.” Ro shook his head indicating he was listening. “I’m kind of, um … we uh … he’s my,” Syn stuttered not quite finding the right words. “You know him and you like him,” Ro finished for him. Syn looked Ro in the eye. “Yeah, I like him.” Syn took a deep breath. “He’s the first him that I’ve liked in a very long time.” “I see.” Ro rubbed his hand over his cheek again. Syn knew the gesture meant Ro was thinking. “Shit’s all fucked up now. I can’t date a goddamn suspect, a married goddamn suspect.” “Hey whoa. We don’t know the situation with the marriage yet. The reasons I thought he could be a suspect? They might be easily explained away.” “You’re the one said you think he’s hiding something,” Syn argued. “Yes, I did. This guy is married, right? He leaves his husband in a way that makes the man file a missing persons on him, and then Furious changes his name, and not back to his birth name. It looks like he’s hiding from him, I just need to find out why.” Ro pulled a paper from the file. “This shows him making regular deposits to an account in a bank located in Los Angeles. The account is under a different name and has over ninety thousand dollars in it.” “So he stole his husband’s money and hauled ass in the middle of the night. Fuckin’ great.” Syn yanked the door open, ready to charge into interrogation room five and tell Furious he could go to hell. “Geez, hold on a minute, Sarge.” Ro grabbed his arm and pulled him back inside, slamming the door closed. “No wonder Day likes you so much. Both of you go off half-cocked all the fucking time. That money wasn’t stolen. It was life insurance proceeds from when his father died. He might’ve been hiding it from the husband. The contributions he’s been making since then have been small but frequent.” “He’s a porn star, Ronowski! I can’t date a damn porn star! Fucking other women and probably men. What the fuck?” Syn was yelling and pacing now. He knew it wasn’t fair to yell at Ro, but he was the only one there now.

Some people manage to perfect the disappearing act well into adulthood. I went out with a girl once, years ago, who would disappear whenever there was conflict. Anytime there was tension she’d just go missing, and when I’d run into her again, or when I’d go over to her house to see what was going on, she’d be all chipper and act like everything was fine. Finally, one night when she was able to be vulnerable, she explained whenever she felt like she’d messed up she could close off that part of her mind and feel an inner peace that was completely disconnected from reality. She drove everybody else crazy because she couldn’t resolve conflict, yet inside the false world of her mind everything was calm. And as crazy as it sounds, I understood her. I think she was doing the same thing I had done in junior high. She was climbing inside herself and going invisible. My invisibility act worked great for years. But then I found something better.

The world is a busy, hectic place and the need to slow down and focus on one thing and one thing only has never been greater. In a typical day, our phones don’t stop ringing, our texts don’t stop coming, and our meetings don’t stop running into each other. Even when we go home at the end of the day, the multiple hats don’t usually come off. The truth is we’ve lost the art of disconnecting from everything to be able to reconnect to one thing. Sometimes we need God to interrupt our incessantly busy lives to get us to focus on just one thing. Maybe that one thing is Him. Maybe that one thing is you. Maybe that one thing is your family. Maybe that one thing is the future. Whatever that one thing is, let it bring you back to a place where you can appreciate the process more than the product.

That was McNihil’s own personal theory of how dead knowledge, the knowingness of the dead, worked: they had given up the useless distinctions between themselves and any other thing, so they were open to all the information, raw and unfiltered, in the dead world and the living. A salvageable gum wrapper buried in street muck was as evident to their percept systems as the prick of a knifepoint against their cold skin. It was a characteristic of the dead, to be so well connected, to be wired into everything. Only the living maintained defenses and filters and immune systems, tried to unhook and disconnect themselves from the world; an attempt that was doomed to failure, inasmuch as they would all wind up as ashes or worm food eventually, or at least if they were lucky. But a brave and necessary attempt, regardless.

When we invest ourselves in worrying about other people think, we lose touch with what we stand for. By seeking others' approval and trying to be perfect at everything we do, we disconnect from our internal compass.

We are taught to believe that the 'alienation' that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it's the circuitry within our hearts and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I'd be more worried if you didn't.

Again, if we shield ourselves from all feedback, we stop growing. If we engage with all feedback, regardless of the quality and intention, it hurts too much, and we will ultimately armor up by pretending it doesn’t hurt, or, worse yet, we’ll disconnect from vulnerability and emotion so fully that we stop feeling hurt. When we get to the place that the armor is so thick that we no longer feel anything, we experience a real death. We’ve paid for self-protection by sealing off our heart from everyone, and from everything—not just hurt, but love.

today I feel . . . disconnected from everything. From myself.

Dave has always equated love with sex. That idea had started early on with pornographic images which wired him a certain way. It was reinforced by guy talk in locker rooms, he played sports in high school and college, and through relationships with women who also defined love as sex. It was all he knew, but as it turned out, most of those women had been sexually abused in ways that disconnected them from their bodies and wired them to be highly sexual. It came out that Maddie was also sexually abused, which Dave didn't know, but she had gone the other way in reaction to that trauma. She didn't enjoy sex. Sex was a device, something she used to attract men, not something that brought her pleasure.

Writer Gina Trapani has pointed out three prime spots to turn off our brains and take a break from our connected lives: • Commute. A moving train or subway car is the perfect time to write, doodle, read, or just stare out the window. (If you commute by car, audiobooks are a great way to safely tune out.) A commute happens twice a day, and it nicely separates our work life from our home life. • Exercise. Using our body relaxes our mind, and when our mind gets relaxed, it opens up to having new thoughts. Jump on the treadmill and let your mind go. If you’re like me and you hate exercise, get a dog—dogs won’t let you get away with missing a day. • Nature. Go to a park. Take a hike. Dig in your garden. Get outside in the fresh air. Disconnect from anything and everything electronic. It’s very important to separate your work from the rest of your life.

The Nine’s Deadly Sin The deadly sin of Nines is sloth, a word we usually associate with physical laziness. The sloth of Nines, however, is spiritual in nature. Average Nines are disconnected from the passion and motivational drive necessary to rise up and live their “one wild and precious life.” Immature Nines don’t fully connect to the fire in the belly they need to chase after their God-given life and, as a result, fail to become their own person. But tapping into those fiery passions and instinctual drives would upset the inner peace and equilibrium the Nine treasures above almost everything else. And now we’re closer to the truth. For Nines, sloth has to do with their desire to not be overly bothered by life. They literally don’t want life to get to them. Remember, Nines are in the Anger or Gut Triad. You can’t lay claim to your life unless you have guts, unless you have access to your animating instinctual fire. But Nines are slothful when it comes to fully paying attention to their own lives, figuring out what they want in life, chasing their dreams, addressing their own needs, developing their own gifts and pursuing their calling. They cling to and protect their “Hakuna Matata” inner harmony. They ask little of life and hope life returns the favor. If Eights are too in touch with their gut instincts and overexpress their anger, Nines are out of touch with

The Earth is the same as the cauldron, Tricia. The nurturing power of the feminine grows something wonderful from the dark womb that is our Mother Earth. Although most people take this for granted because they are disconnected from the natural world, it is still true. The Mother gives us everything: air, food, water, all our plants, our trees, our wood, our fabrics, even our animals. It’s all offered from the bounty of the Mother. Life germinates in the womb. This is true for all creatures. It is part of the Great Mystery of life, death, and rebirth. Cauldrons represent the alchemical laboratories that symbolize the nature of women and sacred life. This is also why the cauldron was used in alchemy.

I know progress is important but real progress is when you receive while disconnected from everything. I used to think it was a privilege to share a birthday with Einstein until I realized that I’m standing beneath him when it comes to the relative constant of our understanding! Poem - Bond. December 10, 2022.

Consciousness, our soul, the Holy Spirit, on both the individual and the shared levels, has sadly become unconscious! No wonder some call the Holy Spirit the “missing person of the Blessed Trinity.” No wonder we try to fill this radical disconnectedness with various addictions. There is much evidence that so-called “primitive” people were more in touch with this inner Spirit than many of us are. British philosopher and poet Owen Barfield (1898–1997) called it “original participation”3 and many ancient peoples seem to have lived in daily connection with the soulful level of everything—trees, air, the elements, animals, the earth itself, along with the sun, moon, and stars. These were all “brother” and “sister,” just as St. Francis would later name them. Everything had “soul.” Spirituality could be taken seriously and even came naturally. Most of us no longer enjoy this consciousness in our world. It is a disenchanted and lonely universe for most of us. We even speak of the “collective unconscious,” which now takes on a whole new meaning. We really are disconnected from one another, and thereby unconscious. Yet, religion’s main job is to reconnect us (re-ligio) to the Whole, to ourselves, and to one another—and thus heal us. We have not been doing our job very well.

Capitalism has cornered us in such a way that we only can comprehend two options. 1: Work at a machine level, from a disconnected and exhausted place, or 2: Make space for rest and space to connect with our highest selves while fearing how we will eat and live. This rigid binary, combined with the violent reality of poverty, keeps us in a place of sleep deprivation and constant hustling to survive. The work of liberation from these lies resides in our deprogramming and tapping into the power of rest and in our ability to be flexible and subversive. There are more than two options. The possibilities are infinite, although living under a capitalist system is to be confronted with a model of scarcity. This space makes you falsely believe there is not enough of everything: not enough money, not enough care, not enough love, not enough attention, not enough peace, not enough connection, not enough time. There is abundance.

But when it was my turn not to be indifferent, I failed that same test. I was indifferent to the villagers, the local population. I had thought of myself as someone who cares for everything, and cares too much—but in fact I only cared for some things. Other things, I discarded. I didn’t think at all of their struggles for survival, their subsistence living and how it blinded them to any of the magic I saw in my cuttlefish, any of the magic I saw underwater at all. They needed to live, and this place was where they made their living. They needed to live, and I was a threat. “I had become disconnected from others, and that disconnection put everything I cared about at risk. In the end, that disconnection destroyed the cuttlefish as surely as if I had done the poisoning myself.

During the next two weeks Trurl fed general instructions into his future electropoet, then set up all the necessary logic circuits, emotive elements, semantic centers. He was about to invite Klapaucius to attend a trial run, but thought better of it and started the machine himself. It immediately proceeded to deliver a lecture on the grinding of crystallographical surfaces as an introduction to the study of submolecular magnetic anomalies. Trurl bypassed half the logic circuits and made the emotive more electromotive; the machine sobbed, went into hysterics, then finally said, blubbering terribly, what a cruel, cruel world this was. Trurl intensified the semantic fields and attached a strength of character component; the machine informed him that from now on he would carry out its every wish and to begin with add six floors to the nine it already had, so it could better meditate upon the meaning of existence. Trurl installed a philosophical throttle instead; the machine fell silent and sulked. Only after endless pleading and cajoling was he able to get it to recite something: "I had a little froggy." That appeared to exhaust its repertoire. Trurl adjusted, modulated, expostulated, disconnected, ran checks, reconnected, reset, did everything he could think of, and the machine presented him with a poem that made him thank heaven Klapaucius wasn't there to laugh — imagine, simulating the whole Universe from scratch, not to mention Civilization in every particular, and to end up with such dreadful doggerel! Trurl put in six cliché filters, but they snapped like matches; he had to make them out of pure corundum steel. This seemed to work, so he jacked the semanticity up all the way, plugged in an alternating rhyme generator — which nearly ruined everything, since the machine resolved to become a missionary among destitute tribes on far-flung planets. But at the very last minute, just as he was ready to give up and take a hammer to it, Trurl was struck by an inspiration; tossing out all the logic circuits, he replaced them with self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors. The machine simpered a little, whimpered a little, laughed bitterly, complained of an awful pain on its third floor, said that in general it was fed up, through, life was beautiful but men were such beasts and how sorry they'd all be when it was dead and gone. Then it asked for pen and paper.

When the first sunlight at the new house came to inquire about life from that day personal sunlight of this house personal breeze air personal cloudiness took birth everything which is exclusively for this house just as some sunlight enter domesticity to live with some rains Just as local tries to get disconnected from metalanguage just like weakness for personal sunlight once I had observed flax flower creeper to take turn seen Grandma's longing for sunlight even now I remember on our dining table at Darbhanga a shard of sunlight as our tea drinking companion passing sunlight had a different relation with school ending bell just as we have secret correspondence with some shadows Just as some sunlight some shadow are saved in personal kitty just as local tries to get disconnected with metalanguage.

Dr. Campbell handed us off to the orthopedic surgeon, who went over the next steps to deal with Brandon’s broken bones. Another surgeon told us about the repairs to the laceration to his liver. Then a plastic surgeon talked to us about the skin grafts he would need to cover the extensive road rash on his left arm. By the time the doctors were done with us, Sloan was wiped. I put her back in her chair and called Josh. The phone was still ringing when I heard it behind me. I spun and there he was. The second I saw him, my emotional disconnect from the situation clicked off. My coping mechanism snapped away from me like a rubber band shot across a room, and the weight of what happened hit me. Sloan’s grief, Brandon’s condition—Josh’s trauma. I dove into his arms, instantly withered. I’d never trusted anyone else to be the one in control, and my manic mind gave it to him immediately and without reservation and retreated back into itself. He clutched me, and I held him tighter than I’d ever held anyone in my life. I wasn’t sure if I was comforting him, or if I was letting him comfort me. All I knew was something subconscious in me told me I didn’t have to hold the world up anymore now that he was here. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I whispered, breathing him in as my body turned back on from being in suspended animation. The sound to the movie around me turned all the way up. My heart began to pound, I gasped into his neck, and tears instantly flooded my eyes. He put his forehead to mine. He looked like shit. He’d looked bad this morning at the station—I knew he hadn’t slept. But now his eyes were red like he’d been crying. “Any updates?” His voice was raspy. I couldn’t even comprehend how hard it must have been for him to see what he saw and stay at work, going on calls. I wanted to cover him like a blanket. I wanted to cover them both, Josh and Sloan, and shield them from this. I put a hand to his cheek, and he turned into it and closed his eyes. “He just got out of surgery,” I said. Then I told him everything, my hands on his chest like they anchored me. He stood with his arms around my waist, nodding and looking at me like he was worried I was the one who wasn’t okay. It didn’t escape me that we were holding each other and I didn’t care what it meant or what wrong signals it might send to him at the moment. I just knew that I needed to touch him. I needed this momentary surrender. For both of us.

I WOULD NEVER FORGET the day you slipped away. A small lift of your chin and our eyes met. I only saw emptiness in a place where a wistful vulnerability used to collide with wonder. Now, a hollowness of a bottomless pit. In your eyes, I’d never seen your shade of green so dim. It caused my stomach to fall into the same somber eclipse, spiraling faster and faster with no end, no walls, only darkness. And then you averted your gaze. The flesh from my bones, the blood in my veins, the oxygen in my lungs, all of it crumbled, breaking into small pieces yet still holding on by a thread—the thread was my heart. It pumped on auto-pilot as if it couldn’t associate with the rest of my body. It’s thumping sounded in my ears, and I wished it would stop, but my heart was not ready to let go. It continued with the same steady beat, refusing to give up what was right in front of me. Maybe your eyes will return to mine, I thought—well, prayed. And I waited. Two seconds passed. Then three—waiting as my body weakened from your disconnection, and my heart continued to pump. Four. And then your back was to me. Whatever we’d had no longer existed, but I remembered everything clearly, and it wasn’t fair. Could I have accepted the hollow look in your eyes over the wonder? Surely, anything you had to offer would be better than nothing. If only you had turned back around. Had you even noticed me? And then you took a step in the opposite direction. You were gone, left in obscurity and I couldn’t bring you back, but my heart still maintained a steady beat, pumping along to a rhythm of crimson hope. “Stay with me,” you had said over and over. Who would have thought you would be the one to take a step into oblivion? I’m screaming now, can you hear me?Why didn’t you stay with me? I didn’t get to kiss you goodbye. You were gone, and even though you were only twenty feet away, I missed you. It was entirely possible you’d wake up and turn back around, or I’d wake up. Either way, it was a nightmare. I forced my eyes closed. I couldn’t watch you walk away, each step drawing more distance and less of a chance of you coming back. The darkness was better, anyway, and if I held my lids closed tight, I could see stars. I focused on the yellow and orange horizon behind my eyelids, pretending it was a sunset through the bitterness. The only warmth was the water gathering in the corners of my eyes. The tears struggled for a moment, fighting the same lie as my beating heart. I wished I could switch places with you, because I didn’t deserve a world once blessed by your light, and you didn’t deserve this at all. But this is what I deserved. In the beginning, I’d thought you’d be fun, and I’d thought I could leave you effortlessly. It was me who ripped hearts out, but now mine was the one bleeding. The walls surrounding me had been durable, indestructible, before you. And with no more walls, and no more you, I was slowly suffocating. When it came down to you and me, I’d never thought you’d be the one to slip away.

We must be clear that people's bodies are not the cause of our social maladies. [...] Our disconnection, trauma, lack of resources, lack of compassion, fear, greed, and ego are the sources of our contributions to human suffering not our bodies. We can accept humans and their bodies without understanding "why" they love, think, move, or look the way they do. Contrary to common opinion, freeing ourselves from the need to understand everything can bring about a tremendous amount of peace.

Most books contain stories within them, and they often know where the story will go and what, exactly, will happen. But one must be careful with stories—they are violent and cruel things after all, full of heroes and villains and triumph and conquest. Stories are for kings and dragonslayers and for the blood-soaked hungry blades. It is easy, I have found, to seek to imprison the world inside our stories. To glorify the lives of powerful men, to celebrate their victories and mourn their tragedies. To build a reality where everything ties up neatly with a bow, and everything makes sense. There is a comfort in stories like these, disconnected from what it means to be alive. But I’m not here for a story. I’m here for the journey.

What’s the rush?” I said, shaking my head. “We’re in the Void.” We were always in the Void when we were together. “We are, but I can’t control it,” he told me. “It…it consumes me every now and then. It takes over me and the darkness disconnects from me. It rages. It rebels.” His every word rang true. “It consumes everything in its path until it’s full.

Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done. Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match. Sometimes I wonder: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived? I don’t know. That’s the truth.

You think conducting a bunch of phony peace conferences, completely disconnected from the soil, will solve everything! It won't! You know why? Because make-believe peacemaking is not the same as backbreaking peacemaking. To treat the pangs of this planet each civilian must stand up as peacemaker in their everyday life - each civilian must stand up as reformer - and not just any reformer. To reform this pest-infested planet only reformer won't do, what's needed is rowdy reformer. Rowdy Reformers by the hundreds, Rowdy Reformers by the thousands, that's what this world needs - not some backboneless, book-babbling intellectuals playing pretend peace with pretend intellect.

beyond them. The Six Diseases If we want to look at how we practice all forms of rivalry, there are six diseases my father wrote about, all of which stem from the desire we have to win at all costs. These diseases rely on being in competition, which is typically where we go in a relationship the moment any discord pops up. When we relate to others in these ways, we are disconnecting from them and disconnecting from our true selves in order to access some form of outside validation. In other words, there is no relationship, no collaboration, no cocreation. There is only the victor and the loser. The Six Diseases are: The desire for victory I have to be the winner. If I don’t win, I’m a loser. If I win, everyone else is a loser. The desire to resort to technical cunning I rely on the power of my wits to show you how great I am. Who cares about people or their feelings as long as everyone can see how clever I am? The desire to display all that has been learned Check me out. I know lots of things. I can speak at length about anything. It doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say (especially if it’s dumb). The desire to awe the enemy I am a force to be reckoned with. Look out! I will wow you to get your approval even if I have to do something shocking and wild to get your attention. The desire to play the passive role I am so easy to get along with. Who wouldn’t like me? I am so unobtrusive and sweet. I will put anything that’s important to me aside to make sure that you see how likeable and wonderful I am. How could you not like me when I sacrifice everything just for you? The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by I am not okay as I am. I will perform constant self-work and read as many books as I can and take so many classes to make myself good that you will see that I am always trying to be a good person even if I continue to do lots of shitty things. I know I’m not okay as I am. And I know you know that I know I’m not okay as I am, which makes it okay not to get truly better as long as it looks like I’m trying.

When we see that we are not disconnected from everything else, we also see that we are not our changing bodies.  We are not our changing bodies because nothing in our biological makeup is permanent.  We are conglomerates, and all conglomerates must dissolve.  Every nerve, muscle and bone in our bodies is changing and aging.  Our bodies are unable to exist separately from everything else.  Our bodies are unable to exist separately from what exists in everything else.  We cannot exist without matter, air, water, space and fire.  Without that which makes up the rest of nature, we cannot exist.

Disconnect from anything and everything electronic.

Everything connects, Grandpa had told me once, but not everyone hear's those connections. I could sense the fragmentation, the disconnection from others and from the earth. I knew every variety of it. The twisted viciousness of Neville, and Terence. The indifference of the Citizens who never spoke out about the Accords because they didn't think our suffering was theirs. The minions, who'd hated themselves so much they'd been willing to do anything to anybody to be part of the world that rejected them.

It is this heightened state that may produce several relatively new phenomena in childhood today. As the clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair,10 the author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, observes, the most commonly heard complaint when children are asked to go off-line is “I’m bored.” Confronted with the dazzling possibilities for their attention on a nearby screen, young children quickly become awash with, then accustomed to, and ever so gradually semi-addicted to continuous sensory stimulation. When the constant level of stimulation is taken away, the children respond predictably with a seemingly overwhelming state of boredom. “I’m Bored.” There are different kinds of boredom. There is a natural boredom that is part of the woof of childhood that can often provide children with the impetus to create their own forms of entertainment and just plain fun. This is the boredom that Walter Benjamin described years ago as the “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”11 But there may also be an unnatural, culturally induced, new form of boredom that follows too much digital stimulation. This form of boredom may de-animate children in such a fashion as to prevent them from wanting to explore and create real-world experiences for themselves, particularly outside their rooms, houses, and schools. As Steiner-Adair wrote, “If they become addicted to playing on screens,12 children will not know how to move through that fugue state they call boredom, which is often a necessary prelude to creativity.” It would be an intellectual shame to think that in the spirit of giving our children as much as we can through the many creative offerings of the latest, enhanced e-books and technological innovations, we may inadvertently deprive them of the motivation and time necessary to build their own images of what is read and to construct their own imaginative off-line worlds that are the invisible habitats of childhood. Such cautions are neither a matter of nostalgic lament nor an exclusion of the powerful, exciting uses of the child’s imagination fostered by technology. We will return to such uses a little later. Nor should worries over a “lost childhood” be dismissed as a cultural (read Western) luxury. What of the real lost childhoods? one might ask, in which the daily struggle to survive trumps everything else? Those children are never far from my thoughts or my work every day of my life.

No other creature does what humans do to their environment. They poison their land, their water, their food…they even poison the air they breathe. It affects all living things, from the enormous whale to the tiny ant, and humans only grow more ignorant and disconnected from the land as time goes by. They chew down the forests that serve to clean the air, but unlike termites who only feed on dead wood, humans are indiscriminate. They are the only animal that is capable of such intelligence and yet does such asinine things. It’s only a matter of time before their species dies out. Already there is such a high level of violence and disease among them. I have heard that some of them will go as far as to cut out their stomachs when they grow too large. They’re sick; mentally and physically, and it has a ripple effect on everything around them.

Happy people are often perceived as being naive and vulnerable. If nothing else, happy people are stigmatized as being clueless and ill-informed and delusionally positive and disconnected from reality, but the only people who perceive them that way are people who do everything in their power to justify the negativity in their lives they feel they cannot control. It is people who don’t choose a better life that are naive and truly vulnerable, as “happy people” may lose everything they have, but people who never choose to fully step into their lives never have anything at all.

This is the thing about ecology: everything is interconnected. It’s difficult for us to grasp how this works, because we’re used to thinking of the world in terms of individual parts rather than complex wholes. In fact, that’s even how we’ve been taught to think of ourselves – as individuals. We’ve forgotten how to pay attention to the relationships between things. Insects necessary for pollination; birds that control crop pests, grubs and worms essential to soil fertility; mangroves that purify water; the corals on which fish populations depend: these living systems are not ‘out there’, disconnected from humanity. On the contrary: our fates are intertwined. They are, in a real sense, us.

I love and respect the United States. I believe in almost everything this nation stands for, and I will forever be grateful for the sanctuary it provided, along with my education, and the gift of my husband, Maier, and my family. But I was unable to disconnect from Israel.

It’s mayhem, it’s chaos, and then the hose is unleashed. An icy torrent of water knocks me to the ground and separates me from Seth. Water fills my nose, and I choke on it, coughing hard and desperately trying to shield my eyes from the worst of it so I can see. The spray moves away from me long enough that I can stand on shaky legs. It’s a fight to regain my bearings, my vision still blurred, and stray limbs and bodies tangle across the ground, tripping me with every step. The gate is at my back, and everywhere I look is a mess of water, people, and mud. It’s so loud; even when I blink away the last of the water, I still feel too disoriented, like I’m disconnected from my body. I slip. My shoulder slams into concrete, and I breathe through the pain as I force myself to my feet again. Someone shouts my name, but then there’s a guard in front of me, his helmet visor pulled up so I can see the wicked gleam in his eyes when he pulls out a small black object from his belt. I spot the metal prongs and realize what’s about to happen. Terror lances up my spine, thick and suffocating in my throat. I can’t move. Behind me, Ajei screams. A large hand wrenches me back by the arm, and I lose my balance. Electricity crackles from the end of the taser, missing my drenched side by a centimeter as I crash to the ground hard. “We saw you!” Someone screams. “We have a video! Murderer! You tried to kill him!” Without warning, hands are everywhere, grabbing me and pulling me back to safety. “No, wait!” I shout, struggling to free myself from their grasp. I can’t leave now, not like this. I need to be up at the front, strong in the face of danger, just like our ancestors. I need to make my family proud; need to protect them and the land we were blessed with the way I promised I would. There’s a cry of pain, and I catch a glimpse of Seth yanking my attacker’s arm behind his back until he’s forced to drop the taser, which Seth kicks away. His eyes are ablaze, and he’s utterly ruthless, but despite everything, I can only think of how beautiful he looks. Then, he swings out a leg and takes out another guard who is going after a fleeing Ajei, her phone in her hand from where she had been recording everything. He spies me on the ground amidst the throngs of protestors, something like fear on his face, and roars, “Get him out of here!

The more familiar we are with the particular conditions that connect or disconnect us from presence, the easier it becomes to spot them in our lives. For example, I tend to lose presence when I’m rushing. This means that I’m more apt to make physical or relational blunders: I might drop something in the kitchen, forget my lunch, or even say something sharp. I learned a painful lesson about this a few years ago. I was at a farewell party for my girlfriend, Evan, who had just finished a year of service at a meditation retreat center. We had plans to drive north up the coast of California after the party, and I’d made an appointment to install a car radio for the trip. In that classic, romantic way, I wanted everything to be perfect. As our departure time approached, I grew more and more anxious about missing the appointment. With no sign of a formal send-off, I finally spoke up and said that we needed to leave soon. To avoid any awkwardness, Evan went along with my request, but she was in tears by the time we arrived at the auto shop. She was incensed at me for cutting short a meaningful experience and at herself for not speaking up. In my fixation to create “the perfect trip,” I’d missed the fact that she was already enjoying herself. I reflected a lot on that incident, how losing presence had unintended, painful consequences.