Do Mechanics Give Quotes

I am one man with a laptop. When I give the world my characters, it's because I don't want to keep them for myself. You don't like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I'm wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending.

The nice girl loses an important protective mechanism when she assumes that life is fair, or that Prince Charming will always protect her. The smart fox is not governed by wishful thinking or the hope of a fantasy outcome, like Cinderella. Despite appearances, she trusts herself to watch her OWN back instead of giving a man the responsibility of doing it for her.

Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities. "You do not know what you are missing by your micro-scopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine. How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry Cut the poetry. No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gesture; for a lover, when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, perversity and art . . . We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must be by now completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

In high school, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. (You may not have guessed this botanist/mechanical engineer was a bit of a nerd in high school, but indeed I was.) In the game I played a cleric. One of the magic spells I could cast was “Create Water.” I always thought it was a really stupid spell, and I never used it. Boy, what I wouldn’t give to be able to do that in real life right now.

Only a rich cunt can save me now,' he says with an air of utmost weariness. 'One gets tired of chasing after new cunts all the time. It gets mechanical. The trouble is, you see, I can't fall in love. I'm too much of an egoist. Women only help me to dream, that's all. It's a vice, like drink or opium. I've got to have a new one every day; if I don't I get morbid. I think too much. Sometimes I'm amazed at myself, how quick I pull it off — and how little it really means. I do it automatically like. Sometimes I'm not thinking about a woman at all, but suddenly I notice a woman looking at me and then, bango! it starts all over again. Before I know what I'm doing I've got her up to the room. I don't even remember what I say to them. I bring them up to the room, give them a pat on the ass, and before I know what it's all about it's over. It's like a dream.... Do you know what I mean?

Women have been brought up with the false sense that they have all the options in the world. We don’t understand that the culture really isn’t offering us all of these options – there still are very strong pressures to conform. We have to step outside the culture to be able to make choices that will really give us what we want. But we lack the psychic mechanisms to do this, to really choose.

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave—that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, here idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed—yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.

The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism––with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it––could never have reconciled itself to. “I can’t stand the way you androids give up,” he said savagely.

After receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918, Max Planck went on tour across Germany. Wherever he was invited, he delivered the same lecture on new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur grew to know it by heart: “It has to be boring giving the same speech each time, Professor Planck. How about I do it for you in Munich? You can sit in the front row and wear my chauffeur’s cap. That’d give us both a bit of variety.” Planck liked the idea, so that evening the driver held a long lecture on quantum mechanics in front of a distinguished audience. Later, a physics professor stood up with a question. The driver recoiled: “Never would I have thought that someone from such an advanced city as Munich would ask such a simple question! My chauffeur

And when you’re a weird and awkward and paranoid person at all times, CastieCon is the happiest place on the planet. It’s like, a baseline level of freakiness is expected here, right? So unless you’re disemboweling goats in the vendor hall, no one gives a damn who you are or what you’re doing.

No one can ever use his heart to listen or touch or feel or see or smell. It's just a lump of muscle pumping mechanically inside your ribs. It has no will and no ability to do anything but go on pumping until it gives up and withers away or is choked by some disease. Your spinal cord, on the other hand, feels. The central nervous system pours out from the spinal cord, and with it one feels pain. Pain is the most trustworthy sensation a human being can know because it teaches us what hurts. With the spinal cord, one can hear what will hurt, smell the sting of suffering, taste it, feel it, and see the world with new eyes. I learned a long time ago not to follow my heart, the hunk of meat flexing in the chest. I trust the tube locked up in a column of bone, the tube that shows me what pain is.

I believe that we must attack these things in which we do not believe. Not attack by the method of cutting off the heads of the people, but attack in the sense of discuss. I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe this and on the other side they believe that, but never try to compare the two points of view. Because we have learned that, by trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and in appreciating where we are and what we are. And I believe that science has remained irrelevant because we wait until somebody asks us questions or until we are invited to give a speech on Einstein’s theory to people who don’t understand Newtonian mechanics, but we never are invited to give an attack on faith healing, or on astrology — on what is the scientific view of astrology today.

Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others.

...The efficacy of psychedelics with regard to art has to do with their ability to render language weightless, as fluid and ephemeral as those famous "bubble letters" of the sixties. Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both the signifier and the signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world - simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it. In my own experience, it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before - thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it. And it is into this abyss that the horror vacui of psychedelic art deploys itself like an incandescent bridge. Because it is one thing to believe, on theoretical evidence, that we live in a prison-house of language. It is quite another to know it, to actually peek into the slippery emptiness as the Bastille explodes around you. Yet psychedelic art takes this apparent occasion for despair and celebrates our escape from linguistic control by flowing out, filling that rippling void with meaningful light, laughter, and a gorgeous profusion.

The older we get, the more difficult it is to find other people who can give us the love our parents denied us. But the body's expectations do not slacken with age—quite the contrary! They are merely direct at others, usually our own children and grandchildren. The only way out of this dilemma is to become aware of these mechanisms and to identify the reality of our own childhood by counteracting the processes of repression and denial. In this way we can create in our own selves a person who can satisfy at least some of the needs that have been waiting for fulfillment since birth, if not earlier. Then we can give ourselves the attention, the respect, the understanding for our emotions, to sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us.

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I’m sad to say that this method works. If you don’t give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you. I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do.

So to get people talking, companies and organizations need to mint social currency. Give people a way to make themselves look good while promoting their products and ideas along the way. There are three ways to do that: (1) find inner remarkability; (2) leverage game mechanics; and (3) make people feel like insiders.

We are afraid of what we will do to others, afraid of the rage that lies in wait somewhere deep in our souls. How many human beings go through the world frozen with rage against life! This deeply hidden inner anger may be the product of hurt pride or of real frustration in office, factory, clinic, or home. Whatever may be the cause of our frozen rage (which is the inevitable mother of depression), the great word of hope today is that this rage can be conquered and drained off into creative channels … …What should we do? We should all learn that a certain amount of aggressive energy is normal and certainly manageable in maturity. Most of us can drain off the excess of our angry feelings and destructive impulses in exercise, in competitive games, or in the vigorous battles against the evils of nature and society. We also must realize that no one will punish us for the legitimate expression of self-assertiveness and creative pugnacity as our parents once punished us for our undisciplined temper tantrums. Furthermore, let us remember that we need not totally repress the angry part of our nature. We can always give it an outlet in the safe realm of fantasy. A classic example of such fantasy is given by Max Beerborn, who made a practice of concocting imaginary letters to people he hated. Sometimes he went so far as to actually write the letters and in the very process of releasing his anger it evaporated. As mature men and women we should regard our minds as a true democracy where all kinds of ideas and emotions should be given freedom of speech. If in political life we are willing to grant civil liberties to all sorts of parties and programs, should we not be equally willing to grant civil liberties to our innermost thoughts and drives, confident that the more dangerous of them will be outvoted by the majority within our minds? Do I mean that we should hit out at our enemy whenever the mood strikes us? No, I repeat that I am suggesting quite the reverse—self-control in action based upon (positive coping mechanisms such as) self expression in fantasy.

It took me a long while to figure it out, why I didn’t feel the way everyone else seemed to feel about sex. It doesn’t do a whole lot for me, to be honest. I thought maybe it was women, so I switched to men, but it wasn’t all that much better. It’s… it was mechanical , almost. I was going through the motions but it wasn’t really doing anything for me. I could get off but I didn’t care about it. I thought maybe there was something wrong with me until I figured it out and then it was like a big, fat asexual ray of sunshine fell over me and it was glorious . But it felt better when I figured out that I wasn’t weird and that it was okay to not want sex like everyone else. But I like touching and I like kissing most of the time and I can be there for a partner should the situation… arise. Sometimes, I’ll even jerk off, and I’m told I give really awesome hugs.

no simple mechanism could do the job as well or better. It might simply be that nobody has yet found the simpler alternative. The Ptolemaic system (with the Earth in the center, orbited by the Sun, the Moon, planets, and stars) represented the state of the art in astronomy for over a thousand years, and its predictive accuracy was improved over the centuries by progressively complicating the model: adding epicycles upon epicycles to the postulated celestial motions. Then the entire system was overthrown by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, which was simpler and—though only after further elaboration by Kepler—more predictively accurate.63 Artificial intelligence methods are now used in more areas than it would make sense to review here, but mentioning a sampling of them will give an idea of the breadth of applications. Aside from the game AIs

Thus there is an analogy between the juridical relation of human actions and the mechanical relation of moving forces. I never can do anything to another man without giving him a right to do the same to me on the same conditions; just as no body can act with its moving force on another body without thereby causing the other to react equally against it.

Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a growing confusion about how these things really behaved ---- waves or particles, particles or waves? Everything looked like both. This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 or 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics. Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before. Your experience with things that you have seen before is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different. An atom does not behave like a weight hanging on a spring and oscillating. Nor does it behave like a miniature representation of the solar system with little planets going around in orbits. Nor does it appear to be somewhat like a cloud or fog of some sort surrounding the nucleus. It behaves like nothing you have seen before. There is one simplication at least. Electrons behave in this respect in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way…. The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar; I will simply describe it. There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

I don't think this place was everything my mother hoped for that day when she asked God where she should go to give her son the world. Though she didn't ford a river or hike across mountains, she still did what so many pioneers before had done, traveled recklessly, curiously, into the unknown of finding something just a little bit better. And like them she suffered and persevered, perhaps in equal measure. Whenever I looked at her, a castaway on the island of my queen-sized bed, it was hard for me to look past the suffering. It was hard for me not to take inventory of all that she had lost -- her home country, her husband, her son. The losses just kept piling up. It was hard for me to see her there, hear her ragged breath, and think of how she had persevered, but she had. Just lying there in my bed was a testament to her perseverance, to the fact that she survived, even when she wasn't sure she wanted to. I used to believe that God never gives us more than we can handle, but then my brother died and my mother and I were left with so much more; it crushed us. It took me many years to realize that it's hard to live in this world. I don't mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it's hard to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It's natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of "what we can handle" changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that's something of a miracle.

We are to give up all our sins, big or small, for the Father’s reward of eternal life. We are to forget self-justifying stories, excuses, rationalizations, defense mechanisms, procrastinations, appearances, personal pride, judgmental thoughts, and doing things our way. We are to separate ourselves from all worldliness and take upon us the image of God in our countenances.

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so.

Yet, when we allow complexity to be hidden and handled for us, we should at least notice what we are giving up. We risk becoming users of components, handlers of black boxes that do not open or don’t seem worth opening. We risk becoming people who cannot really fix things, who can only swap components, work with mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. But when something breaks or goes wrong or needs fundamental change, what will we do except stand helpless in the face of our own creations

What is the object of human life? The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes instead, that the object of life is Love. He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt. He has learnt that Love is the source of all being, and that Hell itself is ordained by Love. He understands that Death, when we have finished the part that was assigned to us, is the reward of Love. And he apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death. He has no intention of converting this human society of ours into an efficient machine for efficient machine-operators, dominated by master mechanics. Men are put into this world, he realizes, to struggle, to suffer, to contend against the evil that is in their neighbors and in themselves, and to aspire toward the triumph of Love. They are put into this world to live like men, and to die like men. He seeks to preserve a society which allows men to attain manhood, rather than keeping them within bonds of perpetual childhood. With Dante, he looks upward from this place of slime, this world of gorgons and chimeras, toward the light which gives Love to this poor earth and all the stars. And, with Burke, he knows that "they will never love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.

The avatar smiled silkily as it leaned closer to him, as though imparting a confidence. "Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. "We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying. [...] "I have watched people die in exhaustive and penetrative detail," the avatar continued. "I have felt for them. Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts? Per second, a human—or a Chelgrian—might have twenty or thirty, even in the heightened state of extreme distress associated with the process of dying in pain." The avatar's eyes seemed to shine. It came forward, close to his face by the breadth of a hand. "Whereas I," it whispered, "have billions." It smiled, and something in its expression made Ziller clench his teeth. "I watched those poor wretches die in the slowest of slow motion and I knew even as I watched that it was I who'd killed them, who at that moment engaged in the process of killing them. For a thing like me to kill one of them or one of you is a very, very easy thing to do, and, as I discovered, absolutely disgusting. Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do. "And, as you might imagine, I consider that I have an obligation to discharge. I fully intend to spend the rest of my existence here as Masaq' Hub for as long as I'm needed or until I'm no longer welcome, forever keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms and just generally protecting this quaint circle of fragile little bodies and the vulnerable little brains they house from whatever harm a big dumb mechanical universe or any conscience malevolent force might happen or wish to visit upon them, specifically because I know how appallingly easy they are to destroy. I will give my life to save theirs, if it should ever come to that. And give it gladly, happily, too, knowing that trade was entirely worth the debt I incurred eight hundred years ago, back in Arm One-Six.

These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus. Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice — either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town. Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself the direct guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men? I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn’t matter whose Rule Book they rely on — Ayn Rand’s or Joan Baez’s or the Pope’s or Lenin’s or Elephant Doody Comix — the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized—those who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads— find the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don’t know any 'correct' answer. I don’t know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. The universe may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis. To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally—to live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone.

I am the daughter of a mother who would never change...The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity...When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left. I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother's rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine...All my life I've tried to get away from the void of my origin. It was the void that distressed me, that I was fleeing...Writing, I discovered a way of hiding in my characters, of escaping myself. Of undergoing one mutation after another. One could say that the mechanisms of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transitions in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.

When I give the world my characters, it’s because I don’t want to keep them for myself. You don’t like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I’m wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending.

Butters," I said, "Don't give me statistics on heart failure. Fear is a part of life. It's a warning mechanism. That's all. It tells you when there's danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it.

I am a non-accredited, overly logical psychologist, therapist, mechanic, diplomat, businessman, and Teacher working in an industry that is still defining itself each and every day. That is as concise a definition I can give for the modern-day programmer.

Come on,” I said. “Let’s reconnect this bad boy.” Getting the dragon’s head to the bottom was easy. It tumbled right down the slope and hit the neck with a loud, metallic BONK! Reconnecting it was harder. We had no tools and no experience. Annabeth fiddled with the wires and cursed in Ancient Greek. “We need Beckendorf. He could do this in seconds.” “Isn’t your mom the goddess of inventors?” I asked. Annabeth glared at me. “Yes, but this is different. I’m good with ideas. Not mechanics.” “If I was going to pick one person in the world to reattach my head,” I said, “I’d pick you.” I just blurted it out—to give her confidence, I guess— but immediately I realized it sounded pretty stupid. “Awww. . .” Silena sniffled and wiped her eyes. “Percy, that is so sweet!

A man selling Vaseline Petroleum Jelly had gone around a number of houses in town a week before and had left some samples, asking people to see if they could find an ingenious use for it. Now he went around to the same houses, asking what uses they had found for Vaseline. The man in the first house, a wealthy city gent, said, "I used it for medicinal purposes. Whenever my children scraped their elbows or knees, I would rub it on." The man in the second house said, "I used it for mechanical purposes, such as greasing the bearings of my bicycles and lawnmower." The man in the third house, a scruffy, unshaven, working class fellow, said, "I used it for sexual purposes." In a shocked voice the salesman asked, "What do you mean?" "Well," said the scruffy man, "I put a whole lot of it on the handle of my bedroom door to keep the kids out!" You can give the same thing to different people and they will come out with different uses, according to their own unconsciousness. But if they are conscious, they will find only one use.

Could I see that God wanted to transform my life from a somewhat ugly, useless branch to an arrow, a tool usable in His hands, for the furtherance of His purposes?....To be thus transformed, was I willing - am I till willing - for the whittling, sandpapering, stripping, processes necessary in my Christian life? The ruthless pulling off of leaves and flowers might include doing without a television set or washing machine, remaining single in order to see a job done, re-evaluating the worthiness of the ambition to be a "good" doctor (according to my terms an values). The snapping of thorns might include drastic dealing with hidden jealousies and unknown prides, giving up prized rights in leadership and administration. The final stripping of the bark might include lessons to be learned regarding death to self - self-defence,self-pity, self-justification, self-vinidication, self-sufficiency, all the mechanisms of preventing the hurt of too deep involvment. Am I prepared for the pain, which may at times seem like sacrifice, in order to be made a tool in His service? My willingness will be a measure of the sincerity of my desire to express my heartfelt gratitude to Him for his so-great salvation. Can I see such minor "sacrifices" in light of the great sacrifice of Calvary, where Christ gave all for me?

Never miss an opportunity to learn another life skill. Just because you are an author or a doctor does not mean that you cannot learn carpentry, auto mechanics,electrical wiring, farming, or any other discipline. Each of these skills will give you the opportunity to help someone and to make a friend. Your new friend probably has a skill that you do not. If you will just ask every skilled person you see to show you how he does what he does, you will have the tools to succeed in life, to make new friends, and to save a boatload of money.

There is a significant hereditary contribution to ADD but I do not believe any genetic factor is decisive in the emergence of ADD traits in any child. Genes are codes for the synthesis of the proteins that give a particular cell its characteristic structure and function. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself. It is determined, for the most part, by the environment. To put it differently, genes carry potentials inherent in the cells of a given organism. Which of multiple potentials become expressed biologically is a question of life circumstances. Were we to adopt the medical model — only temporarily, for the sake of argument — a genetic explanation by itself would still be unsuitable. Medical conditions for which genetic inheritance are fully or even mostly responsible, such as muscular dystrophy, are rare. “Few diseases are purely genetic,” says Michael Hayden, a geneticist at the University of British Columbia and a world-renowned researcher into Huntington’s disease. “The most we can say is that some diseases are strongly genetic.” Huntington’s is a fatal degeneration of the nervous system based on a single gene that, if inherited, will almost invariably cause the disease. But not always. Dr. Hayden mentions cases of persons with the gene who live into ripe old age without any signs of the disease itself. “Even in Huntington’s, there must be some protective factor in the environment,” Dr. Hayden says.

where DO you suppose such Americans come from! In fact, I'm quite sure you could both be mistaken for English, if you merely lived here a few years. So it's a quite impersonal question. But don't you feel, as we do, that for all our admiration of American energy and mechanical ingenuity, it's the most terrible country the world has ever seen? Such voices--like brass horns! Such rudeness! Such lack of reticence! And such material ideals! And the standardization--every one thinking exactly alike about everything. I give you my word that you'll be so glad you've deserted your ghastly country that after two years here, you'll never want to go home. Don't you already feel that a bit?

If a boy fires off a gun, whether at a fox, a landlord or a reigning sovereign, he will be rebuked according to the relative value of these objects. But if he fires off a gun for the first time it is very likely that he will not expect the recoil, or know what a heavy knock it can give him. He may go blazing away through life at these and similar objects in the landscape; but he will be less and less surprised by the recoil; that is, by the reaction. He may even dissuade his little sister of six from firing off one of the heavy rifles designed for the destruction of elephants; and will thus have the appearance of being himself a reactionary. Very much the same principle applies to firing off the big guns of revolution. It is not a man's ideals that change; it is not his Utopia that is altered; the cynic who says, "You will forget all that moonshine of idealism when you are older," says the exact opposite of the truth. The doubts that come with age are not about the ideal, but about the real. And one of the things that are undoubtedly real is reaction: that is, the practical probability of some reversal of direction, and of our partially succeeding in doing the opposite of what we mean to do. What experience does teach us is this: that there is something in the make-up and mechanism of mankind, whereby the result of action upon it is often unexpected, and almost always more complicated than we expect.

The 9/11 attacks activated several of these group-related adaptations in my mind. The attacks turned me into a team player, with a powerful and unexpected urge to display my team’s flag and then do things to support the team, such as giving blood, donating money, and, yes, supporting the leader.31 And my response was tepid compared to the hundreds of Americans who got in their cars that afternoon and drove great distances to New York in the vain hope that they could help to dig survivors out of the wreckage, or the thousands of young people who volunteered for military service in the following weeks. Were these people acting on selfish motives, or groupish motives? The rally-round-the-flag reflex is just one example of a groupish mechanism.

It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life, and that unless the contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs. But I do not believe that such contemplation on the whole tends to happiness. It gives moments of delight, but these are outweighed by years of effort and depression.

I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me. They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction. With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country.

A more fitting metaphor of the traditional pedagogy is managing a factory of mechanical workers, where the teacher is the manager and students the workers. The teacher gives instructions and assigns tasks to students each day. The students work as hard as possible to finish the tasks. At the end of the work period, the students are rewarded or punished based on how well they have complied with the instructions and completed the tasks.

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the Land Tax Act which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply which gives you your army? or that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber. All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

For many years I have been saying that I would like to write a book (or series of books) called Physics for Mathematicians. Whenever I would tell people that, they would say, “Oh good, you're going to explain quantum mechanics, or string theory, or something like that”. And I would say, “Well that would be nice, but I can't begin to do that now; first I have to learn elementary physics, so the first thing I will be writing will be Mechanics for Mathematicians”. So then people would say, “Ah, so you're going to be writing about symplectic structures”, or something of that sort. And I would have to say, “No, I'm not trying to write a book about mathematics for mathematicians, I'm trying to write a book about physics for mathematicians”; …… it's elementary mechanics that I don't understand. … I mean, for example, that I don't understand this – lever. ... Most of us know the law of the lever, but this law is simply a quantitative statement of exactly how amazing the lever is, and doesn't give us a clue as to why it is true, how such a small force at one end can exert such a great force at the other. Now physicists all agree that Newton's Three Laws are the basis from which all of mechanics follows, but if you ask for an explanation of the lever in terms of these three laws, you will almost certainly not get a satisfactory answer.

Finally, if you're as exasperated as I am by the parts problem and have some money to invest, you can take up the really fascinating hobby of machining your own parts. [...] With the welding equipment you can build up worn surfaces with better than original metal and then machine it back to tolerance with carbide tools. [...] If you can't do the job directly you can always make something that will do it. The work of machining a part is very slow, and some parts, such as ball bearings, you're never going to machine, but you'd be amazed at how you can modify parts designs so that you can make them with your equipment, and the work isn't nearly a slow or frustrating as a wait for some smirking parts man to send away to the factory. And the work is gumption building, not gumption destroying. To run a cycle with parts in it you've made yourself gives you a special feeling you can't possibly get from strictly store-bought parts.

Chris Argyris criticized “good communication that blocks learning,” arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because “they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability.

They can’t all be as charming as me,” Vieve replied with a smile. “Or as adorable as me,” added Soap, coming up behind Vieve and nicking her cap. “Good evening, Miss Temminnick; Vieve. To what do we owe this honor? Shouldn’t you be watching a play or something highfalutin in town?” “Give it back!” Vieve made a grab for her hat, but Soap held it out of reach. “Can’t stand the theater.” “And I’m not allowed,” Sophronia added. “But Soap, Vieve and I were wondering if you could help us get out?” “Out?” “We want to pay a visit to Bunson’s.” “But why? No one will be there.” “Exactly,” crowed Vieve. “They’ve got something we want to see.” Soap was suspicious. “What kind of something?” “A communication machine,” Sophronia explained. Vieve nodded, grinning. Soap looked back and forth between them. He ended with Sophronia. “Not you as well? Gone barmy over mechanics, have you? I should never have introduced you two. It’ll all end in tears and oil.

HOW TO DRIVE A WRITER CRAZY “1. When he starts to outline a story, immediately give him several stories just like it to read and tell him three other plots. This makes his own story and his feeling for it vanish in a cloud of disrelated facts. "2. When he outlines a character, read excerpts from stories about such characters, saying that this will clarify the writer's ideas. As this causes him to lose touch with the identity he felt in his character by robbing him of individuality, he is certain to back away from ever touching such a character. "3. Whenever the writer proposes a story, always mention that his rate, being higher than other rates of writers in the book, puts up a bar to his stories. "4. When a rumor has stated that a writer is a fast producer, invariably confront him with the fact with great disapproval, as it is, of course, unnatural for one human being to think faster than another. "5. Always correlate production and rate, saying that it is necessary for the writer to do better stories than the average for him to get any consideration whatever. "6. It is a good thing to mention any error in a story bought, especially when that error is to be editorially corrected, as this makes the writer feel that he is being criticized behind his back and he wonders just how many other things are wrong. "7. Never fail to warn a writer not to be mechanical, as this automatically suggests to him that his stories are mechanical and, as he considers this a crime, wonders how much of his technique shows through and instantly goes to much trouble to bury mechanics very deep—which will result in laying the mechanics bare to the eye. "8. Never fail to mention and then discuss budget problems with a writer, as he is very interested. "9. By showing his vast knowledge of a field, an editor can almost always frighten a writer into mental paralysis, especially on subjects where nothing is known anyway. "10. Always tell a writer plot tricks, as they are not his business.

Even so, the advance of the far right in Europe and the United States reveals the need to rethink memory work, to adapt it to new generations for whom the Second World War feels like a long-ago crisis. It's important to tell a story people can identify with, a story of ordinary people, the Mitlaufer, and not only of heroes, victims, or monsters. To raise awareness that, if history as such does not repeat itself, sociological and psychological mechanisms do, which push individuals and societies to make irrational choices by supporting regimes and leaders who are opposed to their interests, by becoming complicit in criminal ideas and actions. The most dangerous monster is not a megalomaniacal and violent leader, but us, the people who make him possible, who give him the power to lead. By our opportunism, by our conformity to all-powerful capitalism, which places money and consumption over education, intelligence, and culture, we are in danger of losing the democracy, peace, and freedom that so many of our predecessors have fought to preserve.

The impossible class. — Poor, happy and independent! — these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! — these things can also go together — and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory? In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!

2. The classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them. For the fact is that the reading we do when young can often be of little value because we are impatient, cannot concentrate, lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. This youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us. The definition which we can now give is

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

My perfect storm was nothing permanent. But of course it's far from the last storm I'll face. There will be many more. The key is building fires where you can. Warm yourself up as you wait for the tempest to pass. These fires, the routines, habits, relationships, and coping mechanisms you built, help you to look at the rain and see fertilizer instead of a flood. If you want the lushest green of life and you do, the grey is part of the natural cycle. You are not flawed. You're a human. You have gifts to share with the world and when the darkness comes, when you're fighting the demons, just remember. I'm right there fighting with you. You're not alone. The gems I found were forged in the struggle. Never, ever give up.

So all that took place at the hotel,” he said, “consisted of a—” “The association,” Rachael said, “wanted to reach the bounty hunters here and in the Soviet Union. This [having sex] seemed to work…for reasons which we do not fully understand. Our limitation again, I guess.” “I doubt if it works as often or as well as you say,” he said thickly. “But it has with you.” “We’ll see.” “I already know,” Rachael said. “When I saw that expression on your face, that grief. I look for that.” “How many times have you done this?” “I don’t remember. Seven, eight. No, I believe it’s nine.” She—or rather it—nodded. “Yes, nine times.” “The idea is old-fashioned,” Rick said. Startled, Rachael said, “W-What?” Pushing the steering wheel away from him, he put the car into a gliding decline. “Or anyhow that’s how it strikes me. I’m going to kill you,” he said. “And go on to Roy and Irmgard Baty and Pris Stratton alone.” “That’s why you’re landing?” Apprehensively, she said, “There’s a fine; I’m the property, the legal property, of the association. I’m not an escaped android who fled here from Mars; I’m not in the same class as the others.” “But,” he said, “if I can kill you then I can kill them.” Her hands dived for her bulging, overstuffed, kipple-filled purse; she searched frantically, then gave up. “Goddamn this purse,” she said with ferocity. “I never can lay my hands on anything in it. Will you kill me in a way that won’t hurt? I mean, do it carefully. If I don’t fight; okay? I promise not to fight. Do you agree?” Rick said, “I understand now why Phil Resch said what he said. He wasn’t being cynical; he had just learned too much. Going through this—I can’t blame him. It warped him.” “But the wrong way.” She seemed more externally composed now. But still fundamentally frantic and tense. Yet, the dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism—with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it—could never have reconciled itself to. “I can’t stand the way you androids give up,” he said savagely.

Why two (or whole groups) of people can come up with the same story or idea at the same time, even when across the world from each-other: "A field is a region of influence, where a force will influence objects at a distance with nothing in between. We and our universe live in a Quantum sea of light. Scientists have found that the real currency of the universe is an exchange of energy. Life radiates light, even when grown in the dark. Creation takes place amidst a background sea of energy, which metaphysics might call the Force, and scientists call the "Field." (Officially the Zero Point Field) There is no empty space, even the darkest empty space is actually a cauldron of energies. Matter is simply concentrations of this energy (particles are just little knots of energy.) All life is energy (light) interacting. The universe is self-regenreating and eternal, constantly refreshing itself and in touch with every other part of itself instantaneously. Everything in it is giving, exchanging and interacting with energy, coming in and out of existence at every level. The self has a field of influence on the world and visa versa based on this energy. Biology has more and more been determined a quantum process, and consciousness as well, functions at the quantum level (connected to a universe of energy that underlies and connects everything). Scientist Walter Schempp's showed that long and short term memory is stored not in our brain but in this "Field" of energy or light that pervades and creates the universe and world we live in. A number of scientists since him would go on to argue that the brain is simply the retrieval and read-out mechanism of the ultimate storage medium - the Field. Associates from Japan would hypothesize that what we think of as memory is simply a coherent emission of signals from the "Field," and that longer memories are a structured grouping of this wave information. If this were true, it would explain why one tiny association often triggers a riot of sights, sounds and smells. It would also explain why, with long-term memory in particular, recall is instantaneous and doesn't require any scanning mechanism to sift through years and years of memory. If they are correct, our brain is not a storage medium but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of perception. Some scientists went as far as to suggest that all of our higher cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Field. This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity - and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes in fragments but often as a miraculous whole. An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in the Field. The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world. It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality - our very sense of separateness. If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a Field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world began? Where was consciousness-encased inside our bodies or out there in the Field? Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected. In ignoring the effect of the "Field" modern physicists set mankind back, by eliminating the possibility of interconnectedness and obscuring a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles. In re-normalizing their equations (to leave this part out) what they'd been doing was a little like subtracting God.

But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence—too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

LEADING LESSONS Let them see you sweat. That’s what dancing is about. That’s what life is about. Basically, you get out what you put in to any situation. If you’re lazy, cynical, negative--like that gas station mechanic--it’s going to show in anything you do. But if you focus, prepare, give 110 percent, you’re a winner no matter what the outcome. Any area of your life that you give attention to--career, relationships, health--will be better. I’m not saying that we should all go out there and become workaholics. I’m saying that you should commit yourself fully; give your whole self to the effort. You can’t blame others for your circumstances or your failures. When you ask yourself, “What am I prepared to do?” the answer should always be, “Whatever it takes.

Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty. Before the year is over, I think I will be looking back longingly on the Gulf of Lower California — that sea of mirages and timelessness. It is a very magical place. It is cold and clear here now - the leaves all fallen from the trees and only the frogs are very happy. Great cheering sections of frogs singing all the time. The earth is moist and water is seeping out of the ground everywhere. So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded. Maybe you can find some vague theology that will give you hope. Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like. There it is — It is interesting to watch the German efficiency, which, from the logic of the machine is efficient but which (I suspect) from the mechanics of the human species is suicidal. Certainly man thrives best (or has at least) in a state of semi-anarchy. Then he has been strong, inventive, reliant, moving. But cage him with rules, feed him and make him healthy and I think he will die as surely as a caged wolf dies. I should not be surprised to see a cared for, thought for, planned for nation disintegrate, while a ragged, hungry, lustful nation survived. Surely no great all-encompassing plan has ever succeeded. And so I'll look to see this German plan collapse because they do not know enough to plan for everything.

That we have separate and distinct mechanisms for appreciating the structural and the emotional aspects of music is brought home by the wide variety of responses (and even “dissociations”) that people have to music.146 There are many of us who lack some of the perceptual or cognitive abilities to appreciate music but nonetheless enjoy it hugely, and enthusiastically bawl out tunes, sometimes shockingly off-key, in a way that gives us great happiness (though it may make others squirm). There are others with an opposite balance: they may have a good ear, be finely sensitive to the formal nuances of music, but nevertheless do not care for it greatly or consider it a significant part of their lives. That one may be quite “musical” and yet almost indifferent to music, or almost tone-deaf yet passionately sensitive to music, is quite striking. While

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

In order to verify the conservation of energy, we must be careful that we have not put any in or taken any out. Second, the energy has a large number of different forms, and there is a formula for each one. These are: gravitational energy, kinetic energy, heat energy, elastic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, radiant energy, nuclear energy, mass energy. If we total up the formulas for each of these contributions, it will not change except for energy going in and out. It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives "28"'—always the same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reasons for the various formulas.

A Pleasant Theology One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? —from Mere Christianity

This is about my crucifixion watch,” Dr. Lecter said. “They won’t give me a patent, but they advise me to copyright the face. Look here.” He put a drawing the size of a dinner napkin in the carrier and Starling pulled it through. “You may have noticed that in most crucifixions the hands point to, say, a quarter to three, or ten till two at the earliest, while the feet are at six. On this watch face, Jesus is on the cross, as you see there, and the arms revolve to indicate the time, just like the arms on the popular Disney watches. The feet remain at six and at the top a small second hand revolves in the halo. What do you think?” The quality of the anatomical sketching was very good. The head was hers. “You’ll lose a lot of detail when it’s reduced to watch size,” Starling said. “True, unfortunately, but think of the clocks. Do you think this is safe without a patent?” “You’d be buying quartz watch movements—wouldn’t you?—and they’re already under patent. I’m not sure, but I think patents only apply to unique mechanical devices and copyright applies to design.

The mechanistic reason for Gell-Mann Amnesia is the hub-and-spoke topology of the pre-internet information environment. Suppose you were an expert in computer science, another person was an expert on Japan, a third knew about the bond market, and so on. You are spokes that are all connected to the hub (say, The New York Times) but not each other. Each spoke has superior local information, and can falsify NYT reports in their own domain, but has no mechanism for coordinating with other spokes, let alone establishing a superior hub. Until the internet, the blockchain, and the advent of cryptohistory. The long-term consequence of Gell-Mann Amnesia is Gell-Mann America. People know now that we are systematically misled about the present. But at least we live in the present, so we have local information that can falsify many news stories. We do not live in the past, so all we know is that we may be wildly off-base in our understanding of history. There are no people from the past around to give first hand accounts…though we can read their books and sometimes watch their films.

Galileo's mechanical world was only a partial representation of a finite number of probable worlds, each peculiar to a particular living species; and all these worlds are but a portion of the infinite number of possible worlds that may have once existed or may yet exist. But anything like a single world, common to all species, at all times, under all circumstances, is a purely hypothetical construction, drawn by inference from pathetically insufficient data, prized for the assurance of stability and intelligibility it gives, even though that assurance turns out, under severe examination, to be just another illusion. A butterfly or a beetle, a fish or a fowl, a dog or a dolphin, would have a different report to give even about primary qualities, for each lives in a world conditioned by the needs and environmental opportunities open to his species. In the gray visual world of the dog, smells, near and distant, subtle or violently exciting, probably play the part that colors do in man's world-though in the primal occupation of eating, the dog's world and man's world would approach each other more closely.

By the architecture of a system, I mean the complete and detailed specification of the user interface. For a computer this is the programming manual. For a compiler it is the language manual. For a control program it is the manuals for the language or languages used to invoke its functions. For the entire system it is the union of the manuals the user must consult to do his entire job. The architect of a system, like the architect of a building, is the user's agent. It is his job to bring professional and technical knowledge to bear in the unalloyed interest of the user, as opposed to the interests of the salesman, the fabricator, etc.[2] Architecture must be carefully distinguished from implementation. As Blaauw has said, "Where architecture tells what happens, implementation tells how it is made to happen."[3] He gives as a simple example a clock, whose architecture consists of the face, the hands, and the winding knob. When a child has learned this architecture, he can tell time as easily from a wristwatch as from a church tower. The implementation, however, and its realization, describe what goes on inside the case—powering by any of many mechanisms and accuracy control by any of many.

What do all of these involuntary shakes and shivers have in common? Why do we quake when frightened or tremble in anger? Why do we quiver at sexual climax? And what might be the physiological function of trembling in spiritual awe? What is the commonality of all these shivers and shakes, quivers and quakes? And what have they to do with transforming trauma, regulating stress and living life to its fullest? These gyrations and undulations are ways that our nervous system “shakes off” the last rousing experience and “grounds” us in readiness for the next encounter with danger, lust and life. They are mechanisms that help restore our equilibrium after we have been threatened or highly aroused. They bring us back down to earth, so to speak. Indeed, such physiological reactions are at the core of self-regulation and resilience. The experience of emergent resilience gives us a treasure beyond imagination. In the words of the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching, The fear and trembling engendered by shock comes to an individual at first in such a way that he sees himself placed at a disadvantage … this is only transitory. When the ordeal is over, he experiences relief, and thus the very terror he had to endure at the outset brings good fortune in the long run.

We’d been together for a year when he lost his job in Chicago and I started noticing a change in him. Gone was his ever present smile when we were together; more often than not he would be withdrawn and seemed as if he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Then, he got a job offer from his Uncle in Dalton, Ohio. He needed a new mechanic and wanted to help Beau out. Beau begged me to go with him; said he loved me and couldn’t bear to live without me. My parents and my best friend, Kate, were dead against it. They had noticed the change in Beau. They’d never been happy with our relationship, so they weren’t shy at expressing their concerns about moving across a whole other state to live with my “bad boy” boyfriend, and were vehemently against me giving up nursing school to do so. In the end, Beau used the ace up his sleeve, something I didn’t see coming until it was too late. He blackmailed me into moving with him. We were lying in bed one night, having just made love, and I was stuck in the post-coital haze that had my mind thinking of fluffy bunnies and rainbows. He rolled over and brushed the hair out of my face. “I can’t leave you behind, so I’ve decided you’re coming with me, Mac. It’s you and me against the world. I can’t survive without you, baby.” And

Society of Dead Poets and Poetesses No, none of them actually died, The poets continue to wander, Speaking through the Voices of Others, Do you think you can silence us, When our voice is an Anthem, When our weeping is music, And when our immortality Becomes alive, Did you think the Seine Would stop flowing Because of a few cannon shots? Well, I return, for I have been very silent, Oh God! This silence screams! They awakened those who were already awake, Just as wine intoxicates the drunkards, Words intoxicate the poet who, Over time, Realizes that those same words That once caressed him Become poison in his Blood, Killing him slowly, For the pleasure of their drinkers, In the end, the death of the Author is a fact, Singing to the Four Winds, My poems are not mine, They are poems of the world, And my life, too, Is no longer mine, It is yours, The poet is the most vulgar type of clown, For he is the one who offers his Existence In sacrifice for a meager attention, Like the ugliest harlot, Who gives her carnal pleasures To men who no longer Even understand what pleasure is, Everything has become mechanical, And mechanics became flesh, The vagabond poet Is the bullock who emasculates himself, To bring fertility to those who surround him.

Before going on with this first chapter, which serves as an introduction to all that I plan to write, I wish to inform your so-called “pure waking consciousness” of the fact that, in the chapters following this warning, I shall expound my thoughts intentionally in such a sequence and with such logical confrontation that the essence of certain real ideas may pass automatically from this “waking consciousness,” which most people in their ignorance mistake for the real consciousness, but which I affirm and experimentally prove is the fictitious one, into what you call the “subconscious”— which in my opinion ought to be the real human consciousness—in order that these concepts may mechanically bring about by themselves that transformation which in general should proceed in the common presence of a man and give him, by means of his own active mentation, the results proper to him as a man and not merely as a one- or two-brained animal I decided to do this without fail so that this introductory chapter, intended as I have already said to awaken your consciousness, may fully justify its purpose and, reaching not only your, in my opinion, “fictitious consciousness” but also your real consciousness, that is to say, what you call your “subconscious,” may compel you for the first time to reflect actively. In

[...]Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now. Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who ' 'reflects' the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object - and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura - the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself - to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques. This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity - not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory. The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.

Ideologies are not violent per se, rather it is man who is violent. Ideologies provide the grand narrative which covers up our victimary tendency. They are the mythical happy endings to our histories of persecutions. If you look carefully, you will see that the conclusion of myths is always positive and optimistic. There is always a cultural restoration after the crisis and the scapegoat resolution. The scapegoat provides the systemic closure which allows the social group to function once again, to run its course once more and to remain blind to its systemic closure (the belief that the ones they are scapegoating are actually guilty). After the Christian revelation this is no longer possible. The system cannot be pulled back by any form of pharmacological resolution, and the virus of mimetic violence can spread freely. This is the reason why Jesus says: ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword’ (Matthew 10.34). The Cross has destroyed once and for all the cathartic power of the scapegoat mechanism. Consequently, the Gospel does not provide a happy ending to our history. It simply shows us two options (which is exactly what ideologies never provide, freedom of choice): either we imitate Christ, giving up all our mimetic violence, or we run the risk of self-destruction. The apocalyptic feeling is based on that risk.

When you get right down to the nuts and bolts of understanding what the brain is doing and the relationship between conscious experience and the brain,” Dr. Schwartz said, “the data do not support the commonly held principle that you can just will yourself into one mental state or another. “It’s a subtle thing, freedom. It takes effort; it takes attention and focus to not act something like an automaton. Although we do have freedom, we exercise it only when we strive for awareness, when we are conscious not just of the content of the mind but also of the mind itself as a process.” When not governed by conscious awareness, our mind tends to run on automatic pilot. It is scarcely more “free” than a computer that performs preprogrammed tasks in response to a button being pushed. The distinction between automatic mechanism and conscious free will may be illustrated by the difference between punching a wall with your fist in a fit of reactive rage and mindfully saying to yourself, “I have so much anger in me, I really want to punch this wall right now”—or even more consciously, “My mind tells me I should punch the wall.” The latter mind-states give you the option of not striking the wall, without which there is no choice and no freedom—just a fractured hand and a head full of regret. “Choice,” Eckhart Tolle points out, “implies consciousness—a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice.

The introduction to the original book as I found it in Greece contains many interesting points, since it shows that educators in foreign countries, notably in Germany, had come to the same conclusion with our best American teachers. The editor of the little Greek reading-book says: "In editing this work we have made use not only of Homer's 'Odyssey,' but also of that excellent reader which is used in the public schools of Germany, Willman's 'Lesebuch aus Homer.' We have divided the little volume into three parts, the first of which gives a short resumé of the war against Troy and the destruction of that city, the second the wanderings of Odysseus till his arrival in Ithaca, the third his arrival and the killing of the wooers. We have no apology to make in presenting this book to the public as a school-book, since many people superior to us have shown the need of such books in school-work. The new public schools, as is well known, have a mission of the highest importance. They do not aim, as formerly, at absolute knowledge pounded into the heads of children in a mechanical way. Their aim is the mental and ethical development of the pupils. Reading and writing lead but half way to this goal. With all nations the readers used in the public schools are a collection of the noblest thoughts of their authors." The Greek editor had never read the inane rat and cat stories of American school "readers" when he wrote that.

If you have to walk along a dark mountain path, don’t you prefer to have a flashlight to shine on the path ahead? I would suggest that it is possible to have that flashlight in life all the time. What does a flashlight give us? Light. That is, a flashlight sheds light. It is like the faculty of attention—if we turn our full attention to something, we learn more about that thing. We are seeing it with more light. Our attention is our ‘flashlight.’ So it’s all about how much and how fun an attention we consciously bring to life. This quality of attention doesn’t make us hesitant, or slow to decide, particularly—just as the flashlight doesn’t make us hang back on the trail. So, how do we get to the better quality of attention? With attention! That is, we turn our attention on our attention; we start by trying to see how we don’t pay attention. We sort of keep that light on ourselves. ‘Know thyself’ has been an honored ancient teaching, and it’s still a cornerstone of the world’s greatest philosophies. If you watch yourself honestly, in a detached way—not guilt-tripping yourself when you screw up—you gradually learn where it was that you were just blundering along, reacting sort of mechanically, and being asleep even as you were in your waking day. Another way to make this happen is by returning your whole attention to the present—to what’s happening now, in this moment, and this moment, and on—within yourself and around you.

A bird does not need to take lessons in nest-building. Nor does it need to take courses in navigation. Yet birds do navigate thousands of miles, sometimes over open sea. They have no newspapers or TV to give them weather reports, no books written by explorer or pioneer birds to map out for them the warm areas of the earth. Nonetheless the bird “knows” when cold weather is imminent and the exact location of a warm climate even though it may be thousands of miles away. In attempting to explain such things, we usually say that animals have certain instincts that guide them. Analyze all such instincts and you will find they assist the animal to successfully cope with its environment. In short, animals have a Success Instinct. We often overlook the fact that man, too, has a Success Instinct, much more marvelous and much more complex than that of any animal. Our Creator did not shortchange man. On the other hand, man was especially blessed in this regard. Animals cannot select their goals. Their goals (self-preservation and procreation) are preset, so to speak. And their success mechanism is limited to these built-in goal-images, which we call “instincts.” Man, on the other hand, has something animals don’t: Creative Imagination. Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. With his imagination he can formulate a variety of goals. Man alone can direct his Success Mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.

Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.

But, suppose we should rise up tomorrow and emancipate, who would educate these millions, and teach them how to use their freedom? They never would rise to do much among us. The fact is, we are too lazy and unpractical, ourselves, ever to give them much of an idea of that industry and energy which is necessary to form them into men. They will have to go north, where labor is the fashion,—the universal custom; and tell me, now, is there enough Christian philanthropy, among your northern states, to bear with the process of their education and elevation? You send thousands of dollars to foreign missions; but could you endure to have the heathen sent into your towns and villages, and give your time, and thoughts, and money, to raise them to the Christian standard? That’s what I want to know. If we emancipate, are you willing to educate? How many families, in your town, would take a negro man and woman, teach them, bear with them, and seek to make them Christians? How many merchants would take Adolph, if I wanted to make him a clerk; or mechanics, if I wanted him taught a trade? If I wanted to put Jane and Rosa to a school, how many schools are there in the northern states that would take them in? how many families that would board them? and yet they are as white as many a woman, north or south. You see, Cousin, I want justice done us. We are in a bad position. We are the more obvious oppressors of the negro; but the unchristian prejudice of the north is an oppressor almost equally severe.

Humans are very strange creatures, unconscious too, dominated by mechanics that are hidden in front of their eyes. They call you wrong when you quote their own books, completely oblivious to the fact you may have been the author, even when they claim to believe in reincarnation. They always think their interpretation of reality is more right than that of others, even when you use their own books to explain their mistakes. If you tell them you write books of a spiritual nature, they may call you a liar if you don't match their deductions on what spirituality is. If you don't tell them you write books, they will in many cases recommend you to do it, because of how you speak, even though your speaking is the result of a mental training accumulated with the exercise of writing. If you tell them that you want to write a book, however, they may laugh and tell you it's a waste of time. If you love someone, she will lose interest and if you don't, she will want to know why. If you teach inside a classroom or a temple, people listen to you, but if you speak outside these two places they don't, unless they want something from you. They call you selfish if you don't give them what they want, but act selfishly when you ask the same from them. They don't want to be lied to but lie to others, and they don't want to be afraid but enjoy being in control. They talk about injustices but never apologize. When you are near they ignore you, and when you disappear they remember you. They say life is about luck but they create their own luck every day.

The game within the game is the game that only the players see. They experience it in relation to one another on the floor at a particular time and in the middle of the action. It is one of the nuances of the game of basketball. As Knick teammates during those years, we knew what a teammate was going to do almost before he did it. We helped one another on defense and shared the ball on offense. We made room for each of us to be his best within the context of the team. For example, I often would see Clyde come down the floor with the ball. I'd catch his eye. I knew he wanted to go down my side of the floor. In order to give him a little more room to move, I would clear out. That way I didn't clog up his space. Or, when I had the ball on the side and he was at the top of the key, waiting to go backdoor, our center knew he had to move to the other side of the floor to create the room for the backdoor bounce pass from me to Clyde who was moving down the lane toward the basket. That was the game within the game. On one level, the game within the game was a matter of mechanics but is also operated on a psychological level in that we truly were all for one and one for all. We challenged one another in practice to become better. We helped one another come back from defeat. We inspired one another to reach our peak team performance. None of us felt we could be as good alone as all of us could be together. Our unity came sometimes with laughs, sometimes with conflicts, sometimes with moments of collective insight, but it was that spirit of camaraderie which brought us together in a way that allowed the fans to see something very special.

Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosphy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard. What a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about it? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason… Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a women’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices[…]”. No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of women’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. The gives reasons lots to do withing the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason… Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason - objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty - Kant rejected objectivity.

Our two taco specials get shoved up on the serving counter, crispy, cheesy goodness in brown plastic baskets lined with parchment paper, sour cream and guacamole exactly where they should be. On the side. There is a perfect ratio of sour cream, guac, and salsa on a shredded chicken tostada. No one can make it happen for you. Many restaurants have tried. All have failed. Only the mouth knows its own pleasure, and calibration like Taco Heaven cannot be mass produced. It simply cannot. Taco Heaven is a sensory explosion of flavor that defies logic. First, you have to eye the amount of spiced meat, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and tomatillos. You must consider the size and crispiness of the shells. Some people–I call them blasphemers–like soft tacos. I am sitting across from Exhibit A. We won’t talk about soft tacos. They don’t make it to Taco Heaven. People who eat soft tacos live in Taco Purgatory, never fully understanding their moral failings, repeating the same mistakes again and again for all eternity. Like Perky and dating. Once you inventory your meat, lettuce, tomato, and shell quality, the real construction begins. Making your way to Taco Heaven is like a mechanical engineer building a bridge in your mouth. Measurements must be exact. Payloads are all about formulas and precision. One miscalculation and it all fails. Taco Death is worse than Taco Purgatory, because the only reason for Taco Death is miscalculation. And that’s all on you. “Oh, God,” Fiona groans through a mouthful of abomination. “You’re doing it, aren’t you?” “Doing what?” I ask primly, knowing damn well what she’s talking about. “You treat eating tacos like you’re the star of some Mythbusters show.” “Do not.” “Do too.” “Even if I do–and I am notconceding the point–it would be a worthwhile venture.” “You are as weird about your tacos as Perky is about her coffee.” “Take it back! I am not that weird.” “You are.” “Am not.” “This is why Perky and I swore we would never come here with you again.” Fiona grabs my guacamole and smears the rounded scoop all over the outside of her soft taco. I shriek. “How can you do that?” I gasp, the murder of the perfect ratio a painful, almost palpable blow. The mashed avocado has a death rattle that rings in my ears. Smug, tight lips give me a grimace. “See? A normal person would shout, ‘Hey! That’s mine!’ but you’re more offended that I’ve desecrated my inferior taco wrapping with the wrong amount of guac.” “Because it’s wrong.” “You should have gone to MIT, Mal. You need a job that involves nothing but pure math for the sake of calculating stupid shit no one else cares about.” “So glad to know that a preschool teacher holds such high regard for math,” I snark back. And MIT didn’t give me the kind of merit aid package I got from Brown, I don’t add. “Was that supposed to sting?” She takes the rest of my guacamole, grabs a spoon, and starts eating it straight out of the little white paper scoop container thing. “How can you do that? It’s like people who dip their french fries in mayonnaise.” I shudder, standing to get in line to buy more guac. “I dip my french fries in mayo!” “More evidence of your madness, Fi. Get help now. It may not be too late.” I stick my finger in her face. “And by the way, you and Perky talk about my taco habits behind my back? Some friends!” I hmph and turn toward the counter.

Which is actually good because we’re doing an AP Euro study group this week at the library—I mean good that it got canceled, not good that someone died—so I was wondering too if maybe I can use the car, so you won’t have to come pick me up super late every night?” Alma had been a wildly clingy kid, but now she is a mostly autonomous and wholly inscrutable seventeen-year-old; she is mean and gorgeous and breathtakingly good at math; she has inside jokes with her friends about inexplicable things like Gary Shandling and avocado toast, paints microscopic cherries on her fingernails and endeavors highly involved baking ventures, filling their fridge with oblong bagels and six-layer cakes. “I’m asking now because last time you told me I didn’t give you enough notice,” she says. She has recently begun speaking conversationally to Julia and Mark again after nearly two years of brooding silence, and now it’s near impossible to get her to stop. She regales them with breathless incomprehensible stories at the dinner table; she delivers lengthy recaps of midseason episodes of television shows they have never seen; she mounts elaborate and convincing defenses of things she wants them to give her, or give her permission to do. Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that she won’t be accepted next month to several of the seventeen exalted and appallingly expensive colleges to which she has applied, and because Julia would like the remainder of her tenure at home to elapse free of trauma, she responds to her daughter as she did when she was a napping baby, tiptoeing around her to avoid awakening unrest. The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

a lecture in Leiden in May 1920, Einstein publicly proposed a reincarnation, though not a rebirth, of the ether. “More careful reflection teaches us, however, that the special theory of relativity does not compel us to deny ether,” he said. “We may assume the existence of an ether, only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it.” This revised view was justified, he said, by the results of the general theory of relativity. He made clear that his new ether was different from the old one, which had been conceived as a medium that could ripple and thus explain how light waves moved through space. Instead, he was reintroducing the idea in order to explain rotation and inertia. Perhaps he could have saved some confusion if he had chosen a different term. But in his speech he made clear that he was reintroducing the word intentionally: To deny the ether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical qualities whatever. The fundamental facts of mechanics do not harmonize with this view… Besides observable objects, another thing, which is not perceptible, must be looked upon as real, to enable acceleration or rotation to be looked upon as something real… The conception of the ether has again acquired an intelligible content, although this content differs widely from that of the ether of the mechanical wave theory of light… According to the general theory of relativity, space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, there exists an ether. Space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any spacetime intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the qualities of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.

It’s not the motorcycle maintenance, not the faucet. It’s all of technology they can’t take. And then all sorts of things started tumbling into place and I knew that was it. Sylvia’s irritation at a friend who thought computer programming was ‘creative.’ All their drawings and paintings and photographs without a technological thing in them. Of course she’s not going to get mad at that faucet, I thought. You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate. Of course John signs off every time the subject of cycle repair comes up, even when it is obvious he is suffering for it. That’s technology. And sure, of course, obviously. It’s so simple when you see it. To get away from technology out into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the motorcycle in the first place. For me to bring it back to them just at the point and place where they think they have finally escaped it just frosts both of them, tremendously. That’s why the conversation always breaks and freezes when the subject comes up. Other things fit in too. They talk once in a while in as few pained words as possible about ‘it’ or ‘it all’ as in the sentence, ‘There is just no escape from it.’ And if I asked, ‘From what?’ the answer might be ‘The whole thing,’ or ‘The whole organized bit,’ or even ‘The system.’ Sylvia once said defensively, ‘Well, you know how to cope with it,’ which puffed me up so much at the time I was embarrassed to ask what ‘it’ was and so remained somewhat puzzled. I thought it was something more mysterious than technology. But now I see that the ‘it’ was mainly, if not entirely, technology. But, that doesn’t sound right either. The ‘it’ is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape. I’m putting it way too heavily here but in a less emphatic and less defined way this is what it is. Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak an inhuman language when describing what they do. It’s all parts and relationships of unheard-of things that never make any sense no matter how often you hear about them. And their things, their monster keeps eating up land and polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it, and hardly any way to escape it.

One can readily imagine in what terms a man of today would speak if called upon to make a pronouncement on the only religion ever to have introduced a radical formula of salvation: "The quest for deliverance can be justified only if one believes in the transmigration, in the endless vagrancy of the self, and if one aspires to halt it. But for us who do not believe in it, what are we to halt? This unique and negligible duration? It is obviously not long enough to deserve the effort an escape would require. For the Buddhist, the prospect of other existences is a nightmare; for us, the nightmare consists in the termination of this one, this nightmare. Give us another one, we would be tempted to clamor, so that our disgraces will not conclude too soon, so that they may, at their leisure, hound us through several lives. Deliverance answers a necessity only for the person who feels threatened by a surfeit of existence, who fears the burden of dying and redying. For us, condemned not to reincarnate ourselves, what's the use of struggling to set ourselves free from a nonentity? to liberate ourselves from a terror whose end lies in view? Further more, what's the use of pursuing a supreme unreality when everything here-below is already unreal? One simply does not exert oneself to get rid of something so flimsily justified, so precariously grounded. Each of us, each man unlucky enough not to believe in the eternal cycle of births and deaths, aspires to a superabundance of illusion and torment. We pine for the malediction of being reborn. Buddha took exorbitant pains to achieve what? definitive death - what we, on the contrary, are sure of obtaining without meditations and mortifications, without raising a finger." ... That's just about how this fallen man would express himself if he consented to lay bare the depths of his thought. Who will dare throw the first stone? Who has not spoken to himself in this way? We are so addicted to our own history that we would like to see it drone on and on, relentlessly. But whether one lives one or a thousand lives, whether one has at one's disposal a single hour or all of time, the problem remains the same: an insect and a god should not differ in their manner of viewing the fact of existence as such, which is so terrifying (as only miracles can be) that, reflecting on it, one understands the will to disappear forever so as not to have to consider it again in other existences. This is what Buddha emphasized, and it seems doubtful he would have altered his conclusion had he ceased to believe in the mechanism of transmigration.

When I get back, I decide to listen to a talk Ram Dass once gave about what happens after death. When you die, where your consciousness is at the moment of death is a reflection of your level of evolution. If you are ready for the transformation that occurs at the moment of death, when there is a dissolving of the control mechanism and an intensification of all the energies, and you are not identified with all that so that you have equanimity through it, you can witness from a place of presence. You can witness the entire process of dying, and your consciousness doesn’t flicker. Most people, however, are attached to some way of looking at the world, and when that starts to dissolve at the moment of death, they go unconscious. They go through the process unconsciously and pick up the thread later on, because it happens too fast and requires letting go too fast. So the art is to let go before you die, so that when you die, there is no letting go required. That’s the most evolved state. They say in the literature that one who sees the way in the morning can gladly die in the evening. Die before you die, so that when you die you need not die. There is a great quote from Kabir: ‘If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive’—that is, if you don’t break the identification with your body and your personality while you’re alive—‘do you think that ghosts will do it after?’ The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten, that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you’ll simply end up with an apartment in the city of death. But if you make love with the Divine now, then in the next life, you will have the face of satisfied desire. So plunge into the truth. Find out who your teacher is. Believe in the great sound. In other words, do your sadhana so that you can break the identification now. Then, at the moment of transformation, you can just go. If you have fear, you will be met and guided and protected. There will be beings that are there, who are on other planes, available to give meaning to this transformation for you. So the least conscious beings go unconscious and get reprogrammed. The next more conscious beings meet other beings who guide them and help them. The most conscious beings just let go completely at the moment of death, and they don’t go through more incarnations. The meaning of the wheel of birth and death is that as you get more and more evolved, there is less likelihood that you will keep taking rebirth. From the soul’s point of view, you take rebirth only to work your way out of the illusion of your own separateness.

Long story short, I got lured into a trap. A Mage using that concealment spell tried to knife me. Then someone else tried to blow my brains out with a bullet." "A Mage attacked you?" Alain asked, feeling a sick sensation inside. "She tried. I knew they'd been watching me. I didn't give them any reason to try to kill me." Mari looked at him. "Did I?" "It is my fault," Alain admitted. "Even though I have tried to keep them from finding out who you are, they still believe that you are dangerous." She gave him another look, then shook her head. "From the looks of things, I'm mainly dangerous to my friends and myself. Just how much trouble did you actually get in because of spending time with me in Dorcastle?" Alain looked into the fire. "My Guild did not believe that I had been with you in Dorcastle. The elders thought that the woman I had been seen with in that city was a common I had sought out because she researched the Mechanic I had met in Ringhmon." "Why would you want to find a common who looked like me?" Mari asked. "For physical satisfaction." The simple statement would have created no reaction in a Mage, but he saw the outraged look in Mari's face and hurriedly added more. "I would not have done that. But the elders assumed that I did. I told you that they believed I was attracted to you." "Alain, 'attracted to' doesn't bring to mind the idea of finding another woman who resembles me so that you can pretend that you're—" she choked off the words, glaring into the night. "The elders assumed that. I never wanted it. I would never do it. There is no other woman like you." Somehow he must have said the right thing, because she relaxed. "But because of that belief of theirs," Mari said, "your elders thought you might look for me again." "They actually thought that you would seek me," Alain explained. "They were very concerned that you would..." His "social skills" might need work, but Alain realized that he probably should not say the rest. Too late. Mari bent a sour look his way. "What did they think I would do?" "It is not important." "Alain..." He exhaled slowly, realizing that Mari would not give up on this question. "The elders thought that you would seek to ensnare me, using your physical charms, and through me work to strike at the Mage Guild." She stared back in disbelief. "Ensnare? They actually used the word ensnare?" "Yes. Many times." "Using my physical charms?" Mari seemed unable to decide whether to laugh or get angry. She looked down at herself. "I'm a little low on ammunition when it comes to physical charms, or hadn't these elders of yours noticed?" "You are beautiful beyond all other women," Alain objected. Mari rolled her eyes. "And you ate seriously deluded. I hadn't realized how badly until this moment.

The impossible class. Poor, happy and independent! — these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! — these things can also go together — and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory? In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!

he importance and influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can scarcely be exaggerated. A century after Darwin’s death, the great evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote, ‘The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of some of the most basic beliefs of his age.’1 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s biographers, contend, ‘Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker—even Freud or Marx—this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.’2 In the words of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is… Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.’3 Dennett goes on to add, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’4 The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin begin their introduction by stating, ‘Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life—including the evolutionary origin of humans—have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice.’5 Among the fundamental questions raised by Darwin’s work, which are still being debated by philosophers (and others) are these: ‘Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards—competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones?’6 As the editors of the volume point out, virtually the entire corpus of the foundational works of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel, has had to be re-examined in the light of Darwin’s work. Darwin continues to be read, discussed, interpreted, used, abused—and misused—to this day. As the philosopher and historian of science, Jean Gayon, puts it, ‘[T]his persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science.

Christine's heart is thumping wildly. She lets herself be led (her aunt means her nothing but good) into a tiled and mirrored room full of warmth and sweetly scented with mild floral soap and sprayed perfumes; an electrical apparatus roars like a mountain storm in the adjoining room. The hairdresser, a brisk, snub-nosed Frenchwoman, is given all sorts of instructions, little of which Christine understands or cares to. A new desire has come over her to give herself up, to submit and let herself be surprised. She allows herself to be seated in the comfortable barber's chair and her aunt disappears. She leans back gently, and, eyes closed in a luxurious stupor, senses a mechanical clattering, cold steel on her neck, and the easy incomprehensible chatter of the cheerful hairdresser; she breathes in clouds of fragrance and lets aromatic balms and clever fingers run over her hair and neck. Just don't open your eyes, she thinks. If you do, it might go away. Don't question anything, just savor this Sundayish feeling of sitting back for once, of being waited on instead of waiting on other people. Just let our hands fall into your lap, let good things happen to you, let it come, savor it, this rare swoon of lying back and being ministered to, this strange voluptuous feeling you haven't experienced in years, in decades. Eyes closed, feeling the fragrant warmth enveloping her, she remembers the last time: she's a child, in bed, she had a fever for days, but now it's over and her mother brings some sweet white almond milk, her father and her brother are sitting by her bed, everyone's taking care of her, everyone's doing things for her, they're all gentle and nice. In the next room the canary is singing mischievously, the bed is soft and warm, there's no need to go to school, everything's being done for her, there are toys on the bed, though she's too pleasantly lulled to play with them; no, it's better to close her eyes and really feel, deep down, the idleness, the being waited on. It's been decades since she thought of this lovely languor from her childhood, but suddenly it's back: her skin, her temples bathed in warmth are doing the remembering. A few times the brisk salonist asks some question like, 'Would you like it shorter?' But she answers only, 'Whatever you think,' and deliberately avoids the mirror held up to her. Best not to disturb the wonderful irresponsibility of letting things happen to you, this detachment from doing or wanting anything. Though it would be tempting to give someone an order just once, for the first time in your life, to make some imperious demand, to call for such and such. Now fragrance from a shiny bottle streams over her hair, a razor blade tickles her gently and delicately, her head feels suddenly strangely light and the skin of her neck cool and bare. She wants to look in the mirror, but keeping her eyes closed in prolonging the numb dreamy feeling so pleasantly. Meanwhile a second young woman has slipped beside her like a sylph to do her nails while the other is waving her hair. She submits to it all without resistance, almost without surprise, and makes no protest when, after an introductory 'Vous etes un peu pale, Mademoiselle,' the busy salonist, employing all manner of pencils and crayons, reddens her lips, reinforces the arches of her eyebrows, and touches up the color of her cheeks. She's aware of it all and, in her pleasant detached stupor, unaware of it too: drugged by the humid, fragrance-laden air, she hardly knows if all this happening to her or to some other, brand-new self. It's all dreamily disjointed, not quite real, and she's a little afraid of suddenly falling out of the dream.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel emphasis on grace could be lost in several ways. A church might simply become heterodox — losing its grip on the orthodox tenets of theology that under-gird the gospel, such as the triune nature of God, the deity of Christ, the wrath of God, and so on. It may turn its back on the very belief in justification by faith alone and the need for conversion and so move toward a view that being a Christian is simply a matter of church membership or of living a life based on Christ’s example. This cuts the nerve of gospel renewal and revival.2 But it is possible to subscribe to every orthodox doctrine and nevertheless fail to communicate the gospel to people’s hearts in a way that brings about repentance, joy, and spiritual growth. One way this happens is through dead orthodoxy, in which such pride grows in our doctrinal correctness that sound teaching and right church practice become a kind of works-righteousness. Carefulness in doctrine and life is, of course, critical, but when it is accompanied in a church by self-righteousness, mockery, disdain of everyone else, and a contentious, combative attitude, it shows that, while the doctrine of justification may be believed, a strong spirit of legalism reigns nonetheless. The doctrine has failed to touch hearts.3 Lloyd-Jones also speaks of “defective orthodoxy” and “spiritual inertia.”4 Some churches hold to orthodox doctrines but with imbalances and a lack of proper emphasis. Many ministries spend more time defending the faith than propagating it. Or they may give an inordinate amount of energy and attention to matters such as prophecy or spiritual gifts or creation and evolution. A church may become enamored with the mechanics of ministry and church organization. There are innumerable reasons that critical doctrines of grace and justification and conversion, though strongly held, are kept “on the shelf.” They are not preached and communicated in such a way that connects to people’s lives. People see the doctrines — yet they do not see them.

Dirac's quantum mechanics thus allows us to do two things. First, to calculate which values a physical variable may assume. This is called "calculation of the spectrum of a variable"; it captures the granular nature of things. When an object (atom, electromagnetic field, molecule, pendulum, stone, star, and the like) interacts with something else, the values computed are those that its variables can assume in the interaction (relationism). The second thing that Dirac's quantum mechanics allows us to do is to compute the probability that this or that value of a variable appears at next interaction. This is called "calculation of an amplitude of transition." Probability expresses the third feature of the theory: indeterminacy, the fact that it does not give unique predictions, only probabilistic ones. This is Dirac's quantum mechanics: a recipe for calculating the probability that one or another value in the spectrum appears during an interaction. That's it. What happens between one interaction and the next is not mentioned in the theory. It does not exist.

In the social dilemma of the tragic commons, popularised by Garrett Hardin (1968),[51] a group of famers has access to a common grassed area upon which to sustain their individually owned herds of sheep. Each farmer, being rational, wishes to keep as many sheep as possible on the commons in order to make more money – the sheep being a mechanism for converting common property (grass) into individual wealth. However, if the grass is consumed faster than the rate at which it grows (because the number of sheep is unsustainable) the farmers are collectively disadvantaged. The dilemma is that a farmer who adds extra sheep to the commons receives all of the profit, while the cost of doing so is distributed to the group. Each farmer, therefore, has an individual incentive to increase their use of the land even though doing so reduces the productivity of the land, and affects them all adversely. The selfish, though rational, short-term individual preferences of the farmers undermine their longer-term individual interests. Furthermore, the agential behaviour of the farmers creates structural barriers to collective reform because once one farmer overuses the common resource without being punished the action becomes legitimised. The rational behaviour of individuals can thus create collective irrationality. Solving this collective-action problem is typically understood to require either the conversion of the common resource into privately owned property (the exploitation of which is, therefore, regulated by the private owners because they have incentives to maintain its productivity), or through the creation of a public authority that is capable of regulating the amount of the common resource available to an individual.[52] But there is also another option: that the farmers lobby wealthy landowners from the neighbouring village to give them more land and more grass and thus prevent an outbreak of violence between the famers that may affect those beyond the borders of the commons.

The spinothalamic system, on the other hand, runs through the “grey matter” of the cord, so named because it has no white fatty insulation sheaths around its axons. Their spatial orientation is not nearly so carefully preserved at all levels, and they make many more internuncial synaptic junctions on their way up the cord. Their transmission speed is roughly one-fifth of that of the dorsal tract. This system carries impulses which announce pain; thermal sensations, both hot and cold; crude touch sensations that are not acutely localized; pressure sensations that do not rely upon fine distinctions; kinesthetic sensations having to do with chronic conditions, or the body at rest; tickles and itches; and sexual sensations. It is a fact of considerable significance to our reflex responses that pain sensations are carried exclusively by the slower spinothalamic pathway. This means that more neutral and at the same time more detailed sensory information will always reach the spinal circuits and the cortex slightly before the stab of pain arrives. This gives us a brief moment to assess the location and the cause of the pain before we react, so that our reflex withdrawal can be more appropriately tailored to the actual source of the pain and more effectively directed; that is, so that we will be able to assess the intensity of the burn, and will be sure to jerk away from the flame rather than towards it, and will arrest our jerk before we crash into the wall. This time lag gives a special role to general tactile sensations—including body work—when we are in pain. It means that it is possible to bombard the consciousness with more rapidly transmitted and more detailed touch sensations which tend to displace the pain response from the foreground. This is why rubbing the spot that hurts, or jumping up and down, or shaking the injured hand are often effective for alleviating pain. This is the principle behind the mother’s instinctual rocking and stroking of her hurt child, and it is a principle that can be turned to great advantage in bodywork. If the rest of the body can be inundated with touch sensations, particularly pleasurable ones, the part that is in pain can be shifted away from the mind’s central focus. On the other hand, this very same mechanism presents a danger: By keeping ourselves busy, and by forcing our attention onto other matters, it is possible to suppress pain signals which may be very important, possible to bury our awareness of threatening conditions beneath a layer of faster, more acute, but more trivial sensations. The mind’s mechanisms of selection and focus can play tricks that are nasty as well as ones that are helpful. One of the principal strengths of bodywork is that it can generate the sensory information—the self awareness—that is necessary for the individual to identify and gain control over conflicting tendencies of this kind.