Eliminate Fear Quotes

Anger exceeding limits causes fear and excessive kindness eliminates respect.

Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I.

Once you reject fear, you will become the perfect candidate to receive and reflect Truth.

To crush fear doesn't mean you eliminate it; crushing fear means you literally crush it down into smaller, more manageable parts and tackle one piece at a time.

You don't have to apologize for loving someone or wanting a life that no longer fits your blueprint. The beginning phase of reclaiming your life always starts with apologizing to yourself, then apologizing to others for wasting their time because of your fear based decisions. The truth is when we eliminate fear we often find the real path we were meant to be on.

I don't fear death; I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice. I am young and I want to live. But I say to those who would eliminate my voice: I am ready, wherever and whenever you might strike. You can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of the spring.

I don’t know what afflicts me now. Indecisiveness? Reluctance? Fear of being vulnerable? I am not a coward, at least. Fear isn’t equivalent to cowardice. Even a soldier deployed at the border fears bullet, which is exactly why he is able to dodge the enemy and eliminate them.

The things we tend to fear, aren't really a thing or a fear at all, but a choice we must make next. Using the Jamange line to become more rational, will eliminate most fears and keep those tracks clearer for you

I don't like anything that scares me, and I prefer to face it head on and get over it. Anyone who says they're not scared is a fool, a liar or both. I just don't want that fear in my stomach to be part of my life, so I work to eliminate it.

Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine. If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it. Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering. By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.

It’s not about the elimination of fear. Rather it’s about the elimination of the feeling that the elimination of fear is necessary before we take the next step.

Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father’s active goodness and unrestricted love.

There are many places where we choose to hide. And in the hiding, we soon realize that hiding never eliminates what we are hiding from.

This in essence is my goal. To set an example by doing what is good. If I live openly and honestly, I set an example of virtue, humanness, restoration, and healing. I give others permission to join me on my journey despite the fear of failure or the rejection it might elicit when they know they are not alone in their experience. The more of us who amass the courage to embark openly on this path, the more normal this experience becomes, effectively eliminating the tactic of shame and isolation that the enemy so often uses to cause us to falter.

Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent. But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.

Our insecurities drive us. Our fears control us. We try to hide the first and deny the second and it is exhausting us.

Faith eliminates fear.

You can’t operate a company by fear, because the way to eliminate fear is to avoid criticism, and the best way to avoid criticism is to do nothing. —STEVE ROSS, FORMER CEO OF TIME WARNER

We must realize that violence is not confined to physical violence. Fear is violence, caste discrimination is violence, exploitation of others, however subtle, is violence, segregation is violence, thinking ill of others and condemning others are violence. In order to reduce individual acts of physical violence, we must work to eliminate violence at all levels, mental, verbal, personal, and social, including violence to animals, plants, and all other forms of life.

I wanted to be with her, like all the time. Eliminate the obstacles, the people and things in our lives that were keeping us apart: Brandi, Seth, Kirsten, society, me. Me? Make that my fear. What was I afraid of, exactly? What other people would think? I guess, a little. But that wasn’t what was stopping me from acting on my feelings. It was the intensity of them. The desire for her. I knew if I gave into it, I’d have to surrender myself completely. I’d lose all control. Everything I knew, everything I was, the walls I’d built up to protect myself all these years would come crashing down. I might get lost in the rubble. Yet, she made me feel alive in a way I'd only ever imagined I could feel. Bells, whistles, music. (Chapter. 15)

The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover's paranoia and the creation of a secret police).

Every physical response, every psychological change and every mental transformation starts with the mind.

It is not uncommon for highly agitating situations to show up right before a major breakthrough takes place in our lives. In fact, we can definitely prepare for a breakthrough when the enemy starts using agitation against us.

YOU KNOW HOW RAMADI WAS WON? We went in and killed all the bad people we could find. When we started, the decent (or potentially decent) Iraqis didn’t fear the United States; they did fear the terrorists. The U.S. told them, “We’ll make it better for you.” The terrorists said, “We’ll cut your head off.” Who would you fear? Who would you listen to? When we went into Ramadi, we told the terrorists, “We’ll cut your head off. We will do whatever we have to and eliminate you.” Not only did we get the terrorists’ attention—we got everyone’s attention. We showed we were the force to be reckoned with. That’s where the so-called Great Awakening came. It wasn’t from kissing up to the Iraqis. It was from kicking butt. The tribal leaders saw that we were bad-asses, and they’d better get their act together, work together, and stop accommodating the insurgents. Force moved that battle. We killed the bad guys and brought the leaders to the peace table. That is how the world works.

Dr. Jubal Harshaw, professional clown, amateur subversive, and parasite by choice, had long attempted to eliminate “hurry” and all related emotions from his pattern. Being aware that he had but a short time left to live and having neither Martian nor Kansan faith in his own immortality, it was his purpose to live each golden moment as if it were eternity—without fear, without hope, but with sybaritic gusto.

Excision of my genitals didn’t eliminate the human sex drive, and neither did the fear of hellfire. Repression only led to hypocrisy and lying, strategies that corrupt the human individual, and it failed to protect people from unwanted pregnancy and disease. The

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. —Eleanor Roosevelt Some

Life is a competition to eliminate fear and doubts to double our life to live better not bitter in this world.

I used to think that if only I could make everything perfect, then I could relax and have fun. If I could just eliminate all mistakes, my life would settle into place - click! - and my mind would rest. If I'm being truthful, I have to acknowledge that on some unchangeable, deep-down level, there's still a part of me that thinks that. I'm still a first grader at a spelling bee, thinking that what matters more than anything is that I get every word right. But by now, I've built up a crowd of selves who can set that little girl at ease. It's okay, they tell her. Mistakes will happen - they have happened - and it's not the end of the world. They get her to loosen up a little bit. They help her see that doing things wrong is part of doing life right. They show her that joy is bigger than fear. It can even be funny when things go haywire.

Learning how someone else is already doing the thing you want to do, or a version of it, can eliminate fear—every path is easier to follow when you see someone else’s footprints already on it.

Maybe we’ll evolve to a point where fear as an experience is no longer instinctual, but rather an emotion we use to enrich our understanding of why our human ancestors killed each other when they could have loved each other. One day we’ll be holding hands instead of grudges; we’ll eliminate our territorial circuits and know what love is. One day we’ll be holding hands instead of M-16s.

Before entering into any kind of intimate relationships, whether friendship, familial re-connection, or romance, the idea of “needing” or “being needed” must be eliminated. It's harmful to me and others. Need is no kind of foundation for anything. Rather, I choose to be wanted. “Want” is a deliberate choice. Wanting is not based in fear or ego (which are one in the same, I believe). Want comes from recognition of someone else's goodness and loving them for it. Being wanted is unconditional. It does not require emotional games be played, it does not require reparations be made or obligations be met. Being wanted is good, in and of itself.

I’ve learned that possibly the greatest detractor from high performance is fear: fear that you are not prepared, fear that you are in over your head, fear that you are not worthy, and ultimately, fear of failure. If you can eliminate that fear—not through arrogance or just wishing difficulties away, but through hard work and preparation—you will put yourself in an incredibly powerful position to take on the challenges you face.

Moreover, we look in vain to philosophy for the answer to the great riddle. Despite its noble purpose and history, pure philosophy long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence. The question itself is a reputation killer. It has become a Gorgon for philosophers, upon whose visage even the best thinkers fear to gaze. They have good reason for their aversion. Most of the history of philosophy consists of failed models of the mind. The field of discourse is strewn with the wreckage of theories of consciousness. After the decline of logical positivism in the middle of the twentieth century, and the attempt of this movement to blend science and logic into a closed system, professional philosophers dispersed in an intellectual diaspora. They emigrated into the more tractable disciplines not yet colonized by science – intellectual history, semantics, logic, foundational mathematics, ethics, theology, and, most lucratively, problems of personal life adjustment. Philosophers flourish in these various endeavors, but for the time being, at least, and by a process of elimination, the solution of the riddle has been left to science. What science promises, and has already supplied in part, is the following. There is a real creation story of humanity, and one only, and it is not a myth. It is being worked out and tested, and enriched and strengthened, step by step. (9-10)

Evolution has geared the human stress response to last about thirty seconds. It's enough time to facilitate fight or flight. Evolution has not adapted our brains or bodies to handle weeks or months of prolonged stress.

FAITH IS THE EMPEROR OF DREAMS A great emperor is born from one tiny sperm. A large eagle grows from one small egg. A giant tree grows from one tiny seedling. For the newborn and wise, Everything begins small. However, it is faith that builds the staircase to your dreams. Always have faith in yourself and the universe, For one will not get you anywhere without the other. Both must be equally strong to reach your desires, For they are the wings that will lift you to your dreams. Not a single bird makes its first leap From a tree without faith. And not a single animal in the jungle starts each day without faith. Faith is the flame that eliminates fear, And faith is the true emperor of dreams.

Don’t strive to be a well-rounded leader. Instead, discover your zone and stay there. Then delegate everything else. Admitting a weakness is a sign of strength. Acknowledging weakness doesn’t make a leader less effective. Everybody in your organization benefits when you delegate responsibilities that fall outside your core competency. Thoughtful delegation will allow someone else in your organization to shine. Your weakness is someone’s opportunity. Leadership is not always about getting things done “right.” Leadership is about getting things done through other people. The people who follow us are exactly where we have led them. If there is no one to whom we can delegate, it is our own fault. As a leader, gifted by God to do a few things well, it is not right for you to attempt to do everything. Upgrade your performance by playing to your strengths and delegating your weaknesses. There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination. Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing. My competence in these areas defines my success as a pastor. A sixty-hour workweek will not compensate for a poorly delivered sermon. People don’t show up on Sunday morning because I am a good pastor (leader, shepherd, counselor). In my world, it is my communication skills that make the difference. So that is where I focus my time. To develop a competent team, help the leaders in your organization discover their leadership competencies and delegate accordingly. Once you step outside your zone, don’t attempt to lead. Follow. The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Only those leaders who act boldly in times of crisis and change are willingly followed. Accepting the status quo is the equivalent of accepting a death sentence. Where there’s no progress, there’s no growth. If there’s no growth, there’s no life. Environments void of change are eventually void of life. So leaders find themselves in the precarious and often career-jeopardizing position of being the one to draw attention to the need for change. Consequently, courage is a nonnegotiable quality for the next generation leader. The leader is the one who has the courage to act on what he sees. A leader is someone who has the courage to say publicly what everybody else is whispering privately. It is not his insight that sets the leader apart from the crowd. It is his courage to act on what he sees, to speak up when everyone else is silent. Next generation leaders are those who would rather challenge what needs to change and pay the price than remain silent and die on the inside. The first person to step out in a new direction is viewed as the leader. And being the first to step out requires courage. In this way, courage establishes leadership. Leadership requires the courage to walk in the dark. The darkness is the uncertainty that always accompanies change. The mystery of whether or not a new enterprise will pan out. The reservation everyone initially feels when a new idea is introduced. The risk of being wrong. Many who lack the courage to forge ahead alone yearn for someone to take the first step, to go first, to show the way. It could be argued that the dark provides the optimal context for leadership. After all, if the pathway to the future were well lit, it would be crowded. Fear has kept many would-be leaders on the sidelines, while good opportunities paraded by. They didn’t lack insight. They lacked courage. Leaders are not always the first to see the need for change, but they are the first to act. Leadership is about moving boldly into the future in spite of uncertainty and risk. You can’t lead without taking risk. You won’t take risk without courage. Courage is essential to leadership.

Mindless action without a real understanding of the ramifications is only likely to result in serious miscalculations or a colossal waste of time. Avoid both by using your judgment, filtered through both knowledge and experience. Use common sense and logic as a counterbalance to emotion.

The obsession with security at any price petrifies us, and we increase our fear by trying to eliminate risk. That is what is ridiculous about the great outcries in the media: we wake up in order to demand more passivity, a better protected life. The challenge is not only to decrease the amount of space the media devote to hazards but also to increase our ability to resist misfortunes. To augment our endurance rather than our panic.

to fear God means to honor and respect Him in every decision we make. When we fear the Lord, we have a reverence for Him that moves us to obey His Word.

major difference between gossip and small talk is that one is characterized by pleasantries while the other can be explained as a practice in judgemental nastiness. Gossip

to build rapport, discover the same interest on common ground, and establish affinity. You

prepare is to be prepared.

Fear is the number one response to excessive worries and overthinking brains. In order to feel completely in control of our thoughts and actions, it is best to overcome our fears.

The moment you establish a line of communication between two points, you subtly change both. That is also true for the way the brain is affected by the mind.

Before you can act you must choose. Before you can choose you must know. Before you can know you must feel. And before you can feel you must be trained.

Faith is the flame that eliminates fear.

To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes; when you have eliminated what you can’t do, what remains is what you must do.

Fear of failure and/or fear of success can sabotage our best efforts. Knowing that situations causing these fears rarely represent actual danger can eliminate many anxieties.

Everything we do is part of a complex pattern of interwoven relationships which mix personal and professional life.

a conviction of who they are and what they do that’s unshakable.

Control is about creating that inner dialogue which makes those negative voices fall silent.

Special as they may appear to us, articulating what makes you special requires a very precise awareness of your existence, and that’s hard to come by.

Improving the quality of consciousness, advancing the quality and depth of awareness, understanding your nature and purpose, maturation of soul, manifesting universal unconditional love, letting go of fear, and eliminating ego, desire, wants, needs, or preconceived notions – these are the attributes and the results of a successfully evolving consciousness. What do the facts of your life, the facts of your existence, and your results say about the quality of your consciousness, the effectiveness of your process, or the size of your picture?

Conflict can become genocidal when powerful groups think that the most efficient means to get what they want is to eliminate those in the way. It can become equally or more murderous when the motive is revenge, and descend to the worst levels of slaughter when there is great fear that the survival of the enemy group might endanger the survival of one’s own group.

Failure is only implemented when you fear that you have not done your best, which stems from being a perfectionist, which also results in procrastinating with the decision-making process.

Seems a funny way to run things. But of course I’ve never paid taxes.” “You just think you haven’t. You started the day you were born. We may eliminate death someday but I doubt if we’ll ever eliminate taxes.

I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish with their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven't the faintest idea what it's about or why people should enjoy killing one another; you look at a place like Albania—it was constantly staring me in the eyes—and you say to yourself, yesterday it was Greek, to-day it's Italian, to-morrow it may be German or Japanese, and you let it be anything it chooses to be. When you're right with yourself it doesn't matter which flag is flying over your head or who owns what or whether you speak English or Monongahela. The absence of newspapers, the absence of news about what men are doing in different parts of the world to make life more livable or unlivable is the greatest single boon. If we could just eliminate newspapers a great advance would be made, I am sure of it. Newspapers engender lies, hatred, greed, envy, suspicion, fear, malice. We don't need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness. If we could all go on strike and honestly disavow all interest in what our neighbor is doing we might get a new lease on life. We might learn to do without telephones and radios and newspapers, without machines of any kind, without factories, without mills, without mines, without explosives, without battleships, without politicians, without lawyers, without canned goods, without gadgets, without razor blades even or cellophane or cigarettes or money. This is a pipe dream, I know.

Dealing with Fear One is afraid of public opinion, afraid of not achieving, not fulfilling, afraid of not having the opportunity; and through it all there is this extraordinary sense of guilt—one has done a thing that one should not have done; the sense of guilt in the very act of doing; one is healthy and others are poor and unhealthy; one has food and others have no food. The more the mind is inquiring, penetrating, asking, the greater the sense of guilt, anxiety…. Fear is the urge that seeks a Master, a guru; fear is this coating of respectability, which everyone loves so dearly—to be respectable. Do you determine to be courageous to face events in life, or merely rationalize fear away, or find explanations that will give satisfaction to the mind that is caught in fear? How do you deal with it? Turn on the radio, read a book, go to a temple, cling to some form of dogma, belief? Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs. If you see that fear is destructive, then how do you proceed to wipe the mind clean? You say that by probing into the cause of fear you would be free of fear. Is that so? Trying to uncover the cause and knowing the cause of fear does not eliminate fear.

The medicine to fear, these days, is a dose of reality! Because these days the reality is far worse than the disembodiment of the ideal. People today are afraid of the disembodiment of the ideal, because they think the ideal is the reality. A rabbit that does not know it lives in the ground with snakes, is constantly afraid of the sea hawk possibly finding its way to land, to destroy the rabbit’s meadowy existence. In the meadow, living in fear of the sea hawk, not knowing the hole in the ground next to its burrow belongs to a snake. I show the rabbit where the snakes are, thus eliminating its hazardous fear. Misplaced fear is hazardous fear. Fear well placed is a skill for survival.

I have been aware for many years that most people do not think about aging in the same way that they think about cancer, or diabetes, or heart disease. They are strongly in favor of the absolute elimination of such diseases as soon as possible, but the idea of eliminating aging—maintaining truly youthful physical and mental function indefinitely—evokes an avalanche of fears and reservations. Yet, in the sense that matters most, aging is just like smoking: It’s really bad for you.

Defining philosophy as “an activity, attempting by means of discussion and reasoning, to make life happy,” he believed that happiness is gained through the achievement of moral self-sufficiency (autarkeia) and freedom from disturbance (ataraxia). The main obstacles to the goal of tranquillity of mind are our unnecessary fears and desires, and the only way to eliminate these is to study natural science. The most serious disturbances of all are fear of death, including fear of punishment after death, and fear of the gods. Scientific inquiry removes fear of death by showing that the mind and spirit are material and mortal, so that they cannot live on after we die: as Epicurus neatly and logically puts it: “Death…is nothing to us: when we exist, death is not present; and when death is present, we do not exist. Consequently it does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the living it is non-existent and the dead no longer exist” (Letter to Menoeceus 125). As for fear of the gods, that disappears when scientific investigation proves that the world was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, that the gods live outside the world and have no inclination or power to intervene in its affairs, and that irregular phenomena such as lightning, thunder, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes have natural causes and are not manifestations of divine anger. Every Epicurean would have agreed with Katisha in the Mikado when she sings: But to him who’s scientific There’s nothing that’s terrific In the falling of a flight of thunderbolts! So the study of natural science is the necessary means whereby the ethical end is attained. And that is its only justification: Epicurus is not interested in scientific knowledge for its own sake, as is clear from his statement that “if we were not disturbed by our suspicions concerning celestial phenomena, and by our fear that death concerns us, and also by our failure to understand the limits of pains and desires, we should have no need of natural science” (Principal Doctrines 11). Lucretius’ attitude is precisely the same as his master’s: all the scientific information in his poem is presented with the aim of removing the disturbances, especially fear of death and fear of the gods, that prevent the attainment of tranquillity of mind. It is very important for the reader of On the Nature of Things to bear this in mind all the time, particularly since the content of the work is predominantly scientific and no systematic exposition of Epicurean ethics is provided.25 Epicurus despised philosophers who do not make it their business to improve people’s moral condition: “Vain is the word of a philosopher by whom no human suffering is cured. For just as medicine is of no use if it fails to banish the diseases of the body, so philosophy is of no use if it fails to banish the suffering of the mind” (Usener fr. 221). It is evident that he would have condemned the majority of modern philosophers and scientists.

in the Bhagavad Gita. One stanza reads: “Offering the inhaling breath into the exhaling breath and offering the exhaling breath into the inhaling breath, the yogi neutralizes both breaths; thus he releases prana from the heart and brings life force under his control.”2 The interpretation is: “The yogi arrests decay in the body by securing an additional supply of prana (life force) through quieting the action of the lungs and heart; he also arrests mutations of growth in the body by control of apana (eliminating current). Thus neutralizing decay and growth, the yogi learns life-force control.” Another Gita stanza states: “That meditation-expert (muni) becomes eternally free who, seeking the Supreme Goal, is able to withdraw from external phenomena by fixing his gaze within the mid-spot of the eyebrows and by neutralizing the even currents of prana and apana [that flow] within the nostrils and lungs; and to control his sensory mind and intellect; and to banish desire, fear, and anger.”3

Many people believe that eliminating the apparent causes of fear will eliminate it, but fear, like beauty, is part of the world. The fear of fear results in the growth of terror as well as a loss of the beauty and wonder of the world. By fearing fear, we create the room for terror and panic to grow. People become blinded by fear, driven by anxieties, and increasingly ruled by phobias and obsessions. When we fail to recognize how fear works in the world, we become ruled by it. The point is not to become paralyzed with foreboding or be caught in the panic that can grip the collective and cause people to run blindly in the wrong direction. The point is to willingly go where most fear to go, to follow where the fear might lead and face the ways that the world roars at us.

Clearly, it is not simply exegesis that determines how we read the Bible; rather, it is our vested interests, our hopes, and our fears that largely determine our reading. And because the reach of the gracious God of the Bible is toward the other, we ought rightly to be skeptical and suspicious of any reading of the Bible that excludes the other, because it is likely to be informed by vested interest, fears, and hopes that serve self-protection and end in self-destruction. Palestinians’ and Israelis’ fear of the other, said to be grounded in the Bible, has been transposed into a military apparatus that is aimed at the elimination of the other. It is wholly illusionary to imagine that such an agenda is congruent with the God of the Bible who is commonly confessed by Jews and Christians.

If there is fear or confusion in your life, it is because you lack commitment. The very thought, "I am here in this world to do seva," dissolves the "i" and when the "i" dissolves, worries dissolve. Seva is not something you do out of convenience or for pleasure. The ultimate purpose of life is to be of service. An uncommitted mind is miserable. A committed mind may at times experience rough weather but it will reap the fruits of its toil. When you make service your sole purpose in life, it eliminates fear, focuses your mind and gives you meaning.

There is a fine line deep within the mind that makes self-belief and confidence, the defining elements of success and failure in any circumstance. How we learn to activate them without running the risk of lying to ourselves is the key that unlocks the superhuman lying dormant within us.

Stoics, excellent warriors, thought something similar, that when effective action is required against an enemy, including his elimination, emotions like fear and anger get in the way, immobilize, cause one to under- or overreach, and undermine skillfully achieving one’s aims. In De Ira, and in a direct challenge to Aristotle, Seneca writes: “It is easier to banish dangerous emotions than to rule them.” The mature person is disciplined and thoughtful, whereas the angry person is undisciplined and sloppy; “anger is excited by empty matters hovering on the outskirts of the case.

Violence is itself a form of political mobilisation. It is mainly directed against civilians and not at another army. The aim is to capture territory through political control rather than through military success. And political control is maintained through terror, through expulsion or elimination of those who challenge political control, especially those with a different label. Population displacement, massacres, widespread atrocities are not just side effects of war; they are a deliberate strategy for political control. The tactic is to sow the fear and hate on which exclusive identity claims rest.

The six basic fears become translated into a state of worry, through indecision. Relieve yourself, forever of the fear of death, by reaching a decision to accept death as an inescapable event. Whip the fear of poverty by reaching a decision to get along with whatever wealth you can accumulate WITHOUT WORRY. Put your foot upon the neck of the fear of criticism by reaching a decision NOT TO WORRY about what other people think, do, or say. Eliminate the fear of old age by reaching a decision to accept it, not as a handicap, but as a great blessing which carries with it wisdom, self-control, and understanding not known to youth.

All too often our hurry is a sign of something else. Something deeper. Usually that we’re running away from something—father wounds, childhood trauma, last names, deep insecurity or deficits of self-worth, fear of failure, pathological inability to accept the limitations of our humanity, or simply boredom with the mundanity of middle life.

CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)

However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle, in this way suffering for the want of everything. Furthermore, people living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason any one who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.

Imagine the fear the first men must have felt when they saw the sun setting on the horizon and the dark night beginning to rise—They must have felt such hopelessness within their hearts as the darkness descended, only for it to spark back to life as the stars began to shine through. However, the stars do not burn like the sun, do they? They provide little light for the land, which makes one wonder, that perhaps conquering the dark was not their purpose. Maybe the creators of the world intended when they made them, not to bring light into the world, but instead for them to serve as something else. That is the great mystery of our world, is it not? Why would the creators, the gods who shaped the land and the heavens with their hands, forge something so stunning, so dazzling, only to then hide them away during the day and allow men to gaze upon their beauty only when darkness is present—this must mean something, right? Maybe that was their intention all along. Perhaps they knew they could not eliminate the darkness of the night, so instead, they created these beautiful glowing lights in the sky—a small light for the people to cling to—to serve as a constant reminder to all that looked up, that no matter how dark the world seemed, there would always be light. Maybe that is why they created you as well

For the moment it was enough that his advisers and minions respected him–for reestablishing peace, for eliminating the group that had posed the greatest threat to continued stability–but eventually those same advisers would need to fear him. To understand the great power he wielded, as both Emperor and Dark Lord of the Sith. And to that end, Sidious needed Vader. For if someone as potent as Vader answered to the Emperor, then how powerful must the Emperor be!

Analysis—Break things down into tiny steps. Look at your feelings. Understand why you feel the way you do. This helps you overcome things like uncertainty, anger, fear. Analyze the problems you face. Don’t look at them as a whole. Break them down into chunks. Look at what you need in order to solve each tiny part of them. Even if you are looking at a dead end from a distance, apply the bit-by-bit approach. Solutions frequently present themselves through action.

Every thought and preceding action has a resulting outcome. By choosing your actions today, you are choosing how you will live your life tomorrow. By choosing the kind of person you want to be, you are designing your life instead of just letting it happen. When you choose yourself above the rest, this elevates your confidence, eliminates fear and kicks your rejection issues right out the door. The choices in the now are the choices of all your tomorrows combined.

Our culture is obsessed with eliminating struggle. There are parents whose goal is that their kids want for nothing. But what if they’re handicapping them instead? Our fear of failure for the next generation is creating people primed for mediocrity at best and crippled at worst, in comparison to their potential. Experiencing repeated failure and lack of resources forces you to develop deep levels of grit, intellectual creativity, and resourcefulness others have never tapped into.

Ball busting [a friendly form of humor]...contains a fundamental flaw, one that has done immeasurable harm to the male psyche, and basically eliminated dance and music as potential outlets for bonding. That is the use of the term 'gaaay.' It's a form of self-policing, some fucked-up safe word that got called out if any behavior approached a level where it felt intimate or affectionate. Really anything that felt 'feminine,' and that list was long. It was not used to describe romantic attraction to another many--though it certainly insulted that entire idea in an inexcusable way--but instead was used to reinforce what Niobe Way, a psychology professor at NYU, calls the 'crisis of connection' among men. We so fear being called -gaaay- for making connections that are 'feminine' that we sacrifice intimacy for casual banter. It's a huge disconnect, perhaps the central one at the heart of the problems of with modern male bonding. And unlike many 'male' things, it cannot be blamed on genetics. It's cultural. It's learned.

In this second half of life, one has less and less need or interest in eliminating the negative or fearful, making again those old rash judgments, holding on to old hurts, or feeling any need to punish other people. Your superiority complexes have gradually departed in all directions. You do not fight these things anymore; they have just shown themselves too many times to be useless, ego based, counterproductive, and often entirely wrong. You learn to positively ignore and withdraw your energy from evil or stupid things rather than fight them directly.

If at this moment we were to eliminate the religions by force, the people would unanimously beseech us for a new form of worship. You can imagine our Gauleiters giving up their pranks to play at being saints ! As for our Minister for Religion, according to his own co-religionists, God himself would turn away from his family! I envisage the future, therefore, as follows : First of all, to each man his private creed. Superstition shall not lose its rights. The Party is sheltered from the danger of competing with the religions. These latter must simply be forbidden from interfering in future with temporal matters. From the tenderest age, education will be imparted in such a way that each child will know all that is important to the maintenance of the State. As for the men close to me, who, like me, have escaped from the clutches of dogma, I've no reason to fear that the Church will get its hooks on them. We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth.

As a consequence of natural analgesic actions or as a result of the administration of drugs that interfere with body signaling (painkillers, anesthetics), the brain receives a distorted view of what the body state really is at the moment. We know that in situations of fear in which the brain chooses the running option rather than freezing, the brain stem disengages the part of the pain-transmission circuitry, a bit like pulling the plug. The periqueductal gray, which controls these responses, can also command the secretion of natural opioids and achieve precisely what taking an analgesic would achieve -- elimination of pain signals. In the strict sense, we are dealing here with a hallucination of the body because what the brain registers in its maps and the conscious mind feels do not correspond to the reality that might be perceived. Whenever we ingest molecules the have the power to modify the transmission or mapping of body signals, we play on this mechanism. Alcohol does it; so do analgesics and anesthetics, as well as countless drugs of abuse. It is patently clear that, other than out of curiousity, humans are drawn to such molecules because of their desire to generate feelings of well-being, feelings in which pain signals are obliterated and pleasure signals induced.

The underlying emotion that governs all the activity in the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free. Why fear? Because the ego arises by identification with form, and deep down it knows that no forms are permanent, that they are all fleeting. So there is always a sense of insecurity around the ego even if on the outside it appears confident.

Go back. Open the bedroom door and send young Aster down the stairs. Place the groom on his feet and draw him away from the bed. Wipe the sheet clean of the bride’s blood. Shake it straight and flatten its wrinkles. Slide off that necklace and return it to the girl as she races to her mother. Fix what has been broken in her, mend it shut again. Clothe him in his wedding finery. Let there be no light. Allow only shadows into this kingdom of man’s making. See him alone in the room. See him free of a father’s attention. See him step beyond the reach of elders and all who advise growing boys on the perils of weakness. Here is Kidane, shaking loose of unseen bindings. Here he is, gifting himself the freedom to tremble. All advice has been taken back and he is no longer the groom instructed to break flesh and draw blood and bring a girl to earthy cries. See this man in the tender moment before he takes his wife. See him wrestle with the first blooms of untapped emotion. Let the minutes stretch. Remove the expectations of a father. Remove the admonishments to stand tall and stay strong. Eliminate the birthright, the privilege of nobility, the weight of ancestors and blood. Erase his father’s name and that of his grandfather’s father and that of the long line of men before them. Let him stand in the middle of that empty bedroom in his wedding tunic and trousers, in his gilded cape and gold ring, and then disappear his name, too. Make of him nothing and see what emerges willingly, without taint of duty or fear.

It is one of the great tragedies of our time that the masses have come to believe that they have reached their high standard of material welfare as a result of having pulled down the wealthy, and to fear that the preservation or emergence of such a class would deprive them of something they would otherwise get and which they regard as their due. We have seen why in a progressive society there is little reason to believe that the wealth which the few enjoy would exist at all if they were not allowed to enjoy it. It is neither taken from the rest nor withheld from them. It is the fi rst sign of a new way of living begun by the advance guard. True, those who have this privilege of displaying possibilities which only the children or grandchildren of others will enjoy are not generally the most meritorious individuals but simply those who have been placed by chance in their envied position. But this fact is inseparable from the process of growth, which always goes further than any one man or group of men can foresee. To prevent some from enjoying certain advantages fi rst may well prevent the rest of us from ever enjoying them. If through envy we make certain exceptional kinds of life impossible, we shall all in the end suffer material and spiritual impoverishment. Nor can we eliminate the unpleasant manifestations of individual success without destroying at the same time those forces which make advance possible. One may share to the full the distaste for the ostentation, the bad taste, and the wastefulness of many of the new rich and yet recognize that, if we were to prevent all that we disliked, the unforeseen good things that might be thus prevented would probably outweigh the bad. A world in which the majority could prevent the appearance of all that they did not like would be a stagnant and probably a declining world.

Wrecked and despondent at midlife, I need to undertake a strict personal evaluation that will lead to personal transformation. I must be willing to start afresh and attempt to make myself anew. In order to begin all over and not culminate in the same deadhead rut as before, I admit to harboring personal insecurities and boldly confront my greatest fears. In order to establish an altered foundation that will support a revised self, I commence by asking the pertinent questions. If I run fast enough and long enough, can I quash slavish personal demons and capture an elusive self? Can I exercise the self-discipline to eliminate the artificial screens that I hide behind in order to peer out at the formidable world? Do I possess the personal audacity to explore unfamiliar terrain and the internal grit to dual the primal flex of nature’s power while accepting on equal terms the thrall and tragic beauty of surviving in a violent habitat?

You look at the history of any sentient species and what do you find but tableaux of violence and slaughter. It’s finger-painted on the ceilings of caves and engraved into the walls of temples. Dig a hole deep enough on any world and you’ll find the skulls and bones of adults and children fractured by crude weapons. All of us were fighting long before we were farming and raising livestock.” He held up a hand before anyone could voice an objection. “All of you are exceedingly well educated, and you’re going to start rattling off the names of species and societies where that isn’t the case. And my answer is that those aren’t the beings or the star systems we need to worry about. It’s the rest of them. Violence is hardwired into most of us and there’s no eliminating the impulse—not with an army of stormtroopers or a fleet of Star Destroyers. That’s why we’ve embarked on a path to a different solution. We have a chance to forge a peace that will endure for longer than the Republic was in existence.” “Peace through fear,” Reeva said. “Yes,” Krennic told her, and let it go at that.

Saul had seen the rash of demonic-children entertainments as a symptom of deeper underlying fears and hatreds; the “me-generation’s” inability to shift into the role of responsible parenthood at the cost of losing their own interminable childhood, the transference of guilt from divorce—the child is not really a child, but an older, evil thing, capable of deserving any abuse resulting from the adult’s selfish actions—and the anger of an entire society revolting after two decades of a culture dominated by and devoted to youthful looks, youth-oriented music, juvenile movies, and the television and movie myth of the adult-child inevitably wiser, calmer, and more “with-it” than the childish adults in the house hold. So Saul had lectured that the child-fear and child-hatred becoming visible in popular shows and books had its irrational roots in common guilts, shared anxieties, and the universal angst of the age. He had warned that the national wave of abuse, neglect, and callousness toward children had its historical antecedents and that it would run its course, but that everything possible must be done to avoid and eliminate that brand of violence before it poisoned America.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FATHER My Lord, the Creator, has many names, but He is one and the same. God is Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, and Hindu. God is love. God is truth, and the true light of love sees no walls. Do not abandon him even when your days are gray; for He is only returning your call when you asked for strength. The Creator will talk to you only in daylight, through the rays of the sun, and He does not use words. Instead, he will reflect his dancing mirrors inside your head, and they will communicate to your heart and change your biochemistry to see with His eyes and think like Him. There is no such thing as prophets and seers; for all of mankind was created equal. However, if you are open to love all without fear, and to forgive all without hate, He will radiate His love through your heart and eyes in a way that your magnetic field becomes a reflection of His sunshine. Yes, God is near and God is here. His tests are many, but so are his blessings. Yes, faith is the flame to eliminate all fear. For if you are truly good, serve Him, and stand only by your conscience -- He will grant you whatever you ask of Him when you enter His heavenly garden.

Epicurus notes that it is essential to eliminate all pointless fears, starting with the two biggest: fear of the gods, and fear of death. He does not deny the existence of the former (probably out of political caution, since his materialist conception of the world makes the existence of any divinities implausible), but he keeps the gods at a distance, explaining that experience shows that they have no influence on human life. So there is no point in praying to them and being afraid of them, presenting them with all sorts of offerings and sacrifices. Likewise we need to rid ourselves of the idea of the soul’s immortality, as it introduces the fear of a possible punishment after death. Epicurus borrows from Democritus his idea of a reality composed entirely of indivisible atoms, an approach that underpins his own ethical vision. For him the human being, body and soul, is an agglomeration of atoms that dissolve at death. Epicurus explains that the fear of dying stems purely from our imagination, since so long as we are alive, we have no experience of death, and when we die there will be no individual consciousness left to feel the dissolution of the atoms that make up our bodies and our souls. Once

Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,

4Paul Gaydos My Books Browse ▾ Community ▾ The Way of the Superior Man Quotes The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to... by David Deida Read Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine. If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it. Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering. By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.

On the playground, “cooties” seems harmless and innocuous (unless you’ve been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst of human atrocities. During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is “the demonization of the ‘Other’ in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy - the transgressors and deviants.” These deviants are considered to be “deformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness.” Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood. In each of these instances, sociomoral disgust is used to demonize and scapegoat populations, creating “monsters” who are threatening to society.

President Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would pose a “red line” that would trigger an American military response. In August 2013, word filtered out that Assad’s forces had used poison gas against a rebel suburb of Damascus, killing as many as fourteen hundred people. This was a key moment. The United States was just a few hours away from launching airstrikes. “Our finger was on the trigger,” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later said.13 Obama decided otherwise. He concluded that airpower would be insufficient and ineffective, and he wanted congressional authorization but could not get it. He had come into office to end America’s two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—and he was loath to slip into a third, with no clear path to success. Air power in Libya had helped remove Gadhafi, but it had left chaos behind. Obama was also demonstrating that, as he later said, he had broken with the military response “playbook” of the “foreign policy establishment.” Moreover, he feared that an air strike would not eliminate all the chemical weapons, and Assad could then claim that “he had successfully defied the United States.”14 Still, an American president had said using chemical weapons was a red line, but had not acted on that. Coming on top of Mubarak, it made leaders in other countries question the credibility of the United States and its reliability as an ally.

The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers—far more so than the philosophers we will see splitting hairs in their weekly colloquium in Part Three. They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection. An assistant secretary of defence was among us, but had I not known his profession I would have thought he was a practitioner of skeptical empiricism. Even an engineering investigator who had examined the cause of a space shuttle explosion was thoughtful and open-minded. I came out of the meeting realising that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. This does not show in war movies, where they are usually portrayed as war-hungry autocrats. The people in front of me were not the people who initiate wars. Indeed, for many, the successful defence policy is the one that manages to eliminate potential dangers without war, such as the strategy of bankrupting the Russians through the escalation in defence spending. When I expressed my amazement to Laurence, another finance person who was sitting next to me, he told me that the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defence people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk.

But I believe that another important explanation for introverts who love their work may come from a very different line of research by the influential psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the state of being he calls “flow.” Flow is an optimal state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity—whether long-distance swimming or songwriting, sumo wrestling or sex. In a state of flow, you’re neither bored nor anxious, and you don’t question your own adequacy. Hours pass without your noticing. The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings. Although flow does not depend on being an introvert or an extrovert, many of the flow experiences that Csikszentmihalyi writes about are solitary pursuits that have nothing to do with reward-seeking: reading, tending an orchard, solo ocean cruising. Flow often occurs, he writes, in conditions in which people “become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself.” In a sense, Csikszentmihalyi transcends Aristotle; he is telling us that there are some activities that are not about approach or avoidance, but about something deeper: the fulfillment that comes from absorption in an activity outside yourself. “Psychological theories usually assume that we are motivated either by the need to eliminate an unpleasant condition like hunger or fear,” Csikszentmihalyi writes, “or by the expectation of some future reward such as money, status, or prestige.” But in flow, “a person could work around the clock for days on end, for no better reason than to keep on working.

We can dismiss any notion that the Nazi regime murdered Jews in order to gratify German public opinion. It took elaborate precautions to hide these actions from the German people and from foreign observers. In official documents the responsible authorities referred to the killings with euphemisms like Sonderbehandlung (“special handling”), and undertook major operations to eliminate all traces of them, at a time when men and materiel could hardly be spared from the fighting. At the same time, there was no particular effort to keep the secret from German troops on the eastern front, many of whom were regularly assigned to participate. Some soldiers and officials photographed the mass executions and sent pictures home to their families and girlfriends.57 Many thousands of soldiers, civil administrators, and technicians stationed in the eastern occupied territories were eyewitnesses to mass killings. Many more thousands heard about them from participants. The knowledge inside Germany that dreadful things were being done to Jews in the east was “fairly widespread.” As long as disorderly destruction such as the shop-front smashings, beatings, and murders of Kristallnacht did not take place under their windows, most of them let distance, indifference, fear of denunciation, and their own sufferings under Allied bombing stifle any objections. In the end, radicalized Nazism lost even its nationalist moorings. As he prepared to commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945, Hitler wanted to pull the German nation down with him in a final frenzy. This was partly a sign of his character—a compromise peace was as unthinkable for Hitler as it was for the Allies. But it also had a basis within the nature of the regime: not to push forward was to perish. Anything was better than softness.59

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

Some raised a more practical concern, arguing that if Rome really wanted to empty seminaries of gay men—a proposal under consideration at the Vatican—it would face more empty rectories and more barren altars. Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay. “If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.” But the issue was now on the table. At the Vatican meeting, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that he was concerned about the increasing number of gays in the priesthood. “One of the difficulties we do face in seminary life or recruitment is when there does exist a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual men think twice” about joining the priesthood for fear that they’ll be harassed. “It is an ongoing struggle. It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men [and] that the candidates that we receive are healthy in every possible way—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.” And Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit argued that clergy sexual abuse is “not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem.… We have to look at this homosexual element as it exists, to what extent it is operative in our seminaries and our priesthood and how to address it.” Bishops need to “cope with and address” the extent of a homosexual presence in Catholic seminaries, he said. Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said he wouldn’t let gay men become priests. “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he has never committed any homosexual act,” he said.

ROUND UP A lot more can be said, but finally, this is your last lesson in this epic 30 -day quest to become a successful conversationalist. For the past 29 days, you’ve been tutored about different techniques to make things happen, and today you’ll kick start a conversation with more confidence and organization, because you are now a professional in the communication world. There are takeaways that you should not forget as you go forth as a small talk professional. You have learnt and practiced many truths about the nature and composition of small talk, but there are certain ones that should be placed next to your heart: Small talk may be seen as a waste of time, but it is actually time well spent; take note of this important point, people might want to convince and confuse you. Small talk with personal meaning orientation will scratch business shop talk off any time. Small talk should now be seen as an effective tool that is available right next to you and can be a gateway to success. You still have the chance to go back to the previous chapters you struggled with, this way, you’ll review and assimilate the important points, no one is an island of knowledge, and so I don’t expect you to have everything registered in your brain already, constant practices will bring out the best in you. Identifying your weakness is just as important as acknowledging your strength. I want to assure you that you’ll definitely excel since you’ve been able to lay hands on this book, and this how you can help others who are still in the position that you were when you started in day one. You’ve been instructed about many secrets of success, as well as the things to exploit and avoid. It’s up to you to make this permanent, and this can only be achieved if you keep following these instructions. You have to make the decision now; whether you would make use of this manual or not, but I would advise that you want it again and again as this is the only way to dedicate your spirit, soul and body to constant improvement. You definitely would have noticed some changes in you, you’re not the same person any more. One important thing is that you shouldn’t give up; try to redouble your efforts and realize that you know everything you’re supposed to know. This shouldn’t end here, endeavour to spread the word to make sure that you impact at least three people per day, this means that you would have impacted about 90 people at the end of the next 30 days and close to about 120 people in just two months. Now, you see how you can make the world a better place? It’s up to you to decide what you want and how you want it to be. Don’t waste this golden opportunity of becoming a professional in communication, you’ll go a long way and definitely be surprised at the rate at which you’ve gone in such a small time. Take time to attend to things that need attention, don’t be too hard on yourself, and don’t go too soft on yourself, you’re one vessel that can’t be manipulated, so you have to be careful and sure about your status on communication skills. On the final note, I would like to congratulate you for reading this to the end, you’ve taken this course because you believe in the powers of small talks, so this shouldn’t be the last time I’m hearing from you. I would look forward to seeing your questions about any confusing aspect in the future. Till then, remain the professional that you are!