Example Of True Love Quotes

There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others.

Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.

All his life the example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic - "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal" - had seemed to him to be true only in relation to Caius the man, man in general, and it was quite justified , but he wasn't Caius and he wasn't man in general, and he had always been something quite, quite special apart from all other beings; he was Vanya, with Mama, with Papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with his toys and the coachman, with Nyanya, then with Katenka, with all the joys, sorrows, passions of childhood, boyhood, youth. Did Caius know the smell of the striped leather ball Vanya loved so much?: Did Caius kiss his mother's hand like that and did the silken folds of Caius's mother's dress rustle like that for him? Was Caius in love like that? Could Caius chair a session like that? And Caius is indeed mortal and it's right that he should die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my feelings and thoughts - for me it's quite different. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too horrible.

True love blooms when we care more about another person than we care about ourselves. That is Christ's great atoning example for us, and it ought to be more evident in the kindness we show, the respect we give, and the selflessness and courtesy we employ in our personal relationships.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

As much as we look up at the stars and know there is more than life on earth, the divinity of dogs is just as unexplainable and profound. They may be the purest example of divine love in an earthly soul many of us ever experience. If we take their lead, open our hearts, and embrace their love, we may just find our own journey a lot more enlightening.

You will never overcome your self righteousness if you continue to believe that God prefers you over other people. The moment you feel entitled is the moment you feel superior and distance yourself from a humble heart that believes God knows what he is doing.

Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that's not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus the struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers are frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some - and who knows how many? - waste away quiet obstinacy and finally go under.

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either. It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy. And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.

My dogs have been the reason I have woken up every single day with a smile on my face. I am among the ranks of millions of people who appreciate the souls of dogs and know they are a gift of pure love and an example of all that is good.

Love and hatred are not merely subjective feelings, affecting the inward universe of those who experience them, but they are also objective forces, altering the world outside ourselves...if this is true of my love, it is true to an incomparably greater extent of Christ's love. The victory of his suffering love upon the Cross does not merely set me an example, showing me what I myself may achieve if by my own efforts I imitate him. Much more than this, his suffering love has a creative effect upon me, transforming my own heart and will, releasing me from bondage, making me whole, rendering it possible for me to love in a way that would lie altogether beyond my powers, had I not first been loved by him.

If I may be pardoned for suggesting the obvious, I do so only because the obvious is not observed in so many instances. The obvious includes four imperatives with reference to children: (1) love them, (2) teach them, (3) respect them, and (4) pray with them and for them... How much more beautiful would be the world and the society in which we live if every father looked upon his children as the most precious of his assets, if he led them by the power of his example in kindness and love, and if in times of stress he blessed them by the authority of the holy priesthood; and if every mother regarded her children as the jewels of her life, as gifts from the God of heaven, who is their Eternal Father, and brought them up with true affection in the wisdom and admonition of the Lord...

If you want to be a good parent then be a great leader. You should live a life with passion for someone and something. The legacy you leave your children shouldn't be how you suffered in gratitude for a life you had no passion for. Rather, it should be how grateful you are to a God that believes fairytales can come true because they came true for you.

Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. That makes it holier and better. They respect one another more, and much is built on respect. And if once there has been love, if they have been married for love, why should love pass away? Surely one can keep it! It is rare that one cannot keep it. And if the husband is kind and straightforward, why should not love last? The first phase of married love will pass, it is true, but then there will come a love that is better still. Then there will be the union of souls, they will have everything in common, there will be no secrets between them. And once they have children, the most difficult times will seem to them happy, so long as there is love and courage. Even toil will be a joy, you may deny yourself bread for your children and even that will be a joy, They will love you for it afterwards; so you are laying by for your future. As the children grow up you feel that you are an example, a support for them; that even after you die your children will always keep your thoughts and feelings, because they have received them from you, they will take on your semblance and likeness. So you see this is a great duty.

The primary goal of parenting, beyond keeping our children safe and loved, is to convey to them a sense that it is possible to be happy in an uncertain world, to give them hope. We do this, of course, by example more than by anything we say to them. If we can demonstrate in our own lives qualities of commitment, determination, and optimism, then we have done our job and can use our books of child-rearing advice for doorstops or fireplace fuel. What we cannot do is expect that children who are constantly criticized, bullied, and lectured will think well of themselves and their futures.

We seem normal only to those who don't know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on an early dinner date would be; "And how are you crazy?" The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don't care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with. We make mistakes, too, because are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal state of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for. The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn't exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently - the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the "not overly wrong" person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition. Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not "normal." We should learn to accommodate ourselves to "wrongness", striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and our partners.

Secularism should not be equated with Stalinist dogmatism or with the bitter fruits of Western imperialism and runaway industrialisation. Yet it cannot shirk all responsibility for them, either. Secular movements and scientific institutions have mesmerised billions with promises to perfect humanity and to utilise the bounty of planet Earth for the benefit of our species. Such promises resulted not just in overcoming plagues and famines, but also in gulags and melting ice caps. You might well argue that this is all the fault of people misunderstanding and distorting the core secular ideals and the true facts of science. And you are absolutely right. But that is a common problem for all influential movements. For example, Christianity has been responsible for great crimes such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, the oppression of native cultures across the world, and the disempowerment of women. A Christian might take offence at this and retort that all these crimes resulted from a complete misunderstanding of Christianity. Jesus preached only love, and the Inquisition was based on a horrific distortion of his teachings. We can sympathise with this claim, but it would be a mistake to let Christianity off the hook so easily. Christians appalled by the Inquisition and by the Crusades cannot just wash their hands of these atrocities – they should rather ask themselves some very tough questions. How exactly did their ‘religion of love’ allow itself to be distorted in such a way, and not once, but numerous times? Protestants who try to blame it all on Catholic fanaticism are advised to read a book about the behaviour of Protestant colonists in Ireland or in North America. Similarly, Marxists should ask themselves what it was about the teachings of Marx that paved the way to the Gulag, scientists should consider how the scientific project lent itself so easily to destabilising the global ecosystem, and geneticists in particular should take warning from the way the Nazis hijacked Darwinian theories.

If your children know who God is they will know who they are, regardless of where you or they call home.

It wasn't the first time he'd had the urge to tell Marianne that he loved her, whether or not it was true, but it was the first time he'd given in and said it. He noticed how long it took her to say anything in response, and how her pause had bothered him, as if she might not say it back, and when she did say it he felt better, but maybe that meant nothing. Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.

This surrender seems a very strange and difficult thing for us to understand. And yet, just as the life of man here in this world can suddenly be greatly altered by a strong affection, so his total life can be greatly and permanently altered by a supreme affection, which is the love of God as the embodiment or personification of man’s love of truth. He discovers, for example, that as this mystery unfolds within his own nature, what we call the end of knowledge is strangely and wonderfully attained in itself. Man becomes internally appreciative of true value.

You build a relationship on laughing together, discovering new things you never even imagined you might like, Pride and Prejudice for example, and being welcomed into the heart of each other's families. And, say, you find a woman who likes quiet and won't hold your hand and doesn't believe in love...well, when she finally lets you hold her hand, you'll do anything, anything, to persuade her that love can actually be rather wonderful.

I am loving. I am caring. I am inspiring. I am daring. I am always kind. I have peace of mind. I am worthy of trust. I am true and just. I am compassionate. I am passionate. I am a seeker. I am a giver. I am very simple. I am an example.

Function words behave differently than you might think. For example, the most commonly used word in spoken English, I, is used at far higher rates by followers than by leaders, truth-tellers than liars. People who use high rates of articles—a, an, the—do better in college than low users. And if you want to find your true love, compare the ways you use function words with that of your prospective partners.

My dad, the man I loved most in the world, a man who refused to compromise himself for anyone, the man who had showed me by example what it was like to be a true artist, was gone. We had become a loving father and son after a rocky thirty-year start. John Fante’s gift to me was his ambition, his brilliance, and his pure writer’s heart. He had begun life with a drunken, self-hating father, backing out of the hell of poverty and prejudice. Now he was ending it as the best example of courage and humility I had ever known. John Fante was my hero.

True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted - golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasures, crowns, and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Sob - when he started back home.

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning. There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives. 2. Myth: Prayer works. Studies have now shown that inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of the subject. 3. Myth: Atheists are immoral. There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominantly non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies. 4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with science. In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. We have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion. 5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive death. We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. 6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view. 7. Myth: Believing in God is not a cause of evil. The examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the justification for their evils on humankind are too numerous to mention. 8. Myth: God explains the origins of the universe. All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it is all going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law 'create' or 'build' a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, 'loves' us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? 9. Myth: There's no harm in believing in God. Religious views inform voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight.

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. There are plenty of examples. I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. I went to bed in great excitement and in the morning I woke up and the gifts were there, but no one had seen the Befana. True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known; they are the very small miracles of the secret spirits of the home or the great miracles that leave us truly astonished. I still have this childish wish for marvels, large or small, I still believe in them.

Let your children see what a loving relationship is. In a world that has skewed the word love to fit their purposes, show your children what true love it. Show respect for your wives so that your children will also respect her, and not just her but others they come in contact with throughout their lives. Your children are forming a picture of what a marriage should be by looking at you. What sort of example are you giving them?

I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am - for just an example - self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones; but then I countenance the fact that here at least I am worrying about it; so then I feel better about myself (I mean, at least this stuff is on my mind, at least I'm dissatisfied with my level of integrity and commitment); but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to (imagined) Others...It has to do with God and gods and a basic sense of trust in the universe v. fear that the universe must be held at bay and micromanaged into giving me some smidgen of some gratification I feel I simply can't live without. It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am - so where does that put me.

When you ask “Is it true?” for example, you may not really want to know. It could be that you’d rather stay with your statement than dive into the unknown. Blocking means rushing the process and answering with your conscious mind before the gentler polarity of mind (I call it “the heart”) can answer.

My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief. I think Laura was looking for something rational, because she believed that all things that were true were rational. But that isn't the case. Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually feel it. I have been in love, plenty of people have been in love, yet love cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don't make any sense. I think one of the problems Laura was having was that she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.

From a philosophical point of view, Leibniz's most interesting argument was that absolute space conflicted with what he called the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII). PII says that if two objects are indiscernible, then they are identical, i.e. they are really one and the same object. What does it mean to call two objects indiscernible? It means that no difference at all can be found between them--they have exactly the same attributes. So if PII is true, then any two genuinely distinct objects must differ in at least one of their attributes--otherwise they would be one, not two. PII is intuitively quite compelling. It certainly is not easy to find an example of two distinct objects that share all their attributes. Even two mass-produced factory goods will normally differ in innumerable ways, even if the differences cannot be detected with the naked eye. Leibniz asks us to imagine two different universes, both containing exactly the same objects. In Universe One, each object occupies a particular location in absolute space.In Universe Two, each object has been shifted to a different location in absolute space, two miles to the east (for example). There would be no way of telling these two universes apart. For we cannot observe the position of an object in absolute space, as Newton himself admitted. All we can observe are the positions of objects relative to each other, and these would remain unchanged--for all objects are shifted by the same amount. No observations or experiments could ever reveal whether we lived in universe One or Two.

while it’s true that challenges do make us grow, the angels also say that peace leads to even bigger growth spurts. Through peace, our schedules and creativity are more open to giving service. Through peace, our bodies operate in a healthy fashion. Through peace, our relationships thrive and blossom. Through peace, we are shining examples of God’s love.

Clear and strong as an actual presence, that remembrance flashed upon her in an instant, that example upheld her, and the true love defeated the false.

Two examples of true love are love between mother and child and love between Sachin and cricket.

You see, none of these conflicts are about things that people only sort of like. It is always about love. You may think me blasphemous to use the Passion of the Christ as an example of drama, but not so: this is the one true story, the greatest story ever told, the tale of tales even as Christ is the King of Kings, and all truly inspired fairy tales and fiction have to contain some echo or reflection of the One True Tale, or else it is no tale of any power at all, merely a pastime. The most powerful and potent tales, even when they are told awkwardly and without grace or poetry or craft, are stories of paradise lost and paradise regained; sacrifice, selfless love, forgiveness and salvation; stories of a man who learns better.

The Otherworld does not supply the meaning of life. Rather, the Otherworld describes being alive. Life, in all its glory - warts and all, so to speak. The Otherworld provides meaning by example, by exhibition, by illustration if you will. ... Through the Otherworld we learn what it is be be alive, to be human: good and evil, heartbreak and ecstasy, victory and defeat, everything. ... where does one first learn loyalty? Or honor? Or any higher value, for that matter? ... Where does one learn to value the beauty of a forest and to revere it?' In nature?' Not at all. This can easily be proven by the fact that so many among us do not revere the forests at all - do not even see them, in fact. You know the people I am talking about. You have seen them and their works in the world. They are the ones who rape the land, who cut down forests and despoil oceans, who oppress the poor and tyrannize the helpless, who live their lives as if nothing lay beyond the horizon of their own limited earth-bound visions. But I digress. The question before us is this: where does one first learn to see a forest as a thing of beauty, to honor it, to hold it dear for its own sake, to recognize its true value as a forest, and not just see it as a source of timber to be exploited, or a barrier to be hacked down in order to make room for a motorway? ... the mere presence of the Otherworld kindles in us the spark of higher consciousness, or imagination. It is the stories and tale and visions of the Otherworld - that magical, enchanted land just beyond the walls of the manifest world - which awaken and expand in human beings the very notion of beauty, of reverence, of love and nobility, and all the higher virtues.

The flesh,' as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically, not to our bodies but to fallen human nature. The 'carnal' spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God. The carnal spirit is cruel, egocentric, avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such us fevered, restless, and divided. The spiritual man, on the other hand, is alone the man who both knows what flesh is for and can enter into its amplitude. The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse knows what love is about. The glutton supposes that he knows the pleasures of food, but the true knowledge of food is unavailable to his dribbling and surfeited jowls. The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical. They may look alike and weigh the same. The different lies, rather, between one's being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver.

Fear of the Dark I’ve always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I’d picture something terrible happening; I’d picture losing everything in a flash. At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I started working on it, I realized that “my too good to be true” was totally related to fear, scarcity, and vulnerability. Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage to talk about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come to one of my parenting lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to her. You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I’m crazy and now they’re all sitting there like, “She’s a nut. How do we get out of here?” Then all of the sudden I heard the sound of a woman toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone from the front shouting out, “Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?” The auditorium erupted in some kind of crazy parent revival. As I had suspected, I was not alone.

there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A school master will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in class than a … genius. … His task is not to produce extravagant intellectuals but good Latinists, arimeticians and sober decent folk. … We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds always heal. … they create their art in spite of school. Once dead and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. … Time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers … are afterwards the ones who add to society's treasure.

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both. They are both contained in the traditional three aspects of the Dharma path: wisdom (prajna), meditation (dhyana), and morality (sila). Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one’s ego-driven anxieties and aggressions. Meditation is going into the mind to see this for yourself — over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in. Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of “all beings.

The rationalistic faith of the Enlightenment has a view of God (Deism), revelation (general, not special), truth (known by reason alone), sin (Pelagianism), Christ (teacher of morality and example of love), atonement (via subjective theories only), salvation (through education and technology), the church (the scientific community), and eschatology (utopia on earth through progress). But most modern people who live their lives as though this set of beliefs were true dislike admitting that they follow a religion. They would rather it was a choice between religion and reason, which is why the myth of the warfare between science and religion was invented in the nineteenth century.

She was the promise that a boy chained in a tavern or a girl starving in a basement could become something more. She was true love and complete determination. She was an example to follow and a cheerleader to encourage. Most of all, she was the voice.

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me. A rabbi was once asked the following question: ‘When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?’ The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, ‘No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!’ Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl… For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my famished soul by feeding it with abstract concepts. I said that my body was a slave and that its duty was to gather raw material and bring it to the orchard of the mind to flower and bear fruit and become ideas. The more fleshless, odorless, soundless the world was that filtered into me, the more I felt I was ascending the highest peak of human endeavor. And I rejoiced. And Buddha came to be my greatest god, whom I loved and revered as an example. Deny your five senses. Empty your guts. Love nothing, hate nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing. Breathe out and the world will be extinguished. But one night I had a dream. A hunger, a thirst, the influence of a barbarous race that had not yet become tired of the world had been secretly working within me. My mind pretended to be tired. You felt it had known everything, had become satiated, and was now smiling ironically at the cries of my peasant heart. But my guts – praised be God! – were full of blood and mud and craving. And one night I had a dream. I saw two lips without a face – large, scimitar-shaped woman’s lips. They moved. I heard a voice ask, ‘Who if your God?’ Unhesitatingly I answered, ‘Buddha!’ But the lips moved again and said: ‘No, Epaphus.’ I sprang up out of my sleep. Suddenly a great sense of joy and certainty flooded my heart. What I had been unable to find in the noisy, temptation-filled, confused world of wakefulness I had found now in the primeval, motherly embrace of the night. Since that night I have not strayed. I follow my own path and try to make up for the years of my youth that were lost in the worship of fleshless gods, alien to me and my race. Now I transubstantiate the abstract concepts into flesh and am nourished. I have learned that Epaphus, the god of touch, is my god. All the countries I have known since then I have known with my sense of touch. I feel my memories tingling, not in my head but in my fingertips and my whole skin. And as I bring back Japan to my mind, my hands tremble as if they were touching the breast of a beloved woman.

But how does the Atonement motivate, invite, and draw all men unto the Savior? What causes this gravitational pull-- this spiritual tug? There is a certain compelling power that flows from righteous suffering-- not indiscriminate suffering, not needless suffering, but righteous, voluntary suffering for another. Such suffering for another is the highest and purest form of motivation we can offer to those we love. Contemplate that for a moment: How does one change the attitude or the course of conduct of a loved one whose every step seems bent on destruction? If example fails to influence, words of kindness go unheeded, and the powers of logic are dismissed as chaff before the wind, then where does one turn... In the words of the missionary evangelist, E. Stanley Jones, suffering has "an intesnse moral appeal." Jones once asked Mahatma Gandhi as he sat on a cot in an open courtyard of Yervavda jail, "'Isn't your fasting a species of coercion?' 'Yes,' he said very slowly, 'the same kind of coercion which Jesus exercises upon you from the cross.'" As Jones reflected upon that sobering rejoinder, he said: "I was silent. It was so obviously true that I am silent again every time I think of it. He was prfoundly right. The years have clarified it. And I now see it for what it is: a very morally potent and redenptive power if used rightly. But it has to be used rightly.

There does exist, however, an external prize for man; when, for example, the orator sees the faces of his listeners change with the emotions he has awakened, he experiences something so great that it can only be likened to the intense joy with which one discovers that he is loved. Our joy is to touch, and conquer souls, and this is the one prize which can bring us a true compensation. Sometimes there is given to us a moment when we fancy ourselves to be among the great ones of the world. These are moments of happiness given to man that he may continue his existence in peace.

It’s true I’ve got a cold streak. I recognize that. But if they—my father and mother—had loved me a little more, I would have been able to feel more—to feel real sadness, for example.” “Do you think you weren’t loved enough?” She tilted her head and looked at me. Then she gave a sharp, little nod. “Somewhere between ‘not enough’ and ‘not at all.’ I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it—to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once. If I tried to cuddle up and beg for something, they’d just shove me away and yell at me. ‘No! That costs too much!’ It’s all I ever heard. So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I was still in elementary school at the time—fifth or sixth grade—but I made up my mind once and for all.” “Wow,” I said. “And did your search pay off?” “That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.” “Waiting for the perfect love?” “No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.” “I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement. “It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are times in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.” “Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?” “Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. ‘Now I see, Midori. What a fool I’ve been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?’” “So then what?” “So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.” “Sounds crazy to me.” “Well, to me, that’s what love is. Not that anyone can understand me, though.” Midori gave her head a little shake against my shoulder. “For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn’t begin at all.” “I’ve never met a girl who thinks like you.

As I looked at their faces, love filled me up. It was the wise and difficult love that reminds parents that all we can really do is be true to our own spiritual unfolding and trust that our examples will one day help them be true to theirs. For children have a guiding spiritual wisdom inside of them, too.

...in a word, [they] did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully, without any grudging in the least, showing herein their true love unto their friends and brethren. A rare example and worthy to be remembered.

Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age—it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For every one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realization he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another. It will be the spirit of the time, and people will marvel that they have sat so long in darkness without seeing the light. And then the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in the heavens.... But, until then, we must keep the banner flying. Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men's souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea may not die.

Self-hatred is not in our nature, but self-love is. If we attempt to think logically we might say, well if self-love is pride, then isn’t the opposite of pride equal to self-hate? The short answer is no. Many Christians actively argue that since the opposite of pride is humility, the opposite of self-love must be self-hatred. In order for this to be true, it would mean that humility is the same thing as self-hatred. It is not. Humility means that you put others above yourself. The motivation for this selflessness is not because you hate yourself, but because you love others more than you love yourself. Did Jesus hate Himself? No. Previously we saw Jesus as the ultimate example of humility. If you subscribe to the belief that the opposite of pride must be self-hatred, you are also subscribing to the idea that Jesus died on the cross because He hated Himself. Jesus actually died on the cross because of His intense love for us, not for any other reason.

Neither Josh nor his father are easy men. Some men are a delight. Patrick, for example. Reasonable, calm, ready with a smile. Josh has a nickname for him, too. Mr. Nice Guy. It’s true. He is. It takes a strong woman to love someone like Josh, and I think it’s you. Patrick’s an open book. Josh is a safety-deposit box. But he’s worth it.

So what does the life of an empath look like? The short answer to this is “hiding.” Empaths often take extreme measures to contort their true identities into something less painful. They become very good at blending in and figuring out how to be loved and accepted not for who they really are but instead for how they can serve others. For example, if an empathic homosexual child is born into a very conservative family, that child will very quickly know how to suppress his true self in service to his family’s belief system. Or if an empathic, creative, energetic child is born into a family that values logic and study, the child will soon become subdued and work to prove her worth through family-approved pursuits.

Eternal peace, happiness, love and joy are not found in things or people. It can only be gotten when you realize your true Self, that is bliss itself, peace itself, love itself and joy itself. Once you realize your true Self as Brahman, you are not happy but happiness itself, you are not peaceful but peace itself, you are not in love but love itself and so on.

Where establishment Islam was becoming less tolerant, seeing the Quran as the only valid scripture and Muhammad’s religion as the one true faith, Sufis went back to the spirit of the Quran in their appreciation of other religious traditions. Some, for example, were especially devoted to Jesus, whom they saw as the ideal Sufi since he had preached a gospel of love.

Is it not obvious? You will persist in writing these stories, full of splendid fellows of all different sorts, but never once have I heard one of your heroines to be blessed with a dashing sailor brother whom she admires and adores." "That is true." Jane laughed. Cassy looked up from her sewing and smiled to see her sister so at ease. After a successful reading of her own work to the family, she glowed as she never glowed otherwise. "But to do so would defeat my own purposes. It would strike right through the narrative. You must see that if a young lady is so fortunate as to have her own dashing sailor brother, she is spoiled then for any other hero I could create for her. For how, with such an example in her own background, could she fall in love on dry land? No man could match him.

On the other hand, Christos descended from the realm of Light and brought humanity the light of true knowledge in the simple principles of love. Marcion de Sinope (85 – 160 C.E.) was an important leader in early Christianity. Marcion, in his two brilliant books, explained how the God of the Jews was not the God of whom Jesus spoke. He provided many examples that show that the Jewish god is only a jealous tribal deity.

How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? For this our delicate balance of dependence and independence, this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but loving mutual contact, was surely a microcosm of true community, was after all in its simple style an actual and living example of that high goal which the world seeks.

I never went to college. I don’t believe in college for writers. I think too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual. And the intellect is a great danger to creativity because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth--- who you are, what you are, what you wanna be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for twenty-five years now which reads, “Don’t think.” You must never think at the typewriter--- you must feel, and your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data, you do a lot of thinking away from the typewriter, but at the typewriter you should be living. It should be a living experience. The worst thing you do when you think is lie — you can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did, and what you’re trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself — find out who you really are, and try not to lie, try to tell the truth all the time. And the only way to do this is by being very active and very emotional, and get it out of yourself — making things that you hate and things that you love, you write about these then, intensely. When it’s over, then you can think about it; then you can look, it works or it doesn’t work, something is missing here. And, if something is missing, then you go back and reemotionalize that part, so it’s all of a piece. But thinking is to be a corrective in our life. It’s not supposed to be a center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life, being is supposed to be the center, with correctives around, which hold us like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not a way of life. The way of living is the blood pumping through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know, and the intellect doesn’t help you very much there. You should get on with the business of living. Everything of mine is intuitive. All the poetry I’ve written, I couldn’t possibly tell you how I did it. I don’t know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of these sorts of thing. It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that I loved. I love Shakespeare, I don’t Intellectualize about him. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins, I don’t intellectualize about him. I love Dylan Thomas, I don’t know what the hell he’s writing about half the time, but he sounds good, he rings well. Let me give you an example on this sort of thing: I walked into my living room twenty years ago, when one of my daughters was about four years old, and a Dylan Thomas record was on the set. I thought that my wife had put the record on; come to find out my four-year-old had put on his record. I came into the room, she pointed to the record and said, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’ Now, that’s great. See, that’s not intellectualizing, it’s an emotional reaction. If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art.” 

I have learned that there exist a word, onsra, in Bodo, a language spoken by the Bodo people in parts of northeastern India, that is used to describe the poignant emotion a person experiences when that person realizes that the love they have been sharing with another is destined not to endure. This word, which has no equivalent in English, has been translated as "to love for the last time." Misleading. Most English-speaking people would probably take "to love for the last time" to mean to have at long last found one's true love, enduring love. For example, in a song composed by Carole King called "Love for the Last Time." But when I first learned this translation of onsra I thought it meant something else entirely. I thought it meant to have experienced a love so overwhelming, so fierce and deep, that you could never ever ever love again.

It was as if her own conscience had taken human shape, for his voice eloquently uttered the fears, the feelings that had filled her heart that night. She had wavered, for love was sweet and life looked desolate without it; but the example of this man who asked nothing for himself and was as true to his own soul as he would have her to hers, touched and inspired her with a brave desire to be worthy his respect, to emulate his virtue.

In September 1970, airplane tickets were outrageously expensive, which meant only the rich could travel. OK, that wasn’t entirely true for an enormous number of young people whom these outdated media outlets could see only for their outward appearance: they wore their hair long, dressed in bright-colored clothing, and never took a bath (which was a lie, but these young kids didn’t read the newspaper, and the older generation believed any news item that served to denigrate those they considered “a danger to society and common decency”). They were a danger to an entire generation of diligent young boys and girls trying to succeed in life, with their horrible example of lewdness and “free love,” as their detractors liked to say with disdain. Well, this ever-growing number of kids had a system for spreading news that no one, absolutely no one, ever managed to detect.

But if anyone turns away from My reminder, his life will be a dark and narrow one and on the Day of Resurrection We will gather him blind. (Surah Ta Ha: 124) Only belief can save us from a life of anxiety, for we cannot find true happiness on our own. Even if people are rich, they cannot properly enjoy their wealth or enjoy the blessings they possess. In order to do this, they must understand how to appreciate them. For example, they must realize that a carnation with perfectly arranged petals, as well as its scent, softness, and incomparable beauty, is a great blessing of creation. But only believers can really understand this, because they know that whatever exists is a gracious gift from Allah and that all blessings come from Him. Therefore, they contemplate His infinite creative power in every beautiful thing, thereby increasing their love and attachment to Him.

Again: real love—the kind described by the God who created and is love (1 John 4:8)—always includes truth. The two are inextricably intertwined, since true love celebrates truth (1 Cor. 13:6). Christians are called to this kind of love regardless of whether we feel empathy or not. Christians love because Christ first loved us, not because we feel a certain way or have had a particular experience (1 John 4:19). That’s why empathy is different from love and why it also must be submissive to love. Putting yourself in someone’s shoes may help you feel their pain, but their pain isn’t determinative of what’s true or false, right or wrong. A person for whom you feel empathy may, in their pain, believe or demand things that are untrue, unhelpful, and even harmful. We can empathize with the pain of withdrawal for a drug addict, for example, but it would be cruel to give them the heroin they crave.

Patriotism July 4 ALL “ISMS” RUN OUT IN the end, and good riddance to most of them. Patriotism for example. If patriots are people who stand by their country right or wrong, Germans who stood by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich should be adequate proof that we’ve had enough of them. If patriots are people who believe not only that anything they consider unpatriotic is wrong but that anything they consider wrong is unpatriotic, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and his backers should be enough to make us avoid them like the plague. If patriots are people who believe things like “Better Dead Than Red,” they should be shown films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, and then be taken off to the funny farm. The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who love their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost but the planet Earth as Home. If in the interests of making sure we don’t blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty. There is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of another sort altogether.

Many dysfunctional parents use perfectionistic remarks disguised as support to urge a child to do better. For example, comments of perfectionism sound like support, but the child never seems to meet the parent’s expectations. This parental behavior is neglectful. The neglect involves the withholding of true praise when the child does meet expectations. Without true praise, the child or teen does not feel valued and safe. The child feels he must perform or do well to earn a parent’s love.

The reason we haven’t solved the race problem in America after hundreds of years is that people apart from God are trying to create unity, while people under God who already have unity are not living out the unity we possess. The result of both of these conditions is disastrous for America. Our failure to find cultural unity as a nation is directly related to the church’s failure to preserve our spiritual unity. The church has already been given unity because we’ve been made part of the same family. An interesting point to note about family is that you don’t have to get family to be family. A family already is a family. But sometimes you do have to get family to act like family. In the family of God, this is done through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. A perfect example of spiritual unity came on the Day of Pentecost when God’s people spoke with other tongues (Acts 2:4). When the Holy Spirit showed up, people spoke in languages they didn’t know so that people from a variety of backgrounds could unite under the cross of Jesus Christ. The people who heard the apostles speak on the Day of Pentecost were from all over the world, representing at least sixteen different geographical areas, racial categories, or ethnic groups (Acts 2:8–11). But in spite of the great diversity, they found true oneness in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual oneness always and only comes to those who are under God’s authority because in that reality He enables them with the power of His Spirit.

True love involves virtue, friendship and the pursuit of a common good. Both people are focused on a common goal outside of themselves. In Christian marriage, for example, a husband and wife unite themselves to the common aim of helping each other grow in holiness, deepening their own union and raising children. Most of all, true love involves the selfless pursuit of what is best for the other person, even if it means sacrificing one’s own preferences and desires—love in the sense of ti voglio bene.

Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and Three Cups of Tea Speaking of books that contain an element of travel, Greg Mortenson's bestseller about Central Asia was in the news recently. Were you surprised by the allegations that Three Cups of Tea contained fabrications? No, I wasn't. One of the things The Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction. As for Three Cups of Tea, I think that philanthropists and humanitarians are even less forthcoming about what they do. I guess this guy did build a couple of schools in Afghanistan, but a self-promoting humanitarian is not someone I have a great deal of trust or belief in. I lived for six years in Africa and I've been to Africa numerous times since then. People build schools for their own reasons—not to improve a country. The people I've known who've done great things of that type—you know, building hospitals, running schools—are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. Missionaries get a bad rap, but I've known missionaries in Africa who were very self-sacrificing and humble and who did great things. They ran schools, hospitals, libraries; they helped people. Some wrote dictionaries and translated languages that hadn't been written down. I saw a lot of missionaries in Africa that were doing that, and you would never know their names; they came and did their work, and now they're buried there. Are there travel books out there that feel especially honest to you? Many of the books I quote in The Tao of Travel feel honest. One of them, really the most heartfelt, is Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard is a very honest book. Jan Morris has written numerous books, and you can take what she says to the bank. But there are some that just don't feel right. Bruce Chatwin never rang true to me. Bill Bryson said that he would take a couple of people and make them into one composite character. Well, that's what novelists do. If you're a travel writer you have to stick to the facts.

What if that were true? Was that so bad? To have created love like that out of absolutely nothing—it was a sort of miracle, wasn't it? To have set that kind of example for their son—for Flash—for everyone who saw them fumbling along together, walking, talking, marveling at life. It was a kind of glory, if he thought about it, he realized. A common uncontested outright glory for mankind, he thought. Like each and every unnamed, uncontested, unsung star up there, coupling with the dark for us to contemplate in silence.

[…]My dear, there are many kinds of love. Take my love for you, for example. Come on, don’t look so surprised; of course I love you. I never said it in these words, I know, but it’s true. I’ve never met anyone that makes me feel as comfortable as you do; around you, I am probably the closest version of the person I am when no one else is looking. Maybe that’s why I love you; because, in your presence, the noise in my head dies down, and there’s no clutter, just clarity. What a weird thing love is…now, would you like some tea? […]

Political power is small, although from outside it can seem very large. Economic power is much more important, as is the power of media communication. They are true powers. What does political power do? Changes the laws. And what effect does that have? It's very relative. We know very little about how many laws are adhered to, and if they are followed what effect that has. We have to manage to create a change in attitudes and changes of attitude are obtained more through campaigns, through attitudes that set an example, than through laws, through sanctions etc. A change in attitudes of communication, cultural change, has an absolutely unstoppable effect. I have lived in a Spain when if you were gay you would be thrown in prison. Realistically, they haven't especially changed the laws, until we cleared up the possibility of marriage, but at the start of the democracy gay people were thrown in prison. The law barely changed but people's attitudes did. It was in films, on television, it was in novels, it was examples - gay people who came out of the closet, they were kind, we loved them; there was a change.

there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A school master will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in class than a […] genius. […] His task is not to produce extravagant intellectuals but good Latinists, arimeticians and sober decent folk. […] We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds always heal. […] they create their art in spite of school. Once dead and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. […] [T]ime and again the ones who are detested by their teachers […] are afterwards the ones who add to society's treasure.

Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her. She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’ She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk.

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.” ― Stephen Fry

An irregular birthmark stood out on the crest of her hip, like a splash of wine on snow. He touched a finger to it, and she stirred. “Don’t look at that,” she mumbled, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “I know it’s horrid.” “Horrid?” Despite the pained expression on her face, he had to laugh. “Sweetheart, I can honestly say that there is nothing about you that’s horrid in the least.” “My painting master would not agree.” The bitter taste of envy filled his mouth. “Do you know, that Frenchman of yours had better hope I never meet with him. “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “Not Gervais. Never Gervais. My painting master was an old, balding prig called Mr. Turklethwaite.” Gray’s bafflement must have been obvious. She went on, “There was never any Gervais. I mean, you know that I’d never taken a man to my bed, but you must understand…I’ve never allowed another man into my heart, either.” She kissed his brow, then his lips. “I love you, only you.” God. How brave she was. Tossing those words about as though they were feathers. Could she possibly suspect how they landed in his chest like cannonballs, detonating deep in his heart? Struggling for equanimity, he asked casually, “So when did this other painting master have occasion to see your birthmark?” She laughed. “He didn’t. But I painted something like it once, on a portrait of Venus. I told him I thought it lent her an air of reality. Oh, how he scolded me. A lady who paints, he said-“ She gave Gray a teasing look. “He would not apply the term “artist” to a female, you see.” “I see.” “A lady who paints, he said, should approach the art as she would any other genteel accomplishment. Her purpose is to please; her goal is to create an example of refinement. A true lady would not paint an imperfection, he said, any more than she would strike a false note in a sonata. Beauty is not real, and reality is not beautiful.” Gray shook his head. “Remarkable. I believe I despise your real painting master even more than I hated the fictional one. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

We’ve been through so much together I’ve seen you grow into someone you thought you’d never be I’ve seen you endure challenges most will never see Mocked by your peers for being from a different culture Feeling deserted, you searched for ways to adapt and become accepted You resorted to fitting in instead of making a stand for your true self You’ve made countless mistakes in pursuit of acceptance To me, it was undeniable you were meant to be a misfit You dove into finding your talents and utilizing them Unapologetically, you began making your mark during your middle school years Discovering your skills as a runner made a way for you to flee from the norm Racing hard and your pace in this life Hurdle after hurdle, you never stopped jumping and running towards the finish line You lost focus numerous times running someone else’s race, matching their suicidal pace, but over time you opened your eyes and ran your race in your lane You used failures as your stepping stone to climb up to where you are now and where you’re going I love you, I love you even when you hate you Thank you for staying true to you, never justifying your flaws and running away from your consequences You’ve taught me so much. I’m proud of you I love you so much. Thank you for being a friend, an example, a brother Thank you for being the man you are now. I love you, man in the mirror

On the Dangers of Confusing Saga with History The Four Loves (From Chapter II, “Likings and Loves for the Sub-human”) THE ACTUAL HISTORY OF EVERY COUNTRY IS FULL OF shabby and even shameful doings. The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it and are often themselves open to serious historical criticism. Hence a patriotism based on our glorious past is fair game for the debunker. As knowledge increases it may snap and be converted into disillusioned cynicism, or may be maintained by a voluntary shutting of the eyes. But who can condemn what clearly makes many people, at many important moments, behave so much better than they could have done without its help? I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study. The stories are best when they are handed on and accepted as stories. I do not mean by this that they should be handed on as mere fictions (some of them are after all true). But the emphasis should be on the tale as such, on the picture which fires the imagination, the example that strengthens the will. The schoolboy who hears them should dimly feel—though of course he cannot put it into words—that he is hearing saga. Let him be thrilled—preferably ‘out of school’—by the ‘Deeds that won the Empire’; but the less we mix this up with his ‘history lessons’ or mistake it for a serious analysis—worse still,

Patriotism comes from the same Latin word as father. Blind patriotism is collective transference. In it the state becomes a parent and we citizens submit our loyalty to ensure its protection. We may have been encouraged to make that bargain from our public school education, our family home, religion, or culture in general. We associate safety with obedience to authority, for example, going along with government policies. We then make duty, as it is defined by the nation, our unquestioned course. Our motivation is usually not love of country but fear of being without a country that will defend us and our property. Connection is all-important to us; excommunication is the equivalent of death, the finality we can’t dispute. Healthy adult loyalty is a virtue that does not become blind obedience for fear of losing connection, nor total devotion so that we lose our boundaries. Our civil obedience can be so firm that it may take precedence over our concern for those we love, even our children. Here is an example: A young mother is told by the doctor that her toddler is allergic to peanuts and peanut oil. She lets the school know of her son’s allergy when he goes to kindergarten. Throughout his childhood, she is vigilant and makes sure he is safe from peanuts in any form. Eighteen years later, there is a war and he is drafted. The same mother, who was so scrupulously careful about her child’s safety, now waves goodbye to him with a tear but without protest. Mother’s own training in public school and throughout her life has made her believe that her son’s life is expendable whether or not the war in question is just. “Patriotism” is so deeply ingrained in her that she does not even imagine an alternative, even when her son’s life is at stake. It is of course also true that, biologically, parents are ready to let children go just as the state is ready to draft them. What a cunning synchronic-ity. In addition, old men who decide on war take advantage of the timing too. The warrior archetype is lively in eighteen-year-olds, who are willing to fight. Those in their mid-thirties, whose archetype is being a householder and making a mark in their chosen field, will not show an interest in battlefields of blood. The chiefs count on the fact that young braves will take the warrior myth literally rather than as a metaphor for interior battles. They will be willing to put their lives on the line to live out the collective myth of societies that have not found the path of nonviolence. Our collective nature thus seems geared to making war a workable enterprise. In some people, peacemaking is the archetype most in evidence. Nature seems to have made that population smaller, unfortunately. Our culture has trained us to endure and tolerate, not to protest and rebel. Every cell of our bodies learned that lesson. It may not be virtue; it may be fear. We may believe that showing anger is dangerous, because it opposes the authority we are obliged to appease and placate if we are to survive. This explains why we so admire someone who dares to say no and to stand up or even to die for what he believes. That person did not fall prey to the collective seduction. Watching Jeopardy on television, I notice that the audience applauds with special force when a contestant risks everything on a double-jeopardy question. The healthy part of us ardently admires daring. In our positive shadow, our admiration reflects our own disavowed or hidden potential. We, too, have it in us to dare. We can stand up for our truth, putting every comfort on the line, if only we can calm our long-scared ego and open to the part of us that wants to live free. Joseph Campbell says encouragingly, “The part of us that wants to become is fearless.” Religion and Transference Transference is not simply horizontal, from person to person, but vertical from person to a higher power, usually personified as God. When

Psychologists working with the Tibetan community in exile have noted the remarkable resiliency and joyfulness among the people, even though many are survivors of great trauma and loss. Most surprising are the responses of nuns and monks who have been imprisoned and tortured. According to a study by Harvard psychologists, many show few or none of the ordinary signs of trauma, but instead have deepened in compassion and joyful appreciation of life. Their trainings in loving-kindness, compassion, and wisdom led them to pray for their enemies. One old lama recounted that over the twenty years of prison and torture, his only true fear was that he would lose his compassion and close his heart. If we want to understand optimal mental health, these monks and nuns are a striking example.

I am Ra. Let us give the example of the man who sees all the poker hands. He then knows the game. It is but child’s play to gamble, for it is no risk. The other hands are known. The possibilities are known and the hand will be played correctly but with no interest. In time/space and in the true-color green density, the hands of all are open to the eye. The thoughts, the feelings, the troubles: all these may be seen. There is no deception and no desire for deception. Thus much may be accomplished in harmony, but the mind/body/spirit gains little polarity from this interaction. Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine: a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt, and re-dealt, and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin—and we stress begin—to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves’ cards is to look into the eyes. You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: “All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you.” This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love. This cannot be done without the forgetting, for it would carry no weight in the life of the mind/body/spirit beingness totality.

God calls his creatures to live under authority. He is our authority and has vested authority in people within the institutions he has established (home, church, state, and business). You must not be embarrassed to be authorities for your children. You exercise authority as God's agent. You may not direct your children for your own agenda or convenience. You must direct your children on God's behalf for their good. Our culture tends toward the extreme poles on a continuum. In the area of authority, we tend either toward a crass kind of John Wayne authoritarianism or toward being a wimp. God calls you by His Word and his example to be authorities who are truly kind. God calls you to exercise authority, not in making your children do what you want, but in being true servants - authorities who lay down your lives. The purpose for your authority in the lives of your children is not to hold them under your power, but to empower them to be self-controlled people living freely under the authority if God. Jesus is an example of this. The One who commands you, the One who possesses all authority, came as a servant. He is a ruler who serves; he is also a servant who rules. He exercises sovereign authority that is kind - authority exercised on behalf of his subjects. In John 13, Jesus, who knew that the Father had put all things under his authority, put on a towel and washed the disciples' feet. As his people submit to his authority, they are empowered to live freely in the freedom of the gospel. As a parent, you must exercise authority. You must require obedience of your children because they are called by God to obey and honor you. You must exercise authority, not as a cruel taskmaster, but as one who truly loves them.

This is also true in defining spirituality. The infatuation one feels toward another when one first falls in love is a mixture of dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine. This feeling is exhilarating and intoxicating and it brings joy to most people. The fact one knows the chemicals are involved does not lessen the experience when one is with that person. But it does help regulate your emotions if you know that the person you feel for is negatively affecting you. Oxytocin is another example of a “love” drug found in the human body that brings a greater chance of long term sometime moments. [...] It does not matter if it is the chemical or not, the tantalizing excitement and astounding exhilaration of life long sometime moments makes one grateful to be alive and breathing. These events enliven us and make us feel transcendence and in turn makes one feel transcendent in the merging.

I have seen elsewhere houses in ruins, and statues both of gods and men: these are men still. 'Tis all true; and yet, for all that, I cannot so often revisit the tomb of that so great and so puissant city,—[Rome]— that I do not admire and reverence it. The care of the dead is recommended to us; now, I have been bred up from my infancy with these dead; I had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long before I had any of those of my own house; I knew the Capitol and its plan before I knew the Louvre, and the Tiber before I knew the Seine..... .... Finding myself of no use to this age, I throw myself back upon that other, and am so enamoured of it, that the free, just, and flourishing state of that ancient Rome (for I neither love it in its birth nor its old age) interests and impassionates me; and therefore I cannot so often revisit the sites of their streets and houses, and those ruins profound even to the Antipodes, that I am not interested in them. Is it by nature, or through error of fancy, that the sight of places which we know to have been frequented and inhabited by persons whose memories are recommended in story, moves us in some sort more than to hear a recital of their—acts or to read their writings? It pleases me to consider their face, bearing, and vestments: I pronounce those great names betwixt my teeth, and make them ring in my ears: Of things that are in some part great and admirable, I admire even the common parts: I could wish to see them in familiar relations, walk, and sup. It were ingratitude to contemn the relics and images of so many worthy and valiant men as I have seen live and die, and who, by their example, give us so many good instructions, knew we how to follow them. And, moreover, this very Rome that we now see, deserves to be beloved.

Darwin’s Bestiary PROLOGUE Animals tame and animals feral prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral: the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile, rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile. Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride—every peril was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural, while Courage, Devotion, Thrift—every bright laurel crowned a creature in some mythological mural. Scientists think there is something immoral in singular brutes having meat that is plural: beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral. Yet between the lines there’s an implicit demurral; the habit stays with us, albeit it’s puerile: when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel. 1. THE ANT The ant, Darwin reminded us, defies all simple-mindedness: Take nothing (says the ant) on faith, and never trust a simple truth. The PR men of bestiaries eulogized for centuries this busy little paragon, nature’s proletarian— but look here, Darwin said: some ants make slaves of smaller ants, and end exploiting in their peonages the sweating brows of their tiny drudges. Thus the ant speaks out of both sides of its mealy little mouth: its example is extolled to the workers of the world, but its habits also preach the virtues of the idle rich. 2. THE WORM Eyeless in Gaza, earless in Britain, lower than a rattlesnake’s belly-button, deaf as a judge and dumb as an audit: nobody gave the worm much credit till Darwin looked a little closer at this spaghetti-torsoed loser. Look, he said, a worm can feel and taste and touch and learn and smell; and ounce for ounce, they’re tough as wrestlers, and love can turn them into hustlers, and as to work, their labors are mythic, small devotees of the Protestant Ethic: they’ll go anywhere, to mountains or grassland, south to the rain forests, north to Iceland, fifty thousand to every acre guzzling earth like a drunk on liquor, churning the soil and making it fertile, earning the thanks of every mortal: proud Homo sapiens, with legs and arms— his whole existence depends on worms. So, History, no longer let the worm’s be an ignoble lot unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Moral: even a worm can turn. 3. THE RABBIT a. Except in distress, the rabbit is silent, but social as teacups: no hare is an island. (Moral: silence is golden—or anyway harmless; rabbits may run, but never for Congress.) b. When a rabbit gets miffed, he bounds in an orbit, kicking and scratching like—well, like a rabbit. (Moral: to thine own self be true—or as true as you can; a wolf in sheep’s clothing fleeces his skin.) c. He populates prairies and mountains and moors, but in Sweden the rabbit can’t live out of doors. (Moral: to know your own strength, take a tug at your shackles; to understand purity, ponder your freckles.) d. Survival developed these small furry tutors; the morals of rabbits outnumber their litters. (Conclusion: you needn’t be brainy, benign, or bizarre to be thought a great prophet. Endure. Just endure.) 4. THE GOSSAMER Sixty miles from land the gentle trades that silk the Yankee clippers to Cathay sift a million gossamers, like tides of fluff above the menace of the sea. These tiny spiders spin their bits of webbing and ride the air as schooners ride the ocean; the Beagle trapped a thousand in its rigging, small aeronauts on some elusive mission. The Megatherium, done to extinction by its own bigness, makes a counterpoint to gossamers, who breathe us this small lesson: for survival, it’s the little things that count.

She gives just enough hints about him to make you wonder why he became so villainous. And if he dies, I’ll never learnt the answer.” Oliver eyes her closely. “Perhaps he was born villainous.” “No one is born villainous.” “Oh?” he said with raised eyebrow. “So we’re all born good?” “Neither. We start as animals, with an animal’s needs and desires. It takes parents and teachers and other good examples to show us how to restrain those needs and desires, when necessary, for the greater good. But it’s still our choice whether to heed that education or to do as we please.” “For a woman who loves murder and mayhem, you’re quite the philosopher.” “I like to understand how things work. Why people behave as they do.” He digested that for a moment. “I happen to think that some of us, like Rockton, are born with a wicked bent.” She chose her words carefully. “That certainly provides Rockton with a convenient excuse for his behavior.” His features turned stony. “What do you mean?” “Being moral and disciplined is hard work. Being wicked requires no effort at all-one merely indulges every desire and impulse, no matter how hurtful or immoral. By claiming to be born wicked, Rockton ensures that he doesn’t have to struggle to be god. He can just protest that he can’t help himself.” “Perhaps he can’t,” he clipped out. “Or maybe he’s simply unwilling to fight his impulses. And I want to know the reason for that. That’s why I keep reading Minerva’s books.” Did Oliver actually believe he’d been born irredeemably wicked? How tragic! It lent a hopelessness to his life that helped to explain his mindless pursuit of pleasure. “I can tell you the reason for Rockton’s villainy.” Oliver rose to round the desk. Propping his hip on the edge near her, he reached out to tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear. A sweet shudder swept over her. Why must he have this effect on her? It simply wasn’t fair. “Oh?” she managed. “Rockton knows he can’t have everything he wants,” he said hoarsely, his hand drifting to her cheek. “He can’t have the heroine, for example. She would never tolerate his…wicked impulses. Yet he still wants her. And his wanting consumes him.” Her breath lodged in her throat. It had been days since he’d touched her, and she hadn’t forgotten what it was like for one minute. To have him this near, saying such things… She fought for control over her volatile emotions. “His wanting consumes him precisely because he can’t have her. If he thought he could, he wouldn’t want her after all.” “Not true.” His voice deepening, he stroked the line of her jaw with a tenderness that roused an ache in her chest. “Even Rockton recognizes when a woman is unlike any other. Her very goodness in the face of his villainy bewitches him. He thinks if he can just possess that goodness, then the dark cloud lying on his soul will lift, and he’ll have something other than villainy to sustain him.” “Then he’s mistaken.” Her pulse trebled as his finger swept the hollow of her throat. “The only person who can lift the dark cloud on his soul is himself.” He paused in his caress. “So he’s doomed, then?” “No!” Her gaze flew to his. “No one is doomed, and certainly not Rockton. There’s still hope for him. There is always hope.” His eyes burned with a feverish light, and before she could look away, he bent to kiss her. It was soft, tender…delicious. Someone moaned, she wasn’t sure who. All she knew was that his mouth was on hers again, molding it, tasting it, making her hungry in the way that only he seemed able to do. “Maria…” he breathed. Seizing her by the arms, he drew her up into his embrace. “My God, I’ve thought of nothing but you since that day in the carriage.

Lady Thornton!” the prosecutor rapped out, and he began firing questions at her so rapidly that she could scarcely keep track of them. “Tell us the truth, Lady Thornton. Did that man”-his finger pointed accusingly to where Ian was sitting, out of Elizabeth’s vision-“fid you and bribe you to come back here and tell us this absurd tale? Or did he find you and threaten your life if you didn’t come here today? Isn’t it true that you have no idea where your brother is? Isn’t it true that by your own admission a few moments ago you fled in terror for your life from this cruel man? Isn’t it true that you are afraid of further cruelty from him-“ “No!” Elizabeth cried. Her gaze raced over the male faces around and above her, and she could see not one that looked anything but either dubious or contemptuous of the truths she had told. “No further questions!” “Wait!” In that infinitesimal moment of time Elizabeth realized that if she couldn’t convince them she was telling the truth, she might be able to convince them she was too stupid to make up such a lie. “Yes, my lord,” her voice rang out. “I cannot deny it-about his cruelty, I mean.” Sutherland swung around, his eyes lighting up, and renewed excitement throbbed in the great chamber. “You admit this is a cruel man?” “Yes, I do,” Elizabeth emphatically declared. “My dear, poor woman, could you tell us-all of us-some examples of his cruelty?” “Yes, and when I do, I know you will all understand how truly cruel my husband can be and why I ran off with Robert-my brother, that is.” Madly, she tried to think of half-truths that would not constitute perjury, and she remembered Ian’s words the night he came looking for her at Havenhurst. “Yes, go on.” Everyone in the galleries leaned forward in unison, and Elizabeth had the feeling the whole building was tipping toward her. “When was the last time your husband was cruel?” “Well, just before I left he threatened to cut off my allowance-I had overspent it, and I hated to admit it.” “You were afraid he would beat you for it?” “No, I was afraid he wouldn’t give me more until next quarter!” Someone in the gallery laughed, then the sound was instantly choked. Sutherland started to frown darkly, but Elizabeth plunged ahead. “My husband and I were discussing that very thing-my allowance, I mean-two nights before I ran away with Bobby.” “And did he become abusive during that discussion? Is that the night your maid testified that you were weeping?” “Yes, I believe it was!” “Why were you weeping, Lady Thornton?” The galleries tipped further toward her. “I was in a terrible taking,” Elizabeth said, stating a fact. “I wanted to go away with Bobby. In order to do it, I had to sell my lovely emeralds, which Lord Thornton gave me.” Seized with inspiration, she leaned confiding inches toward the Lord Chancellor upon the woolsack. “I knew he would buy me more, you know.” Startled laughter rang out from the galleries, and it was the encouragement Elizabeth desperately needed. Lord Sutherland, however, wasn’t laughing. He sensed that she was trying to dupe him, but with all the arrogance typical of most of his sex, he could not believe she was smart enough to actually attempt, let alone accomplish it. “I’m supposed to believe you sold your emeralds out of some freakish start-out of a frivolous desire to go off with a man you claim was your brother?” “Goodness, I don’t know what you are supposed to believe. I only know I did it.” “Madam!” he snapped. “You were on the verge of tears, according to the jeweler to whom you sold them. If you were in a frivolous mood, why were you on the verge of tears?” Elizabeth gave him a vacuous look. “I liked my emeralds.

There are three ways to respond to your critic that you might find particularly helpful: defense, questioning, and acceptance. The first way is to directly challenge your critic, saying something like: “I disagree. That seems extreme. I’m not sure that is true.” The second way to respond is to ask your critic questions that highlight his logic. You can also ask for specifics when he is making a vague or extreme claim. For example: Critic: No one likes you. Me: No one? Do you mean nobody at all, or just this person? A final way to respond to your critic is by flowing with the attacks and finding a grain of truth in them. This is a powerful form of acceptance that allows you to acknowledge a shortcoming or mistake, without taking on the meaning that you are a bad person because of it. The general attitude behind the acceptance is: Yes, I make mistakes and have flaws, but I am still a good person who is worthy of love and belonging.

Your charming charm is a super sexy mega power that is simply impossible to overcome. Sweetest gourmet, I adore your gorgeous body, when I see you, only one word sounds in my head: yum, I will give myself completely to you. I will always love only you unconsciously, unconsciously, your gently erotic image sat in the depths of my mind completely. From your amazingly contagious beauty, your mouth opens and speechless is lost. Dizzyingly, stunningly beautiful, you are like a giant tornado, from which everything attracts you. And the heart and soul yearn all the time only for you. It doesn't matter if you love me or not, the main thing is that I still love you, and in my subconscious mind, I will only love you forever. Your luxurious appearance of the highest quality, this is a workshop, the filigree work of Mother Nature, this is just a masterpiece that constitutes a unique example of true beauty, you have no equal, you are a girl of high caliber. You are absolutely beautiful to such an extent, so beautiful, so exotic, erotic, and your image sounds poetic like very beautiful music of love, that I’m just afraid and shy to come to you, I’m afraid to talk to you, as if standing next to a goddess, or with a super mega star, a world scale model that even aliens probably know. My heart beats more often, I can’t talk normally, from excitement, goosebumps all over my body, and it just shakes. All these are symptoms of true love for you, well, simply: oh), wow). To be your boyfriend and husband is the greatest honor in the world, he knelt before you with flowers in his hands. Your appearance is perfect just like Barbie. You are so beautiful that only you want to have sex forever, countless, infinite number of times. You are unattainable, you are like a star whose light of the soul, like a searchlight, illuminates me in the deep darkness of solitude. In love with you thorough. You are simply amazingly beautiful. You are the best of the best. Goddess of all goddesses, empress of all empresses, queen of all queens. More beautiful you just can not imagine a girl. Sexier than you just can not be anything. Beautiful soul just is not found. There was nothing more perfect than you and never will be, simply because I think so. Laponka, I'm your faithful fan, you are my only idol, idol, icon of beauty. It doesn't matter who you are, I will accept you any. Because in any case I am eager to be only with you. You have a sexy smile, and your sensual look is just awesome. And from your voice and look a pleasant shiver all over your body. You are special, the best that is in all worlds, universes and dimensions. You're just a sight for sore eyes. To you I feel the most powerful, love and sexual inclination. You're cooler than any Viagra and afrodosiak. From your beauty just cling to the constraints and embarrassment.

The Messenger was the first to legislate an international law. Although the concept was known before Islam, international law was very limited. For example, there were no recognized rules concerning prisoners of war. The Messenger established a set of rules to bring a “discipline” to fighting. For example, the following is the order given by him and all his true successors to departing armies, an order obeyed to the letter by Muslims in their wars as Muslims: Always keep fear of God in your mind. Remember that you can’t afford to do anything without His grace. Don’t forget that Islam is a mission of peace and love. Don’t destroy fruit trees or fertile fields in your paths. Be just, and spare the feelings of the vanquished. Respect all religious persons who live in hermitages or convents, and spare their edifices. Don’t kill civilians, or violate women’s chastity and the conquered’s honor. Don’t harm old people and children, or accept gifts from the civilian population. Don’t billet your soldiers or officers in civilians’ homes.364

Yes, there is a human nature and that human nature is build for love and contact. It is build for connection, it is build for mutual protection, it is build for mutual aid. And when we rear people in base of all society on the lines that transgress those needs, we're gonna get exactly what we have today. Which is a society which is increasingly conflicted, increasingly fractured, increasingly disconnected and where human pathology is, despite all the advances of medicine, chronic human pathology is on the rise. Western medicine does not recognize that the pathologies are manifestations of our life, that diseases don't have a life of their own, that diseases express the life of the individual. And if that individual's life is changed, so can the disease in many, many cases. And furthermore, that human beings have an innate healing capacity. There is a healing capacity in all living beings, plant or animal. And along with the wonders and contributions of Western medicine we could do so much more if we actually respected and evoked and encouraged that healing capacity that is within the individual, which is very much connected to the emergence of the true self. Now, for that, you need the truth. That means, we actually have to look at what is going on. And there is so much denial in this society. My own profession is a prime example. The average doctor does not hear the information I gave you about asthma. They couldn't explain it, even though the physiology is straightforward. For all the trauma in this society, the average physician does not hear the word "trauma" in all their years of training. Not that they don't get a lecture, not that they don't get a course, they don't even hear the word, except in the physical sense, physical trauma. Teachers are not taught that the human child's brain is still developing and that the conditions for healthy brain development is the presence of nurturing and responsive adults. And that schools are not knowledge factories, they are places where human development needs to be nurtured. That's a very different proposition for an educational system. And the courts don't get it. The courts think that if a human is behaving badly, it is a choice they're making, therefore they need to be punished. For some strange reason, certain minority groups have to be punished more than the average, like in my country 5% of the population is native, and they are 25% of the jail population now. And of course when we ask the question if the science is straightforward — as I believe it to be — and the conclusions are as clear as I believe them to be, why don't we just embrace it and follow it and do something about it? Well.. the reason for that is obvious, because if everything I just said happens to be true, which I firmly believe to be true, and if it is.. everything would have to change. How we teach parents would have to change, how we treat family would have to change, how we support young parents would have to change, how we pass laws, how we educate people, how we run the economy. We have to do something different. Getting to that something different has to begin with an inquiry and I hope I've said enough to encourage you to continue on that path of inquiry.

Would you want the ability to hear other people’s thoughts? Of course you would. Everyone answers yes to that question, until they think it all the way through. For example, what if other people could hear your thoughts? What if they could hear your thoughts…right now?... Sometimes we have thoughts that even we don’t understand. Thoughts that aren’t even true—that aren’t really how we feel—but they’re running through our heads anyway because they’re interesting to think about... If you could hear other people’s thoughts, you’d overhear things that are true as well as things that are completely random. And you wouldn’t know one from the other. It’d drive you insane. What’s true? What’s not? A million ideas, but what do they mean?... That’s what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff where you’re not sure what the poet’s talking about. You may have an idea, but you can’t be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. Is it a stand-in—a symbol—for another idea? Does it fit into a larger, more hidden, metaphor?

breaking things off, convinced that our partner’s psychological issues are making things impossible, or that we’re not as compatible as we’d believed. Either of these might conceivably be true in certain cases; people are sometimes guilty of spectacularly bad choices in love, and in other domains as well. But more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by comparison with the world of your fantasy, where the limiting rules of reality don’t apply. The point that Bergson made about the future—that it’s more appealing than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if they contradict each other—is no less true of fantasy romantic partners, who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn’t coexist in one person in the real world. It’s common, for example, to enter a relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement—and then, when that’s not what transpires, to assume that the problem is your partner and that these qualities might coexist in someone else, whom you should therefore set off to find. The reality is that the demands are contradictory. The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall. And not only should you settle; ideally, you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or getting married, or having a child. The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude—to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options—is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.

Instead of concentrating on how we can include the “other,” too often in American Christianity the focus becomes on when, how, and finding the right justifications for excluding the “other.” When I truly begin to appreciate the inclusive nature of Jesus, my heart laments at all the exclusiveness I see and experience. I think of my female friends; women of wisdom, peace, discernment, and character who should be emulated by the rest of us. When I listen and learn from these women, I realize what an amazing leaders they would be in church—but many never will be leaders in that way because they are lacking one thing: male genitals. Wise and godly women have been excluded, not because of a lack of gifting, education, or ability, but because they were born with the wrong private parts. I also think of a man who attended my former church who has an intellectual disability. He was friendly, faithful, and could always be counted on for a good laugh because he had absolutely no filter— yelling out at least six times during each sermon. One time in church my daughter quietly leaned over to tell me she had to go to the bathroom—and, in true form so that everyone heard, he shouted out, “Hey! Pipe it down back there!” It was hilarious. However, our friend has been asked to leave several churches because of his “disruptiveness.” Instead of being loved and embraced for who he is, he has been repeatedly excluded from the people of God because of a disability. We find plenty of other reasons to exclude people. We exclude because people have been divorced, exclude them for not signing on to our 18-page statements of faith, exclude them because of their mode of baptism, exclude them because of their sexual orientation, exclude them for rejecting predestination…we have become a religious culture focused on exclusion of the “other,” instead of following the example of Jesus that focuses on finding ways for the radical inclusion of the “other.” Every day I drive by churches that proudly have “All Are Welcome” plastered across their signs; however, I rarely believe it—and I don’t think others believe it either. Far too often, instead of church being something that exists for the “other,” church becomes something that exists for the “like us” and the “willing to become like us.” And so, Christianity in America is dying.

Ionic is the ‘opposites attract’ chemical bond,” Elizabeth explained as she emerged from behind the counter and began to sketch on an easel. “For instance, let’s say you wrote your PhD thesis on free market economics, but your husband rotates tires for a living. You love each other, but he’s probably not interested in hearing about the invisible hand. And who can blame him, because you know the invisible hand is libertarian garbage.” She looked out at the audience as various people scribbled notes, several of which read “Invisible hand: libertarian garbage.” “The point is, you and your husband are completely different and yet you still have a strong connection. That’s fine. It’s also ionic.” She paused, lifting the sheet of paper over the top of the easel to reveal a fresh page of newsprint. “Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water—or H2O as it’s more commonly known. In many respects, the covalent bond is not unlike a party—one that’s made better thanks to the pie you made and the wine he brought. Unless you don’t like parties—I don’t—in which case you could also think of the covalent bond as a small European country, say Switzerland. Alps, she quickly wrote on the easel, + a Strong Economy = Everybody Wants to Live There. In a living room in La Jolla, California, three children fought over a toy dump truck, its broken axle lying directly adjacent to a skyscraper of ironing that threatened to topple a small woman, her hair in curlers, a small pad of paper in her hands. Switzerland, she wrote. Move. “That brings us to the third bond,” Elizabeth said, pointing at another set of molecules, “the hydrogen bond—the most fragile, delicate bond of all. I call this the ‘love at first sight’ bond because both parties are drawn to each other based solely on visual information: you like his smile, he likes your hair. But then you talk and discover he’s a closet Nazi and thinks women complain too much. Poof. Just like that the delicate bond is broken. That’s the hydrogen bond for you, ladies—a chemical reminder that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are.” She walked

THE MAGIC OF LOVE The magic of personal love works miracles as this true story testifies: Even one person’s intimate love can deeply heal another. For example,Tom, a simple person without training in psychotherapy, worked as an orderly in a mental hospital. One of the sickest patients in the hospital, a deeply psychotic woman, had been there for eighteen years. She never spoke to anyone, or even looked in another’s eyes. She sat alone all day in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth. One day during his dinner break, Tom found another rocking chair, pulled it over, and rocked along beside her as he ate his dinner. He returned the next day, and the next. Tom worked only five days per week, but he asked for special permission to come in on his days off so he could rock with the psychotic woman. Tom did this every day for six months. Then one evening as he got up to leave, the woman said, “Good night.” It was the first time she had spoken in eighteen years. After that, she began to get well. Tom still came to rock with her every day, and eventually she was healed of her psychosis.* *Healing the Eight Stages of Life. M. Linn, S. Fabricant, D. Linn. Paulist Press. 1988.

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

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag. p237

I sighed. “Very well, if that is too difficult, show me all communications the day the Pecus Curse took effect.” The Book paused, its writing fading in and out uncertainly. At length, a sentence formed. I don’t think that’s allowed. “What do you mean, it’s not allowed!” You’re concerned in breaking the curse, the Book scrawled. It would be considered cheating. This is outside my parameters. “I am most certainly not concerned in breaking the curse!” I told the book firmly. “It has nothing in the world to do with me. Lord Pecus can look after himself.” Lord Pecus seems to have chosen you to break it, smugly said the Book. That means you’re not allowed any help. You wouldn’t want to cheat, would you? “Of course I would!” I said. “What a ridiculous question! I quite often cheat, thank you very much; sometimes it’s the only way to get things done. For example: how may I break a curse if I’m not given any information?” It’s meant to be hard, inked the Book, sulky again. That’s the way it is. All the True Love curses are like that. “I utterly refuse to be involved in anything so trite as a True Love Curse! And if you dare to tell me that ‘Lord Pecus seems to have involved me’, I shall begin ripping your pages out!

Hitherto all that has given colour to existence has lacked a history: where would one find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law, as also of punishment, has hitherto been completely lacking. Have the different divisions of the day, the consequences of a regular appointment of the times for labour, feast, and repose, ever been made the object of investigation? Do we know the moral effects of the alimentary substances? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The ever-recurring outcry for and against vegetarianism proves that as yet there is no such philosophy!) Have the experiences with regard to communal living, for example, in monasteries, been collected? Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship been set forth? The customs of the learned, of trades-people, of areists, and of mechanics have they already found been found and thought about? There is so much in them to think about! All that up till now has been considered as the "conditions of existence," of human beings, and all reason, passion and superstition in this consideration have they been investigated to the end? The observation alone of the different degrees of development which the human impulses have attained, and could yet attain, according to the different moral climates, would furnish too much work for the most laborious; whole generations, and regular co-operating generations of the learned, would be needed in order to exhaust the points of view and the material here furnished. The same is true of the determining of the reasons for the differences of the moral climates ("on what account does this sun of a fundamental moral judgment and standard of highest value shine here and that sun there?") And there is again a new labour which points out the erroneousness of all these reasons, and determines the entire essence of the moral judgments hitherto made. Supposing all these labours to be accomplished, the most critical of all questions would then come into the foreground: whether science is in a position to provide goals for human action, after it has proved that it can take them away and destroy them and then would be the time for a process of experimenting, in which every kind of heroism could satisfy itself, an experimenting for centuries, which would put into the shade all the great labours and sacrifices of previous history. Science has not as yet built its Cyclopic buildings; but for that also the time will come.

So many people were changed by Chris’s life. Many others were changed by his death. I saw much good and charity from others as a result. So if it’s true that there is great evil in the world, and that evil was responsible for Chris’s murder, then I have to recognize that there is great good as well, and that I witnessed it even in the darkest depths. That doesn’t excuse the evil, much less make up for it. But it does mean that evil need not prevail, and will not prevail, as long as we can perceive the good even at the worst times. I struggle to be at peace with the fact that it hurts like hell to lose my husband. It hurts like hell for our kids. But ultimately, God’s plan is not about me, or even them. It’s about the deeper mission of our lives. Many people say they’ve changed the direction of their lives because of Chris’s example-Team guys, servicemen, people who read the book and heard about his death. It is of great comfort to know that their reactions are part of God’s plan. I see beauty rising from ashes. And there is this other thing I keep coming back to. My faith tells me that I will see Chris again. I cling to that. If I didn’t think I could touch him again, hold him in his perfection, and my perfection, in the glory of the afterlife--then truly I would despair.

Trains are about getting from point A to point B in a timely, efficient manner. They rumble through town on a predetermined path, with a sequence of stops to make and a schedule to keep. A train has a plan, and the plan moves in one direction, with little regard for anyone or anything beyond its path. It’s no surprise that cities and towns turn their worst side to the tracks. A park, on the other hand, is the opposite. A park has no agenda and makes no exclusions. It is welcoming, lovely, and nurturing. It is a forum for life; a congregation of unscheduled joy, laughter, and leisure. Cities bring their most important events to parks: weddings, recreation, picnics, relaxation. People bring life to the park because the park invites them in, no matter who they are. No ticket required. No schedule to obey. The parks, in a word, are turned outward; the tracks are turned inward. The parks give unceasingly to their community; the train rumbles through. This is a picture of how we can approach our loves: We can choose to be trains or parks. We can plan our lives with rigid precision, ignore everyone who isn’t sitting beside us, and simply forge ahead with our own agenda. Or, we can be present in our lives and open ourselves up to the chaos of love. I’m sure we can all think of examples of people in our own lives, whether married or not, who operate as trains and who operate as parks.

dwell in humility; and take heed that no views of outward gain get too deep hold of you, that so your eyes being single to the Lord, you may be preserved in the way of safety. Where people let loose their minds after the love of outward things, and are more engaged in pursuing the profits and seeking the friendships of this world than to be inwardly acquainted with the way of true peace, they walk in a vain shadow, while the true comfort of life is wanting. Their examples are often hurtful to others; and their treasures thus collected do many times prove dangerous snares to their children. But where people are sincerely devoted to follow Christ, and dwell under the influence of his Holy Spirit, their stability and firmness, through a Divine blessing, is at times like dew on the tender plants round about them, and the weightiness of their spirits secretly works on the minds of others. In this condition, through the spreading influence of Divine love, they feel a care over the flock, and way is opened for maintaining good order in the Society. And though we may meet with opposition from another spirit, yet, as there is a dwelling in meekness, feeling our spirits subject, and moving only in the gentle, peaceable wisdom, the inward reward of quietness will be greater than all our difficulties. Where the pure life is kept to, and meetings of discipline are held in the authority of it, we find by experience that they are comfortable, and tend to the health of the body.

As everyone knows, Islam set up a social order from the outset, in contrast, for example, to Christianity. Islamic social teachings are so basic to the religion that still today many people, including Muslims, are completely unaware of Islam's spiritual dimensions. Social order demands rules and regulations, fear of the king, respect for the police, acknowledgement of authority. It has to be set up on the basis of God's majesty and severity. It pays primary attention to the external realm, the realm of the body and the desires of the lower soul, the realm where God is distant from the world. In contrast, Islamic spiritual teachings allow for intimacy, love, boldness, ecstatic expressions, and intoxication in the Beloved. All these are qualities that pertain to nearness to God. (...) In short, on the social level, Islam affirms the primacy of God as King, Majestic, Lord, Ruler. It establishes a theological patriarchy even if Muslim theologians refuse to apply the word father (or mother) to God. God is yang, while the world, human beings, and society are yin. Thereby order is established and maintained. Awe and distance are the ruling qualities. On the spiritual level, the picture is different. In this domain many Muslim authorities affirm the primacy of God as Merciful, Beautiful, Gentle, Loving. Here they establish a spiritual matriarchy, though again such terms are not employed. God is yin and human beings are yang. Human spiritual aspiration is accepted and welcomed by God. Intimacy and nearness are the ruling qualities. This helps explain why one can easily find positive evaluations of women and the feminine dimension of things in Sufism. (...) Again, this primacy of yin cannot function on the social level, since it undermines the authority of the law. If we take in isolation the Koranic statement, "Despair not of God's mercy surely God forgives all sins" (39:53), then we can throw the Sharia out the window. In the Islamic perspective, the revealed law prevents society from degenerating into chaos. One gains liberty not by overthrowing hierarchy and constraints, but by finding liberty in its true abode, the spiritual realm. Freedom, lack of limitation and constraint, bold expansivenessis achieved only by moving toward God, not by rebelling against Him and moving away. Attar (d. 618/1221) makes the same point more explicitly in an anecdote he tells about the great Sufi shaykh, Abu'l- Hasan Kharraqani (d. 425/1033): It is related that one night the Shaykh was busy with prayer. He heard a voice saying, "Beware, Abu'l-Hasan! Do you want me to tell people what I know about you so that they will stone you to death?" The Shaykh replied, "O God the Creator! Do You want me to tell the people what I know about Your mercy and what I see of Your generosity? Then no one will prostrate himself to You." A voice came, "You keep quiet, and so will I." Sufism is concerned with "maintaining the secret" (hifz al-sirr) for more reasons than one. The secret of God's mercy threatens the plain fact of His wrath. If "She" came out of the closet, "He" would be overthrown. But then She could not be found, for it is He who shows the way to Her door.

Letter to the tech giants: When fame and abundance kiss somebody’s feet before that person is wise enough, he or she is very likely to lose track of what’s necessity and what’s luxury. And modern society is filled with examples of such intelligent stupidity – stupidity that is carried out by apparently smart humans. Because being smart is not the same as being wise. The world has enough smartness, but not enough wisdom to bring that smartness into proper productive practice – and I mean productive practice not sophisticated practice – there is a difference. A person smart enough to visualize a Falcon rocket engine can easily pinpoint the locations of various organizations that spread terrorism, yet the person chooses to explore the space further instead of prioritizing the technological advantages to first fix real issues of the human society that inflict harm to the humans every walk of the way. The world is a miserable place not because we have lack of resources, but because those who have an abundance of resources do not have the slightest idea of true human need. The resources needed for colonizing Mars if put to proper practice can fix the world’s global warming issues – it can fix the world’s climate change issues – it can fix the world’s terrorism issues, yet people are more interested in the pompous idea of living in Mars for whatever reason, instead of paying attention to improving human condition on earth. I am not against technological advancement, for I am a scientist, but my soul aches when I see smart people are dumb enough to chase after illusory glory of doing something different and innovative instead of focusing the powers of their soul on cleaning up the misery business on earth. You can, yet you don’t. Why? Smartness without wisdom is stupidity. You are smart – yes indeed – but I am sorry – you are stupid at the same time. How can you dream of having a cheese burger on Mars when your own kind on Earth is suffering! How can you think of taking rich kids into the orbit just so they can admire the beauty of earth from the heavens, when that very earth is infested with the primordial evils of human character! Awaken the human within you my friend, and pay attention. Awaken the human within and let it consume all the miseries from the world that you live in. Say a member of your family falls ill, would you ignore his or her misery completely just because you want to make life more comfortable for others than it already is, or would you first try everything in your capacity in order to heal your loved one! Be wise my friend, for it is not enough to be smart. You are smart – there is no doubt about that – so utilize that smartness for humanity and heal your own kind. Heal your kind with your capacity my friend. It is wailing for healers – not some delusional faith healers, but real tangible healers. Would you not do anything! Would you not give your soul to fix the broken soul of this world! Arise my friend, Awake my friend and work for humanity, not to make it sophisticated, but to make it peaceful first. Remember, humanity first, then everything else. Peace first, sophistication later. Harmony first, luxury later.

When I was younger, I remember taking pride in people’s well-meaning remarks: “You’re so lucky that no one would ever know!” or “You don’t even look like a guy!” or “Wow! You’re prettier than most ‘natural’ women!” They were all backhanded compliments, acknowledging my beauty while also invalidating my identity as a woman. To this day, I’m told in subtle and obvious ways that I am not “real,” meaning that I am not, nor will I ever be, a cis woman; therefore, I am fake. These thoughts surrounding identity, gender, bodies, and how we view, judge, and objectify all women brings me to the subject of “passing,” a term based on an assumption that trans people are passing as something that we are not. It’s rooted in the idea that we are not really who we say we are, that we are holding a secret, that we are living false lives. Examples of people “passing” in media, whether through race (Imitation of Life and Nella Larsen’s novel Passing), class (Catch Me if You Can and the reality show Joe Millionaire), or gender (Boys Don’t Cry and The Crying Game), are often portrayed as leading a life of tragic duplicity and as deceivers who will be punished harshly by society when their true identity is uncovered. This is no different for trans people who “pass” as their gender or, more accurately, are assumed to be cis or blend in as cis, as if that is the standard or norm. This pervasive thinking frames trans people as illegitimate and unnatural. If a trans woman who knows herself and operates in the world as a woman is seen, perceived, treated, and viewed as a woman, isn’t she just being herself? She isn’t passing ; she is merely being.

First, bring your attention to the moment, and breathe deeply. Then, get your mind to your mouth, and drink as slowly and purposefully as you can. (When you drink, you rebuild the energies surrounding your Throat Chakra. Any time you feel lost in thoughts or unable to express your desires, swallow and relax your neck.)"Let yourself answer for a moment. Yeah, it's a big question— even a daunting one — but it's one you can use to step more deeply into the intended purpose of your life. The first step in understanding what you need to feel more fully alive is to recognize and express your personal truth. •       Simply sit down with it as the answer comes to you. Bring it in. Inhabit the body, and feel it. When you understand the deepest personal truths, they will open up other truths from there. Of examples, if your greatest personal reality is that energy is real, then other truths emerge: If energy is real, magic is real; if magic is real, anything is possible; if anything is possible, you are boundless; if you are boundless, your wildest dreams will come true. •       Unlimited vision, lovely girl. Know that you are treasured beyond measure and trust when you conduct yourself in service of the highest reality of All Beings. Let the true reality of harmony envelope you. •       Ask your elders and spirit guides to be with you while you absorb what you've seen as you feel connected to reality at every point. Welcome its presence as it surrounds you. They're here to help you love each other and honor yourself deeper than ever. When in this blanket of support and wisdom you feel fully enveloped, close your induction with the universal blessing: Amen.

To speak of a communication failure implies a breakdown of some sort. Yet this does not accurately portray what occurs. In truth, communication difficulties arise not from breakdown but from the characteristics of the system itself. Despite promising beginnings in our intimate relationships, we tend over time to evolve a system of communication that suppresses rather than reveals information. Life is complicated, and confirming or disconfirming the well-being of a relationship takes effort. Once we are comfortably coupled, the intense, energy-consuming monitoring of courtship days is replaced by a simpler, more efficient method. Unable to witness our partners’ every activity or verify every nuance of meaning, we evolve a communication system based on trust. We gradually cease our attentive probing, relying instead on familiar cues and signals to stand as testament to the strength of the bond: the words “I love you,” holidays with the family, good sex, special times with shared friends, the routine exchange, “How was your day?” We take these signals as representative of the relationship and turn our monitoring energies elsewhere. ... Not only do the initiator’s negative signals tend to become incorporated into the existing routine, but, paradoxically, the initiator actively contributes to the impression that life goes on as usual. Even as they express their unhappiness, initiators work at emphasizing and maintaining the routine aspects of life with the other person, simultaneously giving signals that all is well. Unwilling to leave the relationship yet, they need to privately explore and evaluate the situation. The initiator thus contrives an appearance of participation,7 creating a protective cover that allows them to “return” if their alternative resources do not work out. Our ability to do this—to perform a role we are no longer enthusiastically committed to—is one of our acquired talents. In all our encounters, we present ourselves to others in much the same way as actors do, tailoring our performance to the role we are assigned in a particular setting.8 Thus, communication is always distorted. We only give up fragments of what really occurs within us during that specific moment of communication.9 Such fragments are always selected and arranged so that there is seldom a faithful presentation of our inner reality. It is transformed, reduced, redirected, recomposed.10 Once we get the role perfected, we are able to play it whether we are in the mood to go on stage or not, simply by reproducing the signals. What is true of all our encounters is, of course, true of intimate relationships. The nature of the intimate bond is especially hard to confirm or disconfirm.11 The signals produced by each partner, while acting out the partner role, tend to be interpreted by the other as the relationship.12 Because the costs of constantly checking out what the other person is feeling and doing are high, each partner is in a position to be duped and misled by the other.13 Thus, the initiator is able to keep up appearances that all is well by falsifying, tailoring, and manipulating signals to that effect. The normal routine can be used to attest to the presence of something that is not there. For example, initiators can continue the habit of saying, “I love you,” though the passion is gone. They can say, “I love you” and cover the fact that they feel disappointment or anger, or that they feel nothing at all. Or, they can say, “I love you” and mean, “I like you,” or, “We have been through a lot together,” or even “Today was a good day.

My greetings and constant love to Emory and my grandchildren. I am well and continue to make my rounds with the news of the day and as always am well-received in the towns of which we have more than a few now as the Century grows older and the population increases so that large crowds come to hear reportage of distant places as well as those nearby. I enjoy good health as always and hope that Emory is doing well using his left hand now and look forward to an example of his handwriting. It is true what Elizabeth has said about employment for a one-armed man but that concerns manual labor only and at any rate there should be some consideration for a man who has lost a limb in the war. As soon as he is adept with his left I am sure he will consider Typesetting, Accounting, Etc. & Etc. Olympia is I am sure a steady rock to you all. Olympia’s husband, Mason, had been killed at Adairsville, during Johnston’s retreat toward Atlanta. The man was too big to be a human being and too small to be a locomotive. He had been shot out of the tower of the Bardsley mansion and when he fell three stories and struck the ground he probably made a hole big enough to bury a hog in. The Captain’s younger daughter, Olympia, was in reality a woman who affected helplessness and refinement and had never been able to pull a turnip from the garden without weeping over the poor, dear thing. She fluttered and gasped and incessantly tried to demonstrate how sensitive she was. Mason was a perfect foil and then the Yankees went and killed him. Olympia was now living with Elizabeth and Emory in the remains of their farm in New Hope Church, Georgia, and was quite likely a heavy weight. He put one hand to his forehead. My youngest daughter is in reality a bore. There was a pounding on the wall: Kep-dun! Kep-dun!

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths”—that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a “kingdom of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, and of a “son of God” as the second person of the Trinity. All this—if I may be forgiven the phrase—is like thrusting one’s fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols “Father” and “Son”— not, of course, to every one—: the word “Son” expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father” expresses that feeling itself —the sensation of eternity and of perfection.—I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” for good measure?... And thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness— The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea —“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere.... This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived and taught—not to “save mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers, before his accusers—his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme penalty—more, he invites it.... And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil.... Not to defend one’s self, not to show anger, not to lay blames.... On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One—to love him.... 36. —We free spirits—we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood—that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the “holy lie” even more than upon all other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created the church out of denial of the Gospels.... That mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the concept of the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy that the “bearer of glad tidings” regards as beneath him and behind him—it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world- historical irony—

Christian Faith For me, being a Christian is all about true love. The Gospel of John instructs us, “Dear Friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” I believe that first we need to love ourselves, even when we are told that we do not deserve love. Then we need to love others, especially those who have not been treated with love. And of course, we need to love Jesus. Love for Jesus can be the foundation for living a good life, a life full of compassion and joy. Loving Jesus is where I believe a Christian life starts, because that love spreads all around, to people, animals, and the world. Animal Rights During my life so far, animals have brought me joy and comfort when I thought that I would never find happiness. My bunny Neon taught me so much about unconditional love. This experience showed me that animals have souls deserving of love just as much as humans, and they can be some of the purest examples of God’s love on Earth. I believe we can all show animals the compassion and love they deserve by choosing products that are fur-free and cruelty-free and by eating a vegan diet. Even people who aren’t prepared to commit to a vegan lifestyle can make thoughtful everyday choices that reduce needless cruelty against animals. Human Rights I have myself been a victim of abuse, so I know how hopeless life can seem to those in dark situations. However, I also know how much of a difference a small ray of light can make. My goal in life now is to shine that ray of light onto as many people in need as possible. As an advocate for human rights, I aim to raise awareness and help others who are suffering. From volunteering for organizations, to simply looking out for a neighbor or friend, we can all make a difference in helping others. Human rights of freedom and safety belong to each of us, and we all have a responsibility to support people who are the most vulnerable.

city builders and rebuilders (Jerusalem) and city-loving exiles (Babylon). In New Testament times, the people of God become city missionaries (indeed, New Testament writings contain few glimpses of nonurban Christianity). Finally, when God’s future arrives in the form of a city, his people can finally be fully at home. The fallen nature of the city — the warping of its potential due to the power of sin — is finally overcome and resolved; the cultural mandate is complete; the capacities of city life are freed in the end to serve God. All of God’s people serve him in his holy city. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION 1. Keller writes, “The church should continue to relate to the human cities of our time, not as the people of God did under Abraham, Moses, or David, but as they did during the time of the exile.” In what ways is the situation of the Christian church different from that of the exiles in Babylon? In what ways is it similar? How does this affect the mission of the church today? 2. From Acts 17 through the end of the book of Acts, Paul has strategically traveled to the intellectual (Athens), commercial (Corinth), religious (Ephesus), and political (Rome) centers of the Roman world. What are the centers of power and influence in your own local context? How is your church seeking to strategically reach these different centers of cultural influence? 3. Keller writes, “Then, as now, the cities were filled with the poor, and urban Christians’ commitment to the poor was visible and striking.” Do you believe this is still true of the Christian church? If so, give an example. If not, how can this legacy be recaptured? 4. Keller writes, “Gardening (the original human vocation) is a paradigm for cultural development. A gardener neither leaves the ground as is, nor does he destroy it. Instead, he rearranges it to produce food and plants for human life. He cultivates it. (The words culture and cultivate come from the same root.) Every vocation is in some way a response to, and an extension of, the primal,

One cannot erase from a human being's soul those actions which his ancestors loved most and carried out most steadfastly: whether they were, for example, industrious savers attached to a writing table and money box, modest and bourgeois in their desires, as well as modest in their virtues, or whether they were accustomed to live giving orders from morning until night, fond of harsh entertainment and, along with that, perhaps of even harsher duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, they had at some time or other once sacrificed the old privileges of their birth and possessions in order to live entirely for their faith ― their "God" ― as men of an unrelenting and delicate conscience, which blushes when confronted with any compromise. It is in no way possible that a man does not possess in his body the characteristics and preferences of his parents and forefathers, no matter what appearance might say to the contrary. This is the problem of race. If we know something about the parents, then we may draw a conclusion about the child: some unpleasant excess or other, some lurking envy, a crude habit of self-justification ―as these three together have at all times made up the essential type of the rabble― something like that must be passed onto the child as surely as corrupt blood, and with the help of the best education and culture people will succeed only in deceiving others about such heredity. And nowadays what else does education and culture want! In our age, one very much of the people - I mean to say our uncouth age ―"education" and "culture" must basically be the art of deception― to mislead about the origin of the inherited rabble in one's body and soul. Today an educator who preached truthfulness above everything else and constantly shouted at his students "Be true! Be natural! Act as you really are!" ― even such a virtuous and true-hearted jackass would after some time learn to take hold of that furca [pitchfork] of Horace, in order to naturam expellere [drive out nature]. With what success? "Rabble" usque recurret [always returns].

A circle of trust is a group of people who know how to sit quietly "in the woods" with each other and wait for the shy soul to show up. The relationships in such a group are not pushy but patient; they are not confrontational but compassionate; they are filled not with expectations and demands but with abiding faith in the reality of the inner teacher and in each person's capacity to learn from it. The poet Rumi captures the essence of this way of being together: "A circle of lovely, quiet people / becomes the ring on my finger."6 Few of us have experienced large-scale communities that possess these qualities, but we may have had one-on-one relationships that do. By reflecting on the dynamics of these small-scale circles of trust, we can sharpen our sense of what a larger community of solitudes might look like-and remind ourselves that two people who create safe space for the soul can support each other's inner journey. Think, for example, about someone who helped you grow toward true self. When I think about such a person, it is my father who first comes to mind. Though he was himself a hardworking and successful businessman, he did not press me toward goals that were his rather than mine. Instead, he made space for me to grow into my own selfhood. Throughout high school, I got mediocre grades-every one of which I earned-although I always did quite well on standardized intelligence tests. I look back with amazement on the fact that not once did my father demand that I "live up to my potential." He trusted that if I had a gift for academic life, it would flower in its own time, as it did when I went to college. The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out -a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.

ACCORDING TO BUDDHISM, THERE ARE four elements of true love. The first is maitri, which can be translated as lovingkindness or benevolence. Loving-kindness is not only the desire to make someone happy, to bring joy to a beloved person; it is the ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love might make him or her suffer. Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice deep looking directed toward the person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha. If a husband, for example, does not understand his wife’s deepest troubles, her deepest aspirations, if he does not understand her suffering, he will not be able to love her in the right way. Without understanding, love is an impossible thing. What must we do in order to understand a person? We must have time; we must practice looking deeply into this person. We must be there, attentive; we must observe, we must look deeply. And the fruit of this looking deeply is called understanding. Love is a true thing if it is made up of a substance called understanding. The second element of true love is compassion, karuna. This is not only the desire to ease the pain of another person, but the ability to do so. You must practice deep looking in order to gain a good understanding of the nature of the suffering of this person, in order to be able to help him or her to change. Knowledge and understanding are always at the root of the practice. The practice of understanding is the practice of meditation. To meditate is to look deeply into the heart of things. The third element of true love is joy, mudita. If there is no joy in love, it is not true love. If you are suffering all the time, if you cry all the time, and if you make the person you love cry, this is not really love—it is even the opposite. If there is no joy in your love, you can be sure that it is not true love.

Save thee, Timon. Tim. Now, thieves? All [Banditti]. Soldiers, not thieves. Tim. Both too, and women's sons. All [Banditti]. We are not thieves, but men that much do want. Tim. Your greatest want is, you want much of meat. Why should you want? Behold, the earth hath roots; Within this mile break forth a hundred springs; The oaks bear mast, the briers scarlet hips; The bounteous housewife, nature, on each bush Lays her full mess before you. Want! why want? 1. Ban. We cannot live on grass, on berries, water, As beasts and birds and fishes. Tim. Nor on the beasts themselves, the birds, and fishes; You must eat men. Yet thanks I must you con That you are thieves profess'd, that you work not In holier shapes: for there is boundless theft In limited professions. Rascal thieves, Here's gold. Go, suck the subtle blood o' the grape, Till the high fever seethe your blood to froth, And so 'scape hanging: trust not the physician; His antidotes are poison, and he slays Moe than you rob: take wealth and lives together; Do villany, do, since you protest to do't, Like workmen. I'll example you with thievery. The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun: The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen From general excrement: each thing's a thief: The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power Have uncheque'd theft. Love not yourselves: away, Rob one another. There's more gold. Cut throats: All that you meet are thieves: to Athens go, Break open shops; nothing can you steal, But thieves do lose it: steal no less for this I give you; and gold confound you howsoe'er! Amen. 3. Ban. Has almost charmed me from my profession, by persuading me to it. 1. Ban. 'Tis in the malice of mankind that he thus advises us; not to have us thrive in our mystery. 2 Ban. I'll believe him as an enemy, and give over my trade. 1 Ban. Let us first see peace in Athens: there is no time so miserable but a man may be true. Exeunt Thieves [the Banditti]

Are you an influencer? Are you in media? Do you run a conference? A business? A podcast? Are you a mom in the PTA? Are you a teller at the local bank? Are you a volunteer for Sunday school at church? Are you a high school student? Are you a grandma of seven? Great! I need you. We need you! We need you to live into your purpose. We need you to create and inspire and build and dream. We need you to blaze a trail and then turn around and light the way with your magic so other women can follow behind you. We need you to believe in the idea that every kind of woman deserves a chance to be who she was meant to be, and she may never realize it if you—yes, you—don’t speak that truth into her life. You’ll be able to do that if you first practice the idea of being made for more in your own life. After all, if you don’t see it, how do you know you can be it? If women in your community or your network marketing group or your Zumba class don’t ever see an example of a confident woman, how will they find the courage to be confident? If our daughters don’t see a daily practice of us feeling not only comfortable but truly fulfilled by the choice to be utterly ourselves, how will they learn that behavior? Pursuing your goals for yourself is so important, and I’d argue that it’s an essential factor in living a happy and fulfilled existence—but it’s not enough simply to give you permission to make your dream manifest. I want to challenge you to love the pursuit and openly celebrate who you become along the journey. When your light shines brighter, others won’t be harmed by the glare; they’ll be encouraged to become a more luminescent version of themselves. That’s what leadership looks like. Leaders are encouraging. Leaders share information. Leaders hold up a light to show you the way. Leaders hold your hand when it gets hard. True leaders are just as excited for your success as they are for their own, because they know that when one of us does well, all of us come up. When one of us succeeds, all of us succeed. You’ll be able to lead other women to that place if you truly believe that every woman is worthy and called to something sacred.

(50.7) Questioner Thank you. Can you expand on the concept which is this: that it is necessary for an entity to, during incarnation in the physical, as we call it, become polarized or interact properly with other entities, and why this isn’t possible in between incarnations when he is aware of what he wants to do, but why must he come into an incarnation and lose memory, conscious memory, of what he wants to do and then act in a way that he hopes to act? Could you expand on that please? Ra I am Ra. Let us give the example of the man who sees all the poker hands. He then knows the game. It is but child’s play to gamble, for it is no risk. The other hands are known. The possibilities are known and the hand will be played correctly but with no interest. In time/ space and in the true-color green density, the hands of all are open to the eye. The thoughts, the feelings, the troubles: all these may be seen. There is no deception and no desire for deception. Thus much may be accomplished in harmony, but the mind/ body/ spirit gains little polarity from this interaction. Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine: a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt, and re-dealt, and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin—and we stress begin—to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves’ cards is to look into the eyes. You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: “All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you.” This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love. This cannot be done without the forgetting, for it would carry no weight in the life of the mind/ body/ spirit beingness totality.

Ah, you don’t comprehend, friend John. Do not think that I am not sad, though I laugh. See, I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, ‘May I come in?’ is not the true laughter. No! he is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say, ‘I am here.’ Behold, in example I grieve my heart out for that so sweet young girl; I give my blood for her, though I am old and worn; I give my time, my skill, my sleep; I let my other sufferers want that so she may have all. And yet I can laugh at her very grave—laugh when the clay from the spade of the sexton drop upon her coffin and say ‘Thud! thud!’ to my heart, till it send back the blood from my cheek. My heart bleed for that poor boy—that dear boy, so of the age of mine own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his hair and eyes the same. There, you know now why I love him so. And yet when he say things that touch my husband-heart to the quick, and make my father-heart yearn to him as to no other man—not even to you, friend John, for we are more level in experiences than father and son—yet even at such moment King Laugh he come to me and shout and bellow in my ear, ‘Here I am! here I am!’ till the blood come dance back and bring some of the sunshine that he carry with him to my cheek. Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles; and yet when King Laugh come he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall—all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John, that he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and, like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be.

So also the church of Jesus Christ is the place [Ort]—that is, the space [Raum]—in the world where the reign of Jesus Christ over the whole world is to be demonstrated and proclaimed. This space of the church does not, therefore, exist just for itself, but its existence is already always something that reaches far beyond it. This is because it is not the space of a cult[57] that would have to fight for its own existence in the world. Rather, the space of the church is the place where witness is given to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ. The church is the place where it is proclaimed and taken seriously that God has reconciled the world to himself in Christ,[58] that God so loved the world that God gave his Son for it.[59] The space of the church is not there in order to fight with the world for a piece of its territory, but precisely to testify to the world that it is still the world, namely, the world that is loved and reconciled by God. It is not true that the church intends to or must spread its space out over the space of the world. It desires no more space than it needs to serve the world with its witness to Jesus Christ and to the world’sreconciliation to God through Jesus Christ. The church can only defend its own space by fighting, not for space, but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes a “religious society”[60] that fights in its own interest and thus has ceased to be the church of God in the world. So the first task given to those who belong to the church of God is not to be something for themselves, for example, by creating a religious organization or leading a pious life, but to be witnesses of Jesus Christto the world. For this the Holy Spirit equips those to whom the Spirit comes. Of course, it is presupposed that such a witness to the world can only happen in the right way when it comes out of sanctified life in God’s church-community.[61] Nevertheless, true sanctified life in the church-community of God is distinguished[62] from any pious imitation by the fact that it leads the believer at the same time into witness to the world. Where that witness has become silent it is a sign of inner decay in the church-community, just as failure to bear fruit is a sign that a tree is dying.

Cultivating loyalty is a tricky business. It requires maintaining a rigorous level of consistency while constantly adding newness and a little surprise—freshening the guest experience without changing its core identity.” Lifetime Network Value Concerns about brand fickleness in the new generation of customers can be troubling partly because the idea of lifetime customer value has been such a cornerstone of business for so long. But while you’re fretting over the occasional straying of a customer due to how easy it is to switch brands today, don’t overlook a more important positive change in today’s landscape: the extent to which social media and Internet reviews have amplified the reach of customers’ word-of-mouth. Never before have customers enjoyed such powerful platforms to share and broadcast their opinions of products and services. This is true today of every generation—even some Silent Generation customers share on Facebook and post reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon. But millennials, thanks to their lifetime of technology use and their growing buying power, perhaps make the best, most active spokespeople a company can have. Boston Consulting Group, with grand understatement, says that “the vast majority” of millennials report socially sharing and promoting their brand preferences. Millennials are talking about your business when they’re considering making a purchase, awaiting assistance, trying something on, paying for it and when they get home. If, for example, you own a restaurant, the value of a single guest today goes further than the amount of the check. The added value comes from a process that Chef O’Connell calls competitive dining, the phenomenon of guests “comparing and rating dishes, photographing everything they eat, and tweeting and emailing the details of all their dining adventures.” It’s easy to underestimate the commercial power that today’s younger customers have, particularly when the network value of these buyers doesn’t immediately translate into sales. Be careful not to sell their potential short and let that assumption drive you headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember that younger customers are experimenting right now as they begin to form preferences they may keep for a lifetime. And whether their proverbial Winstons will taste good to them in the future depends on what they taste like presently.

But it’s true that I have faced the Dark Court and lived. I suppose I could survive this peril as well, if need be.” “What? Oh—no. I mean…” Eddi faltered and shook her head. “I’m not good at saying this kind of thing. I always sound stupid or too casual or…” “My poet, betrayed by words?” He smiled crookedly. “I never said I was a poet. Besides, it’s not the same thing. This is public speaking.” She smiled weakly and looked at his ruffles. He set his hands on her shoulders, but they were motionless and weightless. “You’ve kept me alive for the last three months,” Eddie began, groping furiously for the words. “You’ve made me coffee. You’ve carried my amplifier.” A nervous chuckled escaped her. “And you’ve been pretty good company. Even when you were being a jerk, you were pretty good company, now that I look back on it.” “But,” he said without inflection. Eddi looked up at him, alarmed. “But? Oh, hell, I told you I was bad at this! No, no buts. You’re a wonderful person. Even if you are a supernatural being. Damn it, Phouka, how am I going to tell my mother that I’m in love with a guy who turns into a dog?” She blushed; she could feel it. A silence of unreasonable proportions followed; the phouka’s only response was a quick spasm of his fingers on her shoulders. “Are you in love with him, then?” “I said so, didn’t I?” “Not quite.” There was a smile twitching in the corner of his mouth. “All right, Al right.” Eddi took a long breath. “I love you.” “There. Now why should that be so hard to say?” “Because it sounds like something out of a soap opera,” Eddi grumbled. “Does it? Not to me. The best line from a favorite song, perhaps.” His smile softened his whole face in a way she hadn’t seen before. “That’s because you’re a damned romantic.” He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear on one side. “Then you’re a doubly damned romantic, my heart, since you won’t even admit it. But perhaps with my excellent example before you…” Eddi caught at his disconcerting fingers, which were now tracing the edge of her ear, and kissed his knuckles. “You’re a jerk,” she said fondly. “Where were we going, when we got distracted?” “Earth and Air, I’d forgotten! It’s your fault, you know. The color of your hair in the moonlight, the curve of your waist, the—” “You’re going to forget again.” “You’re quite right. But I’ll try not to do so for at least a few minutes. You will enjoy this, I think.” He flashed her a grin and folded his fingers around hers. “Come along, then.

... the primary duty of charity does not lie in the toleration of false ideas, however sincere they may be, nor in the theoretical or practical indifference towards the errors and vices in which we see our brethren plunged but in the zeal for their intellectual and moral improvement as well as for their material well-being ... True, Jesus has loved us with an immense, infinite love, and He came on earth to suffer and die so that, gathered around Him in justice and love, motivated by the same sentiments of mutual charity, all men might live in peace and happiness. But for the realization of this temporal and eternal happiness, He has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue, and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors. Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but He instructed them in order to convert them and save them. Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality. Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience. Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them. He was as strong as he was gentle. He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body. Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in Heaven: the royal way of the Cross. These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one's personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism.

The point of power is always in the present moment. This is where we begin to make changes. What a liberating idea. We can begin to let the old nonsense go. Right now. The smallest beginning will make a difference. When you were a tiny baby, you were pure joy and love. You knew how important you were; you felt that you were the center of the universe. You had such courage that you asked for what you wanted and you expressed all your feelings openly. You loved yourself totally—every part of your body, including your feces. You knew that you were perfect. And that is the truth of your being. All the rest is learned nonsense and can be unlearned. How often have we said, “That’s the way I am,” or “That’s the way it is.” What we’re really saying is that it is what we “believe to be true for us.” Usually what we believe is only someone else’s opinion that we’ve accepted and incorporated into our own belief system. It fits in with other things that we believe. If we were taught as a child that the world is a frightening place, then everything we hear that fits in with that belief we will accept as true for us—for example: “Don’t trust strangers,” “Don’t go out at night,” “People cheat you,” and so on. On the other hand, if we were taught early in life that the world is a safe and joyous place, then we would believe other things, such as: “Love is everywhere,” “People are so friendly,” and “Money comes to me easily.” Life experiences mirror our beliefs. We seldom sit down and question our beliefs. For instance, I could ask myself: “Why do I believe that it’s difficult for me to learn? Is that really true? Is it true for me now? Where did that belief come from? Do I still believe it simply because a first-grade teacher told me so over and over? Would I be better off if I dropped that belief?” Stop for a moment and catch your thought. What are you thinking right now? If thoughts shape your life and experiences, would you want this thought to become true for you? If it’s a thought of worry, anger, hurt, or revenge, how do you think that this thought will come back for you? If we want a joyous life, we must think joyous thoughts. Whatever we send out mentally or verbally will come back to us in like form. Take a little time to listen to the words you say. If you hear yourself saying something three times, write it down. It has become a pattern for you. At the end of a week, look at the list you’ve made and you’ll see how your words fit your experiences. Be willing to change your words and thoughts and watch your life change. The way to control your life is to control your choice of words and thoughts. No one thinks in your mind but you.

In order to refashion the world, it is necessary for people themselves to adopt a different mental attitude. Until man becomes brother unto man, there shall be no brotherhood of men. No kind of science or material advantage will ever induce people to share their property or their rights equitably. No one will ever have enough, people will always grumble, they will always envy and destroy one another. You ask when will all this come about. It will come about, but first there must be an end to the habit of self-imposed isolation of man.’ ‘What isolation?’ I asked him. ‘The kind that is prevalent everywhere now, especially in our age, and which has not yet come to an end, has not yet run its course. For everyone nowadays strives to dissociate himself as much as possible from others, everyone wants to savour the fullness of life for himself, but all his best efforts lead not to fullness of life but to total self-destruction, and instead of ending with a comprehensive evaluation of his being, he rushes headlong into complete isolation. For everyone has dissociated himself from everyone else in our age, everyone has disappeared into his own burrow, distanced himself from the next man, hidden himself and his possessions, the result being that he has abandoned people and has, in his turn, been abandoned. He piles up riches in solitude and thinks: ‘How powerful I am now, and how secure,’ and it never occurs to the poor devil that the more he accumulates, the further he sinks into suicidal impotence. For man has become used to relying on himself alone, and has dissociated himself from the whole; he has accustomed his soul to believe neither in human aid, nor in people, nor in humanity; he trembles only at the thought of losing his money* and the privileges he has acquired. Everywhere the human mind is beginning arrogantly to ignore the fact that man’s true security is to be attained not through the isolated efforts of the individual, but in a corporate human identity. But it is certain that this terrible isolation will come to an end, and everyone will realize at a stroke how unnatural it is for one man to cut himself off from another. This will indeed be the spirit of the times, and people will be surprised how long they have remained in darkness and not seen the light. It is then that the sign of the Son of man will appear in heaven…* But, nevertheless, until then man should hold the banner aloft and should from time to time, quite alone if necessary, set an example and rescue his soul from isolation in order to champion the bond of fraternal love, though he be taken for a holy fool. And he should do this in order that the great Idea should not die…

As the most perfect subject for painting I have already specified inwardly satisfied [reconciled and peaceful] love, the object of which is not a purely spiritual ‘beyond’ but is present, so that we can see love itself before us in what is loved. The supreme and unique form of this love is Mary’s love for the Christ-child, the love of the one mother who has borne the Saviour of the world and carries him in her arms. This is the most beautiful subject to which Christian art in general, and especially painting in its religious sphere, has risen. The love of God, and in particular the love of Christ who sits at’ the right hand of God, is of a purely spiritual kind. The object of this love is visible only to the eye of the soul, so that here there is strictly no question of that duality which love implies, nor is any natural bond established between the lovers or any linking them together from the start. On the other hand, any other love is accidental in the inclination of one lover for another, or,’ alternatively, the lovers, e.g. brothers and sisters or a father in his love for his children, have outside this relation other conceI1l8 with an essential claim on them. Fathers or brothers have to apply themselves to the world, to the state, business, war, or, in short, to general purposes, while sisters become wives, mothers, and so forth. But in the case of maternal love it is generally true that a mother’s love for her child is neither something accidental just a single feature in her life, but, on the contrary, it is her supreme vocation on earth, and her natural character and most sacred calling directly coincide. But while other loving mothers see and feel in their child their husband and their inmost union with him, in Mary’s relation to her child this aspect is always absent. For her feeling has nothing in common with a wife’s love for her husband; on the contrary, her relation to Joseph is more like a sister’s to a brother, while on Joseph’s side there is a secret awe of the child who is God’s and Mary’s. Thus religious love in its fullest and most intimate human form we contemplate not in the suffering and risen Christ or in his lingering amongst his friends but in the person of Mary with her womanly feeling. Her whole heart and being is human love for the child that she calls her own, and at the same time adoration, worship, and love of God with whom she feels herself at one. She is humble in God’s sight and yet has an infinite sense of being the one woman who is blessed above all other virgins. She is not self-subsistent on her own account, but is perfect only in her child, in God, but in him she is satisfied and blessed, whether. at the manger or as the Queen of Heaven, without passion or longing, without any further need, without any aim other than to have and to hold what she has. In its religious subject-matter the portrayal of this love has a wide series of events, including, for example, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Birth, the Flight into Egypt, etc. And then there are, added to this, other subjects from the later life of Christ, i.e. the Disciples and the women who follow him and in whom the love of God becomes more or less a personal relation of love for a living and present Saviour who walks amongst them as an actual man; there is also the love of the angels who hover over the birth of Christ and many other scenes in his life, in serious worship or innocent joy. In all these subjects it is painting especially which presents the peace and full satisfaction of love. But nevertheless this peace is followed by the deepest suffering. Mary sees Christ carry his cross, she sees him suffer and die on the cross, taken down from the cross and buried, and no grief of others is so profound as hers. Mary’s grief is of a totally different kind. She is emotional, she feels the thrust of the dagger into the centre of her soul, her heart breaks, but she does not turn into stone.

But as the daylight began to come through the curtains, I knew I was facing something for which I had not been prepared. It was a curious sensation, like suddenly feeling cold water round your feet, then feeling it slowly rising up your legs. It took me some time to realize that they were attacking from some part of my mind of whose existence I was unaware. I had been strong because I was fighting them out of knowledge, but I should have known that my knowledge of mind was pitifully small. I was like an astronomer who knows the solar system, and thinks he knows the universe. What the parasites were doing was to attack me from below my knowledge of myself. It is true that I had given some small thought to the matter; but I had—rightly—postponed it as a study for a more advanced period. I had reflected often enough that our human life is based completely on ‘premises’ that we take for granted. A child takes its parents and its home for granted; later, it comes to take its country and its society for granted. We need these supports to begin with. A child without parents and a regular home grows up feeling insecure. A child that has had a good home may later learn to criticize its parents, or even reject them altogether (although this is unlikely); but it only does so when it is strong enough to stand alone. All original thinkers develop by kicking away these ‘supports’ one by one. They may continue to love their parents and their country, but they love from a position of strength—a strength that began in rejection. In fact, though, human beings never really learn to stand alone. They are lazy, and prefer supports. A man may be a fearlessly original mathematician, and yet be slavishly dependent on his wife. He may be a powerful free thinker, yet derive a great deal more comfort than he would admit from the admiration of a few friends and disciples. In short, human beings never question all their supports; they question a few, and continue to take the rest for granted. Now I had been so absorbed in the adventure of entering new mental continents, rejecting my old personality and its assumptions, that I had been quite unaware that I was still leaning heavily on dozens of ordinary assumptions. For example, although I felt my identity had changed, I still had a strong feeling of identity. And our most fundamental sense of identity comes from an anchor that lies at the bottom of a very deep sea. I still looked upon myself as a member of the human race. I still looked upon myself as an inhabitant of the solar system and the universe in space and time. I took space and time for granted. I did not ask where I had been before my birth or after my death. I did not even recognize the problem of my own death; it was something I left ‘to be explored later’. What the parasites now did was to go to these deep moorings of my identity, and proceed to shake them. I cannot express it more clearly than this. They did not actually, so to speak, pull up the anchors. That was beyond their powers. But they shook the chains, so that I suddenly became aware of an insecurity on a level I had taken completely for granted. I found myself asking: Who am I? In the deepest sense. Just as a bold thinker dismisses patriotism and religion, so I dismissed all the usual things that gave me an ‘identity’: the accident of my time and place of birth, the accident of my being a human being rather than a dog or a fish, the accident of my powerful instinct to cling to life. Having thrown off all these accidental ‘trappings’, I stood naked as pure consciousness confronting the universe. But here I became aware that this so-called ‘pure consciousness’ was as arbitrary as my name. It could not confront the universe without sticking labels on it. How could it be ‘pure consciousness’ when I saw that object as a book, that one as a table? It was still my tiny human identity looking out of my eyes. And if I tried to get beyond it, everything went blank.

Seibel: Some people love Lisp syntax and some can't stand it. Why is that? Deutsch: Well, I can't speak for anyone else. But I can tell you why I don't want to work with Lisp syntax anymore. There are two reasons. Number one, and I alluded to this earlier, is that the older I've gotten, the more important it is to me that the density of information per square inch in front of my face is high. The density of information per square inch in infix languages is higher than in Lisp. Seibel: But almost all languages are, in fact, prefix, except for a small handful of arithmetic operators. Deutsch: That's not actually true. In Python, for example, it's not true for list, tuple, and dictionary construction. That's done with bracketing. String formatting is done infix. Seibel: As it is in Common Lisp with FORMAT. Deutsch: OK, right. But the things that aren't done infix; the common ones, being loops and conditionals, are not prefix. They're done by alternating keywords and what it is they apply to. In that respect they are actually more verbose than Lisp. But that brings me to the other half, the other reason why I like Python syntax better, which is that Lisp is lexically pretty monotonous.

We must therefore say the same thing about language in relation to meaning that Simone de Beauvoir says about the body in relation to mind : it is neither primary nor secondary. No one has ever made the body simply a means or an instrument, or maintained for example that one can love by principles. And since it is no more true that the body loves all by itself, we may say that it does everything and nothing, that it is and is not ourselves. Neither end nor means, always involved in matters which go beyond it, always jealous nevertheless of its autonomy, it is powerful enough to oppose itself to any end which is merely deliberate, but it has none to propose to us if we finally tum toward it and consult it. Sometimes—and then we have the feeling of being ourselves—it lets itself be animated and becomes responsible for a life which is not simply its own. Then it is happy or spontaneous, and we with it. Similarly, language is not meaning's servant, and yet it does not govern meaning. There is no subordination between them. Here no one commands and no one obeys. What we mean is not before us, outside all speech, as sheer signification, lt is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said.

How can he describe such abominations ? And how come he doesn't collapse under the weight of the abominations he describes?' Well it takes exceptional fortitude - or, alternatively, a special form of cowardice. At all events, you have to be abominable to come to terms with abomination. A kind of moral law, of terroristic superstition, denies you the right to speak of anything whatsoever if you are not involved in it. [...]. Either 'You are in cahoots with the object you speak of' or 'You don't know what you are talking about. In fact, speaking of something and being part of it are two quite different things. The finest example is death: you have to be alive to talk about it. But this is true of anything - of politics, economics, art. You have to be a stranger to something to speak about it in a strange – that is to say, original – way.[...] In fact, you have absolutely to collude in what you are speaking about and at the same time to be somewhere else altogether. You have to love it and hate it. You have to be the thing you speak of and to be violently against it. This is the law of hospitality, and it is the law of hostility.

When Jews “unplug,” and maintaina distance toward the society in which they live, they do not do it forthe sake of their own different substantial identity—in a way, anti-Semitism is right here: the Jews are, in effect, “rootless,” their Law is“abstract,” it “extrapolates” them from the social Substance.And there we have the radical gap that separates the Christian sus-pension of the Law, the passage from Law to love, from the pagan sus-pension of the social law: the highest (or, rather, deepest) point ofevery pagan Wisdom is, of course, also a radical “unplugging” (ei-ther the carnivalesque orgy, or direct immersion in the abyss of theprimordial Void, in which all articulated differences are suspended);what is suspended here, however, is the “pagan” immanent law ofthe social, not the Jewish Law that already unplugs us from the so-cial. When Christian mystics get too close to the pagan mystical ex-perience, they bypass the Jewish experience of the Law—no wonderthey often become ferocious anti-Semites. Christian anti-Semitismis, in effect, a clear sign of the Christian position’s regression into pa-ganism: it gets rid of the “rootless,” universalist stance of Christian-ity proper by transposing it onto the Jewish Other; consequently,when Christianity loses the mediation of the Jewish Law, it loses thespecific Christian dimension of Love itself, reducing Love to the pa-gan “cosmic feeling” of oneness with the universe. It is only refer-ence to the Jewish Law that sustains the specific Christian notion of Love that needs a distance, that thrives on differences, that has noth-ing to do with any kind of erasure of borders and immersion inOneness. (And within the Jewish experience, love remains on thispagan level—that is to say, the Jewish experience is a unique combi-nation of the new Law with pagan love, which accounts for its innertension.)The trap to be avoided here is the opposition of the “external” so-cial law (legal regulations, “mere legality”) and the higher “inter-nal” moral law, where the external social law may strike us ascontingent and irrational, while the internal law is fully assumed as“our own”: we should radically abandon the notion that external so-cial institutions betray the authentic inner experience of the true we should radically abandon the notion that external so-cial institutions betray the authentic inner experience of the trueTranscendence of Otherness (in the guise, for example, of the oppo-sition between the authentic “inner” experience of the divine and its“external” reification into a religious institution in which the reli-gious experience proper degenerates into an ideology legitimizingpower relations). If there is a lesson to be learned from Kafka, it isthat, in the opposition between internal and external, the divine di-mension is on the side of the external. What can be more “divine”than the traumatic encounter with the bureaucracy at its craziest—when, say, a bureaucrat tells us that, legally, we don’t exist? It is insuch encounters that we catch a glimpse of another order beyondmere earthly everyday reality. There is no experience of the divinewithout such a suspension of the Ethical. And far from being simplyexternal, this very externality (to sense, to symbolic integration)holds us from within: Kafka’s topic is precisely the obscene jouissancethrough which bureaucracy addresses the subject on the level of thedisavowed innermost (“ex-timate,” as Lacan would have put it) realkernel of his being.

My Son taught with parables to fulfill the prophecy in Psalm 78:2—that He would give instruction by examples to reveal truths that were hidden since the world began. Why were these truths hidden? Because the god of this world had deceived Adam and Eve and many who followed, and he had obscured what I originally made known to them. Why would only some people understand Jesus’s parables? Because the stories distinguished a difference between light and darkness, and their meaning would always be hidden to those who dwell in darkness. But to those with “ears to hear,” they could be understood and discerned. Secrets and mysteries are imbedded in His examples from life. And only some would ever comprehend their true meaning. Like His disciples, these are those who want to understand and bear good fruit. Four reactions always result from hearing My Word: Some immediately reject the truth they hear, allowing it to be stolen from them. Others receive the truth, but quickly turn away from it when they experience life’s pressures. Some hear My Word, receive it for a while, but are drawn away from it by the cares of the world, which include wealth, recognition, and power, which choke out any belief in Me. Finally, those who grasp its meaning, love what it represents, and yearn to learn more are the good seed that yield spiritual abundance—in their own lives and others’. They are the “good wheat” sown in a field that will be gathered at the end harvest and given places of honor and favor. Those who are the good seed are often considered the least and lowliest of people in this world. Like the mustard seed, their capabilities and what lies within them are often overlooked. But, like the mustard plant’s very tiny and insignificant beginning, they can grow into large, magnificent trees that protect and harbor many others. Never underestimate what I can do for and through you. People may disqualify you because of your beliefs and Who you represent, just as they did My Son. Just remember, I am training you for a greater purpose. I want you to be able to understand My hidden truths, so that you can enjoy greater treasures later, and so that you will have a seat of honor in My Kingdom!

To the timid traveler, fresh from the sedimentary levels of the lowlands, these highways, however picturesque and grand, seem terribly forbidding — cold, dead, gloomy gashes in the bones of the mountains, and of all Nature’s ways the ones to be most cautiously avoided. Yet they are full of the finest and most telling examples of Nature’s love; and though hard to travel, none are safer. For they lead through regions that lie far above the ordinary haunts of the devil, and of the pestilence that walks in darkness. True, there are innumerable places where the careless step will be the last step; and a rock falling from the cliffs may crush without warning like lightning from the sky; but what then? Accidents in the mountains are less common than in the lowlands, and these mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of civilization. Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action. Even the sick should try these so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand.

골드드래곤구매가격 ✹ 홈피 : via3.co.to ✹ 카톡 : ppt33 ✹ 라인 : pxp32 ✹ 1.정품 및 진품보장 2.빠른배송 총알배송 3.저렴하고 및 투명한가격 4.제품에 대해서 100% 자신있습니다 5.믿음직하면서 신뢰로 단골님 모시는곳 6.깔끔한거래 안전한거래 #골드드래곤구입방법 #골드드래곤구매방법 #골드드래곤구입 #골드드래곤구매 #골드드래곤판매 #골드드래곤처방 #골드드래곤가격 #골드드래곤후기 #골드드래곤정품구입 #골드드래곤정품구매 #골드드래곤정품판매 #골드드래곤구입하는곳 #골드드래곤구매하는곳 #골드드래곤판매하는곳 #골드드래곤약효 #골드드래곤효과 #골드드래곤효능 #골드드래곤지속시간 Be good to everyone who becomes attached to us; cherish every friend who is by our side; love everyone who walks into our life.It must be fate to get acquainted in a huge crowd of people... I feel, the love that Osho talks about, maybe is a kind of pure love beyond the mundane world, which is full of divinity and caritas, and overflows with Buddhist allegorical words and gestures, but, it seems that I cannot see through its true meaning forever... What is your recovery rate? How long does it take you to recover from actions and behaviors that upset you? Minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks? The longer it takes you to recover, the more influence that incident has on your actions, and the less able you are to perform to your personal best. In a nutshell, the longer it takes you to recover, the weaker you are and the poorer your performance. You are well aware that you need to exercise to keep the body fit and, no doubt, accept that a reasonable measure of health is the speed in which your heart and respiratory system recovers after exercise. Likewise the faster you let go of an issue that upsets you, the faster you return to an equilibrium, the healthier you will be. The best example of this behavior is found with professional sportspeople. They know that the faster they can forget an incident or missd opportunity and get on with the game, the better their performance. In fact, most measure the time it takes them to overcome and forget an incident in a game and most reckon a recovery rate of 30 seconds is too long! Imagine yourself to be an actor in a play on the stage. Your aim is to play your part to the best of your ability. You have been given a script and at the end of each sentence is a ful stop. Each time you get to the end of the sentence you start a new one and although the next sentence is related to the last it is not affected by it. Your job is to deliver each sentence to the best of your ability.

Etty Hillesum is but one example of another function of the Christ: a universally available “voice” that calls all things to become whole and true to themselves. God’s two main tools in this direction, from every appearance, seem to be great love and great suffering—and often great love that invariably leads to great suffering.

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag... His conditioning was clearly off the charts, and I'm not talking about the physical aspect alone. Being a physical specimen is one thing, but it takes so much more energy to stay mentally prepared enough to arrive every day at a place like Air Assault School on a mission to dominate. The fact that he was able to do that told me it couldn't possibly have been a one-time thing. It had to be the result of countless lonely hours in the gym, on the trails, and in the books. Most of his work was hidden, but it is within that unseen work that self-leaders are made. I suspect the reason he was capable of exceeding any and all standards consistently was because he was dedicated at a level most people cannot fathom in order to stay ready for any and all opportunities. p237

I think that writing the villain or antagonist can be very challenging. This is especially true if you are trying to write from a very tight point of view. Kennit is an example of that. While I was writing Kennit, I had to believe all he believed, and feel justified in all he did. The flipside of that is that once you start to understand a character, you start to love them, despite or sometimes because of flaws and faults. You know why they are who they are, and you sympathize even as some part of you is horrified at their logic.

Finally, note that his grandmother is not even present in the current situation, as he has now taken up the reins of domestication and subjugated his own will without anyone's else's influence. In the Toltec tradition we refer to this phenomenon as self-domestication. As my father likes to say, “Humans are the only animals on the planet that self-domesticate.” The relationship between the boy and his grandmother forms a part of the Dream of the Planet, and the lunch between the grandmother and her grandson is a basic example of how domestication and self-domestication within the Dream occurs. The grandmother domesticated her grandson in that moment, but he continued to self-domesticate himself long after that. Self-domestication is the act of accepting ourselves on the condition that we live up to the ideals we have adopted from others in the Dream of the Planet, without ever considering if those ideals are what we truly want. While the consequences of finishing a bowl of soup are minimal, domestication and self-domestication can take much more serious and darker forms as well. For instance, many of us learned to be critical of our physical appearance because it wasn't “good enough” by society's standards. We were presented with the belief that we weren't tall enough, thin enough, or that our skin wasn't the right color, and the moment we agreed with that belief we began to self-domesticate. Because we adopted an external belief, we either rejected or tried to change our physical appearance so we could feel worthy of our own self-acceptance and the acceptance of others. Imagine for a moment the many industries that would cease to exist if we all loved our bodies exactly the way they are. To be clear, domestication regarding body image is different from wanting to lose weight in order to be healthy, or even having a preference to look a certain way. The key difference is that with a preference, you come from a place of self-love and self-acceptance, whereas with domestication you start from a place of shame, guilt, and not being “enough.” The line between these two can be thin sometimes, and a Master of Self is one who can look within and determine his or her true motive. Another popular form of domestication in the current Dream of the Planet revolves around social class and material possessions. There is an underlying belief promulgated by society that those who have the most “stuff” or who hold certain jobs are somehow more important than the rest. I, for one, have never met anyone who was more important than anyone else, as we are all beautiful and unique creations of the Divine. And yet many people pursue career paths they dislike and buy things they don't really want or need all in an effort to achieve the elusive goals of peer acceptance and self-acceptance. Instances such as these (and we can think of many others) are the ways in which domestication leads to self-domestication, and the result is that we have people living lives that aren't their own.

But as our Lord and Saviour has not only declared, but has also proved by His own example, that the Law and the Prophets depend on love, and as, according to the Apostle, charity is the end of the commandment, and the fulfilment of the law, it is unquestionably a chief duty of the pastor to use the utmost diligence to excite the faithful to a love of the infinite goodness of God towards us, that, burning with a sort of divine ardour, they may be powerfully attracted to the supreme and all-perfect good, to adhere to which is true and solid happiness, as is fully experienced by him who can say with the Prophet: What have I in heaven? and besides thee what do I desire upon earth? This, assuredly, is that more excellent way pointed out by the Apostle when he sums up all his doctrines and instructions in charity, which never falleth away. For whatever is proposed by the pastor, whether it be the exercise of faith, of hope, or of some moral virtue, the love of our Lord should at the same time be so strongly insisted upon as to show clearly that all the works of perfect Christian virtue can have no other origin, no other end than divine love.

Ruth was not swayed by the promise of a better life in her home country of Moab. She rejected the chance to go back “to her people and to her gods” (verse 15); she did not want to return. She is an example of a woman who presses in to know the Lord and His people. In this true story, we are getting a little preview of a resonant biblical melody. Though God loved Israel, He loved others from outside the nation as well. Israel was God’s covenant people; yet Israel could not rightly conclude that God loved only Israelites. His people were bigger and broader than this chosen nation, vital as it was to God’s plan; indeed, as the story went on, figures like Ruth and Rahab show us that many who were not of Israel by birth were actually more “of Israel” spiritually than many Jews by birth.

For example, a good deal of what appears as generous philanthropy is really the fruit of prideful self-love disguised as generosity and reaching out for the validation of public approval and social esteem—and in the process creating enormous social benefits.12 It “gives to get” as a matter of an unspoken contract, rather than “giving because given to,” which is the expression of true charity.

When Trust Has Been Broken If you break any of your agreements about trust, there are steps to fix what’s been broken. These steps hold true for minor or major breaks, but you can’t skip any of these steps. 1  Set a specific time and place to talk. 2  Each partner names the feelings he or she experienced during the incident or breach in trust, without blame or criticism. 3  The receiving partner listens without feedback or judgment. 4  Each person describes his or her point of view about what happened during the incident without blaming or criticizing their partner, while their partner only listens and tries to empathize. The listener shouldn’t bring up their own point of view until it’s their turn to speak. 5  Explain and examine any feelings that were triggered by the incident but that were originally felt long before this relationship. For example, one of you is a no-show for a dinner date, and that triggers a feeling of abandonment the other had from childhood or the rejection or infidelity in a past relationship. 6  Each partner assesses how they contributed to the incident and holds himself or herself accountable. 7  Each apologizes and accepts the other’s apology. 8  You make a plan together to prevent this from happening again. Each of the eight dates are experiments in vulnerability, and we hope that on this first date your conversation about what trust means to each of you will bring you not only closer together, but also closer to creating the relationship you both want for a lifetime.

As my father likes to say, “Humans are the only animals on the planet that self-domesticate.” The relationship between the boy and his grandmother forms a part of the Dream of the Planet, and the lunch between the grandmother and her grandson is a basic example of how domestication and self-domestication within the Dream occurs. The grandmother domesticated her grandson in that moment, but he continued to self-domesticate himself long after that. Self-domestication is the act of accepting ourselves on the condition that we live up to the ideals we have adopted from others in the Dream of the Planet, without ever considering if those ideals are what we truly want. While the consequences of finishing a bowl of soup are minimal, domestication and self-domestication can take much more serious and darker forms as well. For instance, many of us learned to be critical of our physical appearance because it wasn't “good enough” by society's standards. We were presented with the belief that we weren't tall enough, thin enough, or that our skin wasn't the right color, and the moment we agreed with that belief we began to self-domesticate. Because we adopted an external belief, we either rejected or tried to change our physical appearance so we could feel worthy of our own self-acceptance and the acceptance of others. Imagine for a moment the many industries that would cease to exist if we all loved our bodies exactly the way they are. To be clear, domestication regarding body image is different from wanting to lose weight in order to be healthy, or even having a preference to look a certain way. The key difference is that with a preference, you come from a place of self-love and self-acceptance, whereas with domestication you start from a place of shame, guilt, and not being “enough.” The line between these two can be thin sometimes, and a Master of Self is one who can look within and determine his or her true motive. Another popular form of domestication in the current Dream of the Planet revolves around social class and material possessions. There is an underlying belief promulgated by society that those who have the most “stuff” or who hold certain jobs are somehow more important than the rest. I, for one, have never met anyone who was more important than anyone else, as we are all beautiful and unique creations of the Divine. And yet many people pursue career paths they dislike and buy things they don't really want or need all in an effort to achieve the elusive goals of peer acceptance and self-acceptance. Instances such as these (and we can think of many others) are the ways in which domestication leads to self-domestication, and the result is that we have people living lives that aren't their own.

Our self-abnegation is thus not for our own sake, but for the sake of others. And thus it is not to mere self- denial that Christ calls us, but specifically to self-sacrifice: not to unselfing ourselves, but to unselfishing ourselves. Self-denial for its own sake is in its very nature ascetic, monkish. It concentrates our whole attention on self; self-knowledge, self-control--and can, therefore, eventuate in nothing other than the very apotheosis of selfishness. At best it succeeds only in subjecting the outer self to the inner self, or the lower self to the higher self; and only the more surely falls into the slough of self-seeking, that it partially conceals the selfishness of its goal by refining its ideal of self and excluding its grosser and more outward elements. Self-denial, then, drives to the cloister; narrows and contracts the soul; murders within us all innocent desires, dries up all the springs of sympathy, and nurses and coddles our self-importance until we grow so great in our own esteem as to be careless of the trials and sufferings, the joys and aspirations, the strivings and failures and successes of our fellow-men. Self-denial, thus understood, will make us cold, hard, unsympathetic,--proud, arrogant, self-esteeming,--fanatical, overbearing, cruel. It may make monks and Stoics,--it cannot make Christians. It is not to this that Christ’s example calls us. He did not cultivate self, even His divine self: He took no account of self. He was not led by His divine impulse out of the world, driven back into the recesses of His own soul to brood morbidly over His own needs, until to gain His own seemed worth all sacrifice to Him. He was led by His love for others into the world, to forget Himself in the needs of others, to sacrifice self once for all upon the altar of sympathy. Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world. And self-sacrifice will lead us, His followers, not away from but into the midst of men. Wherever men suffer, there will we be to comfort. Wherever men strive, there we will be to help. Wherever men fail, there will we be to uplift. Wherever men succeed, there will we be to rejoice. Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our fellows: it means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means entering into every man’s hopes and fears, longings and despairs: it means many-sidedness of spirit, multiform activity, multiplicity of sympathies. It means richness of development. It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives,--binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours. It means that all the experiences of men shall smite our souls and shall beat and batter these stubborn hearts of ours into fitness for their heavenly home. It is, after all, then, the path to the highest possible development, by which alone we can be made truly men. Not that we shall undertake it with this end in view. This were to dry up its springs at their source. We cannot be self-consciously self-forgetful, selfishly unselfish. Only, when we humbly walk this path, seeking truly in it not our own things but those of others, we shall find the promise true, that he who loses his life shall find it. Only, when, like Christ, and in loving obedience to His call and example, we take no account of ourselves, but freely give ourselves to others, we shall find, each in his measure, the saying true of himself also: “Wherefore also God hath highly exalted him.” The path of self-sacrifice is the path to glory.

At four years old, this boy could not yet have an agenda to be rude. He was merely living true to his innately serious and reflective nature. These are some of the messages he might take from the demand to engage socially before he’s ready: “I need to please others to be loved. I need to change my nature to accommodate others. I need to do what others want me to do so they can be comfortable, even if it makes me uncomfortable.” Teaching this boy that he needed to live contrary to his true nature was hurtful to him—even though the skill being taught was supposed to contribute to his later success. Here’s the trick: Teaching him this skill would probably create the opposite effect by causing him to withdraw even more! In fact, the adults I’ve worked with who still can’t look people in the eye are most often those who were shamed about who they were as children. By allowing her son to just be in a new space in his own way, this mother will communicate that he is more important to her than the potential reactions of other people. She will actually help him develop more self-confidence to interact by expressing her own trust in him that he can make the choice when he feels ready. Do not misunderstand this example. I am not saying that we should allow children to do whatever they want, whenever they feel like it. I am not saying that we shouldn’t bother teaching our children social skills or appropriate boundaries. As parents, we have an extraordinary responsibility to guide and to teach. What I am saying is that we need to reevaluate the expectations behind our guidance and our teaching. Why do we really place certain expectations on our children, especially in social situations? How much do our expectations serve our parental egos, and how much do they honor our children’s specific needs? Do we want to look like good parents—or do we want to actually be good parents?

We must see that our heart’s loves are “disordered,” out of order. Things we ought to love third or fourth are first in our hearts. God, whom we should love supremely, is someone we may acknowledge but whose favor and presence is not existentially as important to us as prosperity, success, status, love, and pleasure. Unless at the very least we recognize this heart disorder and realize how much it distorts our lives, our prayers will be part of the problem, not an agent of our healing. For example, if we look to our financial prosperity as our main source of safety and confidence in life, then when our wealth is in grave jeopardy, we will cry out to God for help, but our prayers will be little more than “worrying in God’s direction.” When our prayers are finished we will be more upset and anxious than before. Prayer will not be strengthening. It won’t heal our hearts by reorienting our vision and helping us put things in perspective and bringing us to rest in God as our true security.

True crime is a perfect example of that," I said. "At its heart, it's about what do we know about humanity's capacity for evil and what should we be afraid of. The answers to those questions can tell us a lot, especially when you look at the intersections of privilege and power, who are telling the stories, who are the subjects of them. I know a lot of people think true crime is a pulp genre, and not worthy of analysis, but the fact that it's so closely tied to mainstream fixations makes it more worthy. If I can help students to pay attention to those stories and the way they're presented or received, I'd feel like I'd done my job.

Our emotions are not entirely reliable: they tend to overshoot or undershoot the target. Think, for example, of fear. We tend to be afraid of the wrong things and overlook the real things we should be afraid of. We’re afraid of ghosts, but we’re not that afraid of how short our lives are, or that we’ve neglected our true talents. We’re not great at knowing what there is to fear, nor are we great at knowing what there is to love (and in what quantities).

Thus the surface of all my virtues had a less imposing reverse side. It is true that, in another sense, my shortcomings turned to my advantage. For example, the obligation I felt to conceal the vicious part of my life gave me a cold look that was confused with the look of virtue; my indifference made me loved; my selfishness wound up in my generosities. I stop there, for too great a symmetry would upset my argument. But after all, I presented a harsh exterior and yet could never resist the offer of a glass or of a woman! I was considered active, energetic, and my kingdom was the bed. I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray. Of course, my betrayals didn’t stand in the way of my fidelity; I used to knock off a considerable pile of work through successive periods of idleness; and I had never ceased aiding my neighbor, thanks to my enjoyment in doing so. But however much I repeated such facts to myself, they gave me but superficial consolations. Certain mornings, I would get up the case against myself most thoroughly, coming to the conclusion that I excelled above all in scorn. The very people I helped most often were the most scorned. Courteously, with a solidarity charged with emotion, I used to spit daily in the face of all the blind.

For example, if we eat past the point of satisfaction or comfortable fullness, it is not because our intentions are bad but because we are confused as to what our true needs are in the moment.

Not a single nation,” he went on, as though reading it line by line, still gazing menacingly at Stavrogin, “not a single nation has ever been founded on principles of science or reason. There has never been an example of it, except for a brief moment, through folly. Socialism is from its very nature bound to be atheism, seeing that it has from the very first proclaimed that it is an atheistic organisation of society, and that it intends to establish itself exclusively on the elements of science and reason. Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one’s own existence, and a denial of death. It’s the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, ‘the river of living water,’ the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It’s the æsthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, ‘the seeking for God,’ as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god, but each has always had its own. It’s a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear. Reason has never had the power to define good and evil, or even to distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way; science has even given the solution by the fist. This is particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century, and worse than plague, famine, or war. A half-truth is a despot … such as has never been in the world before. A despot that has its priests and its slaves, a despot to whom all do homage with love and superstition hitherto inconceivable, before which science itself trembles and cringes in a shameful way..." Stavrogin observed cautiously... "The very fact that you reduce God to a simple attribute of nationality …” “I reduce God to the attribute of nationality?” cried Shatov. “On the contrary, I raise the people to God. And has it ever been otherwise? The people is the body of God. Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably; so long as it believes that by its god it will conquer and drive out of the world all other gods. Such, from the beginning of time, has been the belief of all great nations, all, anyway, who have been specially remarkable, all who have been leaders of humanity. There is no going against facts. The Jews lived only to await the coming of the true God and left the world the true God. The Greeks deified nature and bequeathed the world their religion, that is, philosophy and art. Rome deified the people in the State, and bequeathed the idea of the State to the nations.

You remember the 'distinguished' poem that was quoted in the copy you lent to me? "They ordered bacon And eggs at seven. At eight o'clock, There was nobody down. Only the coffeepot Stood on the table." "Yes, but what possible ..." "Do you also remember what your 'distinguished' weekly said about it? 'The old-fashioned reader who would dismiss as insignificant this new and vital work (a striking example of the sharp-edged imagisme with which the more adventurous of our younger writers are experimenting today)'—you see, Basil, I have it by heart, words, tone, cadence and all—'forgets that every object, even the coffeepot on the table, has a perimeter which not only encloses that object, but also subtends a physical and metaphysical otherness that includes the whole of the rest of the universe. Such work, therefore, is more truly significant of ultimate reality than all the pantings after God of the Victorians.' ... you were squashing a perfectly genuine love of simple and true things in a perfectly genuine little woman, and that the words you borrowed for the purpose were muddle-headed and insincere drivel. ... They are not literary grounds. They are human grounds. Miss Bird, as I told you, is unlike your 'distinguished' anonymities in having a few quite genuine beliefs; and you used the cheap phrases of a pseudo-metaphysical charlatan, in a precious literary weekly, to snub her. I saw the hurt look on her face long after you had wiped your boots on her perfectly sincere love of certain perfectly true and simple things. ... I don't go to church to hear a high-brow Anglican curate quoting a Scandinavian lunatic, any more than I go to my hair-dresser's to hear a Christy minstrel reciting the Apostles' Creed. I know that it's all very noble and distinguished and broad-minded and generally newspaperish. You might have been brought up in a seminary for young ladies of fashion. ... He didn't know whether he was modern or antique. In either case, it appeared he was a fraud.

First, when you find a cause you are truly passionate about, giving will not seem like an effort or a burden. In fact, you’ll gladly open your heart (and wallet) as wide as you possibly can. And second, this is yet another example of why it’s so important to stay true to you and your heart’s desires. There are so many worthy causes in the world, and I truly believe that everyone can find the one that is right for them.

Where’s your proof? Sometimes you’re convinced that your written statement is true and you believe that you can absolutely know that it’s true, but you haven’t looked at your “proof.” If you really want to know the truth, bring all your evidence into the open and put it to the test of inquiry. Here’s an example: Original statement: I am saddened by Paul because he doesn’t love me. The proof that Paul doesn’t love me: Sometimes he walks by me without speaking. When I enter the room, he doesn’t look up. He doesn’t acknowledge me. He continues to do what he is interested in. He doesn’t call me by name. I ask him to take out the trash, and he pretends not to hear me. I tell him what time dinner is, and sometimes he doesn’t show up. When we do talk, he seems distant, as though he has more important things to do. Investigate each of your “proof of truth” statements, using all four questions and the turnarounds, as in the following example. He sometimes walks by me without speaking. That proves that he doesn’t love me. Is it true? Can I absolutely know that it’s true? Is it possible that he is mentally absorbed in something else? Continue with all four questions and the turnarounds. When I enter the room, he doesn’t look up. That proves that he doesn’t love me. Is it true? Can I absolutely know that it means he doesn’t love me? Continue to test your proof with all four questions and the turnarounds. Test your whole list in this manner, and then return to your original statement: “I’m saddened by Paul because he doesn’t love me”—is it true?

Inquiry: The Four Questions and the Turnarounds Is it true? (Yes or no. If no, move to question 3.) Can you absolutely know that it’s true? (Yes or no.) How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? Who or what would you be without the thought? And Turn the thought around. Then find examples of how each turnaround is true for you in this situation.

I have come to realize that picking up the gun was/is the easy part. The difficult part is the day-to-day organizing, educating, and showing the people by example what needs to be done to create a new society. The hard, painstaking work of changing ourselves into new beings, of loving ourselves and our people, and working with them daily to create a new reality - this is the first revolution, that internal revolution.

Here are four examples of Lead Magnets I use: A checklist that can be used to properly perform something I explained in a video. A template for determining, say, a business’s profit margin. An advanced guide that goes further into the details of a subject of one of my videos. A unique book that provides substantial value but is offered for free. For me, it is 11 Side Hustle Ideas to Make $500/Day from Your Phone. The appropriate opt-in incentive depends on your content. Here are other types of examples: A DIY carpenter could offer plans to make a corner table. A marketing YouTuber could offer scripts of what to say on sales phone calls. A landscaping expert might offer recommendations for which kinds of grass to use around the United States. YouTuber Nick True at Mapped Out Money, who makes video tutorials that teach the best practices for using the personal budgeting software YNAB, found that he gets the highest sign-up rates when he offers a checklist that relates to the video. His followers really like having a resource that they can use to put his advice into practice. Jess Dante of Love and London runs a YouTube channel helping viewers plan their trips to London by suggesting lesser-known restaurants and stores to visit. Her superstar opt-in incentive is a free London 101 Guide with everything a first-time visitor needs to know. It’s been downloaded more than 45,000 times. Where you make your call to action will also have an impact on your success building your email list. You can make your call to action in a variety of places or ways inside your videos. One of the best ways is to give a short, relevant tease of the bonus or resource you’re offering within the YouTube video and tell people where they can learn more. CHALLENGE Create a Lead Magnet. It’s time to create your first Lead Magnet using the process we’ve just outlined above. You can use your piece of content from the previous chapter as a base or start something new. Don’t spend more than two hours on the first iteration. If you want to turn it into a big thing later on, great. But start SMALL. Go to MillionDollarWeekend.com to get Lead Magnet templates! (See what I did there?)

According to the teachings of the Holy Bible and the Fathers of the Church, man is able to achieve Theosis because within the Orthodox Church of Christ the Grace of God is uncreated. God is not only essence, as the West thinks; He is also energy. If God was only essence, we could not unite with Him, could not commune with Him, because the essence of God is awesome and unapproachable for man, as was written: “Never will man see My face and live” (Exodus 33:20). Let us give a relevant example from things human. If we grasp a bare electric wire, we will die. However, if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated. We see, enjoy, and are assisted by, the energy of electric current, but we are not able to grasp its essence. Let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God. If we were able to unite with the essence of God, we would become gods in essence. Then everything would become a god, and there would be confusion so that, essentially, nothing would be a god. In a few words, this is what they believe in the Oriental religions, e.g. in Hinduism, where the god is not a personal existence but an indistinct power dispersed through all the world, in men, in animals, and in objects (Pantheism). God, according to the Orthodox theological view, is One in a Trinity and a Trinity in One. As St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and other holy Fathers repeatedly say, God is filled with a divine eros, a divine love for His creatures. Because of this infinite and ecstatic love of His, He comes out of Himself and seeks to unite with them. This is expressed and realised as His energy, or better, His energies. With these, His uncreated energies, God created the world and continues to preserve it. He gives essence and substance to our world through His essence-creating energies; He illuminates man with His illuminating energies; He sanctifies him with His sanctifying energies. Finally, He deifies him with His deifying energies. Thus, through His uncreated energies holy God enters nature, the world, history, and human life.

According to the teachings of the Holy Bible and the Fathers of the Church, man is able to achieve Theosis because within the Orthodox Church of Christ the Grace of God is uncreated. God is not only essence, as the West thinks; He is also energy. If God was only essence, we could not unite with Him, could not commune with Him, because the essence of God is awesome and unapproachable for man, as was written: "Never will man see My face and live" (Exodus 33:20). Let us give a relevant example from things human. If we grasp a bare electric wire, we will die. However, if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated. We see, enjoy, and are assisted by, the energy of electric current, but we are not able to grasp its essence. Let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God. If we were able to unite with the essence of God, we would become gods in essence. Then everything would become a god, and there would be confusion so that, essentially, nothing would be a god. In a few words, this is what they believe in the Oriental religions, e.g. in Hinduism, where the god is not a personal existence but an indistinct power dispersed through all the world, in men, in animals, and in objects (Pantheism). As St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and other holy Fathers repeatedly say, God is filled with a divine eros, a divine love for His creatures. Because of this infinite and ecstatic love of His, He comes out of Himself and seeks to unite with them. This is expressed and realised as His energy, or better, His energies. With these, His uncreated energies, God created the world and continues to preserve it. He gives essence and substance to our world through His essence-creating energies; He illuminates man with His illuminating energies; He sanctifies him with His sanctifying energies. Finally, He deifies him with His deifying energies. Thus, through His uncreated energies holy God enters nature, the world, history, and human life.

No longer are animal sacrifices necessary, but we are now to sacrifice our own lives and live for Christ, not ourselves. No longer is ‘an eye for an eye’ appropriate but we are to love our enemies and ‘turn the other cheek.’ These are only two examples of heightened responsibilities Jesus taught His people. As such, I can only conclude that the same holds true with the tithe. While it used to be the requirement, it should now be the minimum.

True Christianity consists only in pure faith, love, and an holy life; which holiness of life springing up in the soul with faith and love, hath its beginning out of TRUE CONTRITION. And this contrition is never without a knowledge of one's self, whereby we perceive daily more and more our own defects, and amend them day by day. And thereby we arrive at a participation of the righteousness and holiness of Christ by faith. Wherein if we do walk, as having the continual fear of God before us, after the example of good children and loyal subjects, we must be sure not to nourish any thing that belongs to the FLESH. 'All things are lawful for me (saith the true Christian) but all things are not expedient. All things are indeed lawful for me, but all things edify not.' For as a dutiful son in his father's house doth not all what seemeth good unto him, though it were lawful for him so to do; but warily observeth the will and pleasure of his father, and, as it were, setting him still before him, doth consult with him, before ever he say or do any thing: so a true Christian, as the child of God, will behave himself in his Father's house, which is the church of God; will not allow himself in all things lawful, but will chastize his senses with Christian moderation, and will never do or speak any thing without consulting first his Father in heaven.

THE REIGN OF CATHERINE II In the public mind outside of Russia, Catherine’s long reign, from 1762 to 1796, has gained notoriety because of her phenomenal love life. Her amorous adventures were unquestionably remarkable, but it would be a mistake to dismiss her as a sovereign whose only interest was private pleasure. Nor would it be accurate to regard her as a self-centered woman who merely used men to satisfy her carnal needs. To be sure, from 1752 until her death she had no fewer than twenty-one lovers, generally men in the prime of life with impressive physiques. It is also true that the older she grew, the younger were the men she chose. When she was in her early sixties, for example, she took a twenty-two-year-old lover. She was

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert. —Matthew 4:1 The sky ripped open, the Holy Spirit took the form of a dove and rested upon Jesus, God thundered his unfailing love from the heavens, and then he ushered his beloved Son into . . . the desert? What? “I love you, Son. Enjoy . . . the desert”? Generally speaking, this series of events makes us a little uncomfortable. Can following God’s Spirit lead us straight into a desert? Would obedience deposit us in a wasteland? Could God’s loving will direct us to wander about in barren places? Evidently. From Jesus’ example, this appears to be true. We just do not talk about it often. Our earthbound hearts prefer to consider how following God leads us into happiness or health or wealth. “God led me into a desert! (hallelujah)” is just not the stuff T-shirts are made of. Even so, did not Jesus’ three decades of hiddenness already qualify as a desert experience? Yes. But in that desert of anonymity Jesus made peace with God’s timing and concluded that Father God’s companionship in his life was enough. From Jesus’ perspective, his hidden years were good years: neither wasted nor unwanted. Therefore, we find no evidence of resistance when the Holy Spirit directs Jesus into another type of desert. Matthew simply states that Jesus was “led” there.

Finally, I must acknowledge the role my lovely wife Annie, to whom I have dedicated the book, played in its production. I had the good luck to have married a woman who is incredibly smart and whose sound intuitions are untainted by philosophy. The price she pays for this is that she is subjected to calls interrupting her own work in which I ask her things like: ‘‘What’s an example of a gesture that gives an instruction?’’ or ‘‘Is the following sentence intuitively true: ‘Jeff owns more surfboards than Napoleon’?’’ She handles this with remarkable grace and humor, while providing excellent answers. In addition, while I was working on the book, she bent over backwards to do things for me that would allow me more time to write at crucial junctures. This even before we were married! And finally, the love and support she gave me while I worked on this book were of incalculable value to me. My friends say she is too good for me. They’re right

In response to my ex-Valet’s email, I wrote: Hi Andy, I am surprised by your honesty and openness in relating your early relationship with Toby. I had not expected such frank soliloquy from a ‘perfect’ gentleman like you. Although we often discussed everything candidly in the old days, we had never written down our thoughts and opinions in black and white. Are we finally reaching an Age of Aquarius where truth and freedom are here to enlighten humanity? I am gladdened that we are able to communicate quickly and efficiently in this electronic age. I know you are aware that I am writing my memoirs. Aren’t you concerned that I may reveal the true nature of your feelings you confided to me in my writings? One thing I can promise you; I will never do anything unsavory or conduct myself in an ungentlemanly fashion towards those I love, respect and trust. My dearest Andy, I value your love greatly and laurel you in the highest esteem in my pantheon of cultivated beings. Moreover we are soul mates and as past E.R.O.S. members we also have a duty to our forebears to continue living spiritually and intellectually. To be illustrious examples in the chaotic world we reside…

Love and hatred are not merely subjective feelings, affecting the inward universe of those who experience them, but they are also objective forces, altering the world outside ourselves. By loving or hating another, I cause the other in some measure to become that which I see in him or her. Not for myself alone, but for the lives of all around me, my love is creative, just as my hatred is destructive. And if this is true of my love, it is true to an incomparably greater extent of Christ's love. The victory of his suffering love upon the Cross does not merely set me an example, showing me what I myself may achieve if by my own efforts I imitate him. Much more than this, his suffering love has a creative effect upon me, transforming my own heart and will, releasing me from bondage, making me whole, rendering it possible for me to love in a way that would lie altogether beyond my powers, had I not first been loved by him. Because in love he has identified himself with me, his victory is my victory. And so Christ's death upon the Cross is truly, as the Liturgy of St Basil describes it, a “life-creating death”.

Green will typically look at history, for example, and whenever it finds a society in which there is a widespread lack of green values, it assumes that these green values would normally and naturally be present were it not for the fact that they have been maliciously oppressed by the dominator hierarchies found in that society. All individuals would possess worldcentric green values of pluralism, radical egalitarianism, and total equality, except for the oppressive controlling powers that crushed those values wherever they appeared. […] The existence of strong and widespread oppressive forces cannot be doubted. The problem comes in the claim to know what their source and cause is. For green postmodernism, the cause of the lack of worldcentric green values in any culture is due to an aggressive and intensively active repressive and oppressive force (usually the male sex; or a particular race— white in most parts of the world, coupled with a rampant colonialism— and/or due to a particular creed—usually religious fundamentalism of one sort or another; or various prejudices—against gays, against women, against whatever minority that is oppressed). In short, lack of green values (egalitarian, group freedom, gender equality, human care and sensitivity) is due to a presence of oppression. […] The major problem with that view taken by itself is that it completely overlooks the central role of growth, development, and evolution. We’ve already seen that human moral identity grows and develops from egocentric (red) to ethnocentric (amber) to worldcentric (orange then green) to integral (turquoise; and this is true individually as well as collectively/historically). Thus, the main reason that slavery was present, say, 2000 years ago, is not because there was an oppressive force preventing worldcentric freedom, but that a worldcentric notion of freedom had not even emerged yet anywhere on the planet. It wasn’t present and then oppressed, as green imagines, it simply had not yet emerged in the first place—there was nothing to oppress. This is why, as only one example, all of the world’s great religions, who otherwise teach love and compassion and treating all beings kindly, nonetheless—precisely because they were created during the great ethnocentric Mythic Age of traditional civilization —had no extensive and widespread conception of the fundamental worldcentric freedom of human beings—or the belief that all humans, regardless of race, sex, color, or creed, were born equal—and thus not one of them strenuously objected to the fact that a very large portion of their own population were slaves. Athens and Greek society, vaunted home of democracy, had 1 out of 3 of their people who were slaves—and no major complaint on a culture-wide scale. Nor was there a widespread culturally effective complaint from Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism et al. It wasn’t until the emergence of the worldcentric Age of Reason that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” actually came into existence—emerged evolutionarily—and thus started to be believed by the average and typical member of that culture.

We all know that forty years of marriage is quite an accomplishment. It doesn’t just happen. It takes commitment and work. When I was about eleven, my best friend’s parents got divorced, and I asked my mom if she thought that was going to happen with her and my dad. She told me that she didn’t think so. “Well, we all know that I’m not one to drop something that easily so, of course, I asked her why she didn’t think so. And she told me that she and my dad had made a promise to each other to wake up every day and choose to love each other. Again, being who I am, I had to challenge that answer, so I told my mom, in all my eleven years of wisdom, that love is something you feel, not something you choose. “She looked down at me and smiled. Shaking her head, she said, ‘Oh, my sweet Nicoletta, yes, it is true that you feel love—most of the time. But after years of chores and kids and bills and life, there are some days we don’t feel the love, and those are the most important days to choose to love. “So Mom, Dad, I want to thank you for giving me an example of what real love is. It’s not just a feeling, it’s also a choice. Thank you for choosing each other every day. Happy anniversary!

Summary of Rule #3 Rules #1 and #2 laid the foundation for my new thinking on how people end up loving what they do. Rule #1 dismissed the passion hypothesis, which says that you have to first figure out your true calling and then find a job to match. Rule #2 replaced this idea with career capital theory, which argues that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable, and if you want these in your working life, you must first build up rare and valuable skills to offer in return. I call these skills “career capital,” and in Rule #2 I dived into the details of how to acquire it. The obvious next question is how to invest this capital once you have it. Rule #3 explored one answer to this question by arguing that gaining control over what you do and how you do it is incredibly important. This trait shows up so often in the lives of people who love what they do that I’ve taken to calling it the dream-job elixir. Investing your capital in control, however, turns out to be tricky. There are two traps that commonly snare people in their pursuit of this trait. The first control trap notes that it’s dangerous to try to gain more control without enough capital to back it up. The second control trap notes that once you have the capital to back up a bid for more control, you’re still not out of the woods. This capital makes you valuable enough to your employer that they will likely now fight to keep you on a more traditional path. They realize that gaining more control is good for you but not for their bottom line. The control traps put you in a difficult situation. Let’s say you have an idea for pursuing more control in your career and you’re encountering resistance. How can you tell if this resistance is useful (for example, it’s helping you avoid the first control trap) or something to ignore (for example, it’s the result of the second control trap)? To help navigate this control conundrum, I turned to Derek Sivers. Derek is a successful entrepreneur who has lived a life dedicated to control. I asked him his advice for sifting through potential control-boosting pursuits and he responded with a simple rule: “Do what people are willing to pay for.” This isn’t about making money (Derek, for example, is more or less indifferent to money, having given away to charity the millions he made from selling his first company). Instead, it’s about using money as a “neutral indicator of value”—a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it’s a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control. This holds whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new role within an established company. Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.

Her pure life and complete devotion influenced me more strongly than it did the other family members. From the time of my earliest memories, she impressed upon me one rule above all others: when I woke from sleep, my first duty was to pray to God for spiritual nourishment and blessings. Only then could I break the night's fast. Sometimes I objected to this rule and insisted on having breakfast first, but my mother would never relent. Usually with coaxing, but when necessary with force, she impressed this rule deep onto my soul: seek God first and only then turn to other things. At the time I was too young to recognize the true value of this education, and I resisted her. Later, however, I came to appreciate her example. Whenever I think back now on her loving guidance, I cannot thank God enough for her. For she planted in me, and tended in my early life, a profound love and fear of God. She carried a light within her, and her heart was the best spiritual training anyone could have: 'You must not be careless and worldly,' she would say. 'Seek peace of soul, and love of God always. Someday you must give yourself fully to the search, you must follow the way of the sadhu.

Definition The five progressive dimensions (or stages) of the life of an apprentice are: trust in Jesus, desire to be his apprentice, obedience, inner transformation, and finally, the character and power to do the work of the kingdom. Quotes “We should be aware of, roughly, five dimensions of our eternal kind of life in The Kingdom Among Us, and these dimensions more or less arrange themselves in the following progression: 1.  Confidence in and reliance upon Jesus as ‘the Son of man,’ the one appointed to save us … This confidence is a reality, and it is itself a true manifestation of the ‘life from above,’ not of normal human capacities … 2.  But this confidence in the person of Jesus naturally leads to a desire to be his apprentice in living in and from the kingdom of God … . 3.  The abundance of life realized through apprenticeship to Jesus, ‘continuing in his word, naturally leads to obedience … Love of Jesus sustains us through the course of discipline and training that makes obedience possible. Without that love, we will not stay to learn. 4.  Obedience, with the life of discipline it requires, both leads to and, then, issues from the pervasive inner transformation of the heart and soul …  as we admire and emulate Jesus and do whatever is necessary to learn how to obey him. 5.  Finally, there is power to work the works of the kingdom … Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow toward.” (DC 366-68) “The various scenes and situations that Jesus discusses in his Discourse on the Hill are actually stages in a progression toward a life of agape love. They progressively presuppose that we know where our well-being really lies, that we have laid aside anger and obsessive desire, that we do not try to mislead people to get our way, and so on. Then loving and helping those who hurt us and hate us, for example, will come as a natural progression.” (DC 139) Exercise—

Ghosts can be really out of line sometimes. It's one thing to come back for true love and cause a little hubbub. Or some unresolved revenge bullshit, fine. You're wrong, blah blah blah, but I get it. At least you have a good reason. But every now and then you get these real entitled-acting blowhards wanna come back and raise a roof just because--perfect example: because they like a house. Ugh. Can't even roll my eyes far enough back into my flesh-and-blood head to express how out of line that shit is. So you like a house. Fucking stay your dead ass downstairs and paint a picture of it. No one wants your house-loving ass wandering around pestering some city councilman, even if he does deserve it.

[…]My dear, there are many kinds of love. Take my love for you, for example. Come on, don’t look so surprised; of course I love you. I never said it in those words, I know, but it’s true. I’ve never met anyone that makes me feel as comfortable as you do; around you, I am probably the closest version of the person I am when no one else is looking. Maybe that’s why I love you; because, in your presence, the noise in my head dies down, and there’s no clutter, just clarity. What a weird thing love is…now, would you like some tea? […]

THE MAGIC OF LOVE The magic of personal love works miracles as this true story testifies: Even one person’s intimate love can deeply heal another. For example,Tom, a simple person without training in psychotherapy, worked as an orderly in a mental hospital. One of the sickest patients in the hospital, a deeply psychotic woman, had been there for eighteen years. She never spoke to anyone, or even looked in another’s eyes. She sat alone all day in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth. One day during his dinner break, Tom found another rocking chair, pulled it over, and rocked along beside her as he ate his dinner. He returned the next day, and the next. Tom worked only five days per week, but he asked for special permission to come in on his days off so he could rock with the psychotic woman. Tom did this every day for six months. Then one evening as he got up to leave, the woman said, “Good night.” It was the first time she had spoken in eighteen years. After that, she began to get well. Tom still came to rock with her every day, and eventually she was healed of her psychosis.* *Healing the Eight Stages of Life. M. Linn, S. Fabricant, D. Linn. Paulist Press. 1988.

I am equally present in all beings and show the same face to all creation; none are favored, none are hateful, and none dear. But those who loveMe with brimming heart become absorbed in Me, and as they dwell in Me, I am revealed dwelling within them. I dwell even in the misguided. Know, Arjuna, that the change from profligacy to purity is not uncommon. If a person soiled with the wayward actions of a lifetime but turns to Me in utter devotion, I see no sinner. Newfound dedication can quickly refashion one’s nature. Know this for certain: no one devoted to Me falls! Everyone who takes refuge in Me, whatever their birth, gender, or position in society will attain the supreme goal of merging into Me. This is true even for those whom society may scorn or consider to be ineligible (women in some cultures, for example, or lower classes in others). There is no such thing as a sinful or wicked birth. Where there is a hurricane of love in the mind and heart all human distinctions vanish.

I began a project 25 years ago that would change my life forever. Evolution of Loving offers real life examples of diverse couples who model successful, conscious partnership over time via intimate photographs and the telling of their story. It provides an intimate glimpse into eight remarkable partnerships that have been consciously built – and in many cases, rebuilt – on a foundation of authenticity, personal responsibility, and trust. The project is a true reflection of the human condition, following births, deaths, separations and the strengthening of partnerships.

Structurally, then, errors of love are similar to errors in general. Emotionally, however, they are in a league of their own: astounding, enduring, miserable, incomprehensible. True, certain other large-scale errors can rival or even dwarf them; we’ve gotten a taste of that in recent chapters. But relatively few of us will undergo, for example, the traumatic and total abandonment of a deeply held religious belief, or the wrongful identification of an assailant. By contrast, the vast majority of us will get our hearts seriously broken, quite possibly more than once. And when we do, we will experience not one but two kinds of wrongness about love. The first is a specific error about a specific person—the loss of faith in a relationship, whether it ended because our partner left us or because we grew disillusioned. But, as I’ve suggested, we will also find that we were wrong about love in a more general way: that we embraced an account of it that is manifestly implausible. The specific error might be the one that breaks our heart, but the general one noticeably compounds the heartache. A lover who is part of our very soul can’t be wrong for us, nor can we be wrong about her. A love that is eternal cannot end. And yet it does, and there we are—mired in a misery made all the more extreme by virtue of being unthinkable. We can’t do much about the specific error—the one in which we turn out to be wrong about (or wronged by) someone we once deeply loved. (In fact, this is a good example of a kind of error we can’t eliminate and shouldn’t want to.) But what about the general error? Why do we embrace a narrative of love that makes the demise of our relationships that much more shocking, humiliating, and painful? There are, after all, less romantic and more realistic narratives of love available to us: the cool biochemical one, say, where the only heroes are hormones; the implacable evolutionary one, where the communion of souls is supplanted by the transmission of genes; or just a slightly more world-weary one, where love is rewarding and worth it, but nonetheless unpredictable and possibly impermanent—Shakespeare’s wandering bark rather than his fixèd mark. Any of these would, at the very least, help brace us for the blow of love’s end. But at what price? Let go of the romantic notion of love, and we also relinquish the protection it purports to offer us against loneliness and despair. Love can’t bridge the gap between us and the world if it is, itself, evidence of that gap—just another fallible human theory, about ourselves, about the people we love, about the intimate “us” of a relationship. Whatever the cost, then, we must think of love as wholly removed from the earthly, imperfect realm of theory-making. Like the love of Aristophanes’ conjoined couples before they angered the gods, like the love of Adam and Eve before they were exiled from the Garden of Eden, we want our own love to predate and transcend the gap between us and the world.

CRISIS IN LOVE crisis in love , is what makes love no longer love but haterd , it also distroy friendship , ,, . We have two major crisi s in love , .MONEY & SEX.... Most of our gals nowadays no longer interested in true love , but un does who send money un dem, many has gone because of it , dat is why men nowadays are using dem for rituals ,, , while some are having problem in their marriage because of it, this is also break the marriage when the möney is gone, , True love is like a seed , if u water it , it wil grow , if not it wil die . What shall do to prevent dis , for gals dont love a gal because of his money , bt love him because of his future ,.SEX. What shall it profit a man to gain the pride ,of a woman and loses it his bright future, , Some of our gals are decive by the word "I LOVE U,," that makes some mothers in this dear youth stages, Some are also distorying dear womb , in the name of abortion , and also some family are childless because of this ,.., and so sin before God and man. Shine ur eyes gals, many has gone, before u openup for a guy makes sure he has paide ur bride price, .. LET u understand the sex , is devine gift from God to promote marriage life......NB Love is devine by one word sacrifice, ..that is why God sent his son to die for us. JESUS is pure example of love. Thanks . I LOVE u all ,but God LOVE most.

Whether your neighbor, coworker, friends, or extended family, there is someone. If every person can think of someone who had a broken family, it shows you how common this disease is. Don’t let this condition plague your life! Love your family like no tomorrow. The mortar of every relationship is love. All the bonds of friendship begin with the heart. So work on your own heart that you can cherish other’s as well. How we relate to others can determine how easy or how difficult our lives will be. If you’re too busy trying to take care of yourself, there will be a day when you’ll wish you did more to bond with a friend or family member before they died. By then it’s too late to take your choices back. Don’t live life with regrets! Remember that there are no regrets in perfect love. Indeed, the most rewarding experiences don’t come from how we love ourselves but how we love others. If we spend more time filling up other people, it will result in a tangible reward that can be felt and experienced in this life. Now, true and sincere love wouldn’t be loving someone with the hope of getting a reward out of it. True love is expressed without regard for self. For example, consider the depths of a mother’s love. True love can be examined in a mother’s life.

some general principles in the holy books of all religions that teach love, charity, liberty, justice and equality for all the human family, there are many grand and beautiful passages, the golden rule has been echoed and re-echoed around the world. There are lofty examples of good and true men and women, all worthy our acceptance and imitation whose lustre cannot be dimmed by the false sentiments and vicious characters bound up in the same volume. The Bible cannot be accepted or rejected as a whole, its teachings are varied and its lessons differ widely from each other. In criticising the peccadilloes of Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel, we would not shadow the virtues of Deborah, Huldah and Vashti. In criticising the Mosaic code, we would not question

I’ve always been intrigued, for example, by the way that many people use the analogy of a train to describe their companies. Massive and powerful, the train moves inexorably down the track, over mountains and across vast plains, through the densest fog and darkest night. When things go wrong, we talk of getting “derailed” and of experiencing a “train wreck.” And I’ve heard people refer to Pixar’s production group as a finely tuned locomotive that they would love the chance to drive. What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position—that driving the train is the way to shape their companies’ futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.

Truth is infinite and is therefore vast enough to hold an infinite number of facets. It has been said that the measure of an idea’s greatness is the degree to which its opposite is also true. For example, love is gentle; love is also strong.

Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent. I cannot force myself to love or honor my parents if my body rebels against such an endeavor for reasons that are well-known to it. But if I still attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment, then the upshot will be the kind of stress that is invariably involved when I demand the impossible of myself. This kind of stress has accompanied me almost all my life. Anxious to stay in line with the system of moral values I had accepted, I did my best to imagine good feelings I did not possess while ignoring the bad feelings I did have. My aim was to be loved as a daughter. But the effort was all in vain. In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place. On the other hand, I learned that a feeling of love will establish itself automatically (for example, love for my children or love for my friends) once I stop demanding that I feel such love and stop obeying the moral injunctions imposed on me. But such a sensation can happen only when I feel free and remain open and receptive to all my feelings, including the negative ones. The realization that I cannot manipulate my feelings, that I can delude neither myself nor others, brought me immense relief and liberation. Only then was I fully struck by the large number of people who (like myself) literally almost kill themselves in the attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment, without any consideration of the price this exacts both from their own bodies and from their children. As long as the children allow themselves to be used in this way, it is entirely possible to live to be one hundred without any awareness of one’s own personal truth and without any illness ensuing from this protracted form of self-deception. A mother who is forced to realize that the deprivations imposed on her in her youth make it impossible for her to love a child of her own, however hard she may try, can certainly expect to be accused of immorality if she has the courage to put that truth into words. But I believe that it is precisely this explicit acceptance of her true feelings, independent of the claims of morality, that will enable her to give both herself and her children the honest and sincere kind of support they need most, and at the same time will allow her to free herself from the shackles of self-deception. When

5. Although Sanders and especially Pinnock often speak of the importance of faith, they rarely listen to what the New Testament has to say about the content of faith, about the object of faith. Consider, for example, the following statements: “people can receive the gift of salvation without knowing the giver or the precise nature of the gift.”77 Inclusivism “denies that Jesus must be the object of saving faith.”78 “‘Saving faith’…does not necessitate knowledge of Christ in this life. God’s gracious activity is wider than the arena of special revelation. God will accept into his kingdom those who repent and trust him even if they know nothing of Jesus.”79 “Faith in God is what saves, not possessing certain minimum information.”80 “A person is saved by faith, even if the content of faith is deficient (and whose is not?). The Bible does not teach that one must confess the name of Jesus to be saved.”81 “The issue that God cares about is the direction of the heart, not the content of theology.”82 Some of this argument is slanted by the form of the proferred antitheses. For example: “Faith in God is what saves, not possessing certain minimum information.” At one level that is surely correct: merely possessing information, minimal or otherwise, does not save. Christians are not gnostics. On the other hand, the form of the antithesis may allow the unwary to overlook the fact that faith has content, or an object. Does faith in, say, a ouija board save? How about sincere faith in astrology? Pinnock says it is “faith in God” that saves. But which God? The Buddhist impersonal God? And even if we assume we are dealing with the true God, does all faith in this God save, when we are told that even the devils believe? Again: “The issue that God cares about is the direction of the heart, not the content of theology.” At one level, I would strenuously agree. Yet at the same time, I would want to add that if the direction of the heart is truly right, one of the things it will be concerned about is the content of theology. Does Paul sound as if he does not care about the content of theology in Galatians 1:8-9? Does John, in 1 John 4:1-6? Far from resorting to antitheses, John purposely links sound doctrine, transparent obedience, and love for the brothers and sisters in Christ, as being joint marks of the true believer (and thus of true faith!).

Today instruments in churches are loved, praised, lauded, adored, applauded and embraced as vital necessities for stimulating worship. However, when the Truth refutes the use of instruments in true New Testament worship, contemporaries cry foul! They resort to emotionalism alleging that God loves musical instruments in worship. Interestingly enough, they can’t find any biblical command or example for the musical instrument in New Testament Christian worship.

Question 1 asks us, “What makes you so sure that God exists at all—especially when you can’t see, hear, or touch him?” • We believe in many things that we don’t see or directly experience with our senses—the virtue of love being a great example. Yet we see evidence of love through its effects. Similarly, we can’t see God, but we can believe in him based on his work in us and in the universe around us. • One of the ways we can know that God is real and active in our world is that he’s real and active in our lives—he’s our friend! If that’s true in your own experience, then talking about him will be a natural part of your answer to people who ask you this question about God’s existence. • Evidence #1: Whatever has a beginning has a cause. Science shows us that the universe had a beginning. It therefore had a cause—one that’s outside of itself and is therefore beyond time, space, matter, and physical energy. In other words, that cause has the characteristics of the God of the Bible. • Evidence #2: Our universe is fine-tuned, with astounding “just-so” precision, in ways that make it a place that can support life. The odds of this happening on its own, by sheer chance, are vanishingly small and thus point powerfully to an intelligent designer—One whom the Bible calls God. • Evidence #3: Apart from God there can be no objective moral standards. But we clearly live in a world that has objective moral standards. Therefore there has to be a divine moral lawgiver. We refer to that lawgiver as “God.” • Our experience, science, and philosophy all point to the existence of an invisible God, One that fits the descriptions given in Scripture for Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and of us, as Christians.

The nature of the society seemed an inevitable, unstoppable juggernaut of evil. He just wanted some rest, some respite from the relentless hostility and hate foisted upon him. He was tired of the death threats, sabotage of his work, and vandalism of his home. He had stopped fighting for his “cause.” He told himself he would just try to be a silent example of true love to his neighbors, hoping that they might eventually wonder what was different about him and ask him about his different god and different values. But they never did.

about to harness that power and make our wildest dreams become our reality. There will be a learning curve and I know that it may be scary for you, but I promise to be there every day for you and continue to train you with love, compassion, and acceptance. I’m going to be the best damn boss in the world. Step 4: Accept Your Mind’s Gift It took years of programing for your mind to believe limiting beliefs. As a kid, you probably picked up the majority of them from your parents, friends, or at school. You were given a lot of misinformation about your true nature that caused you to take on limiting beliefs that have been passed down from generation to generation. These beliefs weren’t passed down out of malice. They were passed down as a form of protection based on fear and lack. For an example, while growing up you probably heard over and over again: “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” If currently you’re experiencing anything other than abundance, you probably heard that phrase or something similar over and over again until you adopted it as your own limiting belief. That belief was meant to protect you from experiencing economic hardship. Your parents told you this in hopes that you would be frugal and not waste money so that you wouldn’t experience the hardship that they did. However, that limiting belief that was passed down to protect you is causing you to feel bad and making it damn near impossible for you to attract financial security into your life. What if you were taught that money flows easily and freely? You would most likely have that belief and never experience financial insecurity in your life. Look at rich families that come from “old money.” They stay rich forever, not only because they pass down their money, but because they see that money always comes and that it’s easy to make money if you try. That belief shapes their thoughts and feelings around money and therefore, it manifests their wealthy reality. This last step is about turning your lemons into a refreshing cup of lemonade. Any time you catch your mind feeding you a negative thought, let it raise a red flag and be an opportunity to have a conversation with your mind. Believe me. Your mind will continue to feed you worst-case scenario thoughts and visions. You can go from financially insecure to secure in an instant, but it takes time to dismantle years of fear-based programming and reprogram your beliefs. You will have to sit down with your mind and train it every day. You don’t have to dedicate chunks of time every day and practice as if you were trying to become an Olympic athlete. It’s a lot easier and effortless on your part. Your mind will tell you exactly when it needs some more training by having a limiting belief that causes a bad feeling. Those worst-case scenario thoughts and visions aren’t your mind trying to sabotage you. It’s your mind taking a seat in your classroom and asking for more training.

True religion, in great part, consists in . . .’ Everything we have seen means that life with this God is as different from life with any other God as oranges are from orang-utans. If, for example, God wasn’t about having us know and love him, but simply about having us live under his rule, then our behaviour and performance would be all that mattered. The deeper, internal questions of what we want, what we love and enjoy would never be asked. As it is, because the Christian life is one of being brought to share the delight the Father, Son and Spirit have for each other, desires matter. As Jonathan Edwards put it, ‘True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.’15 He was thinking primarily of love for Christ and joy in him, and he wrote one of his main works (Religious Affections) largely to unpack that conviction. What Edwards was getting at was the fact that the Spirit is not about bringing us to a mere external performance for Christ, but bringing us actually to love him and find our joy in him. And any performance ‘for him’ that is not the expression of such love brings him no pleasure at all. Edwards compares such loveless Christianity to a cold marriage, asking: if a wife should carry it [that is, behave] very well to her husband, and not at all from any love to him, but from other considerations plainly seen, and certainly known by the husband, would he at all delight in her outward respect any more than if a wooden image were contrived to make respectful motions in his presence?16

The Holy Scripture is called the Book of the Old and of the New Testament. When a notary has drawn a contract or other deed, when a testament is confirmed by the death of the testator, there must not be added, withdrawn, or altered, one single word under penalty of falsification. Are not the Holy Scriptures the true testament of the eternal God, drawn by the notaries deputed for this purpose, duly sealed and signed with his blood, confirmed by death? Being such, how can we alter even the smallest point without impiety? “A testament,” says the great Ulpian, “is a just expression of our will as to what we would have done after our death.”898 Our Lord by the Holy Scriptures shows us what we must believe, hope for, love and do, and this by a true expression of his will; if we add, take away or change, it will no longer be the true expression of God’s will. For Our Lord having duly expressed in Scripture his will, if we add anything of our own we shall make the statement go beyond the will of the testator, if we take anything away we shall make it fall short, if we make changes in it we shall set it awry, and it will no longer correspond to the will of the author, nor be a correct statement. When two things exactly correspond, he who changes the one destroys the equality and the correspondence between them. If it be a true statement, whatever right have we to alter it? Our Lord puts a value on the iotas, yea, the mere little points and accents of his holy words. How jealous then is he of their integrity, and what punishment shall they not deserve who violate this integrity! Brethren, says S. Paul,899 (I speak after the manner of man), yet a man’s testament, if it be confirmed, no man despiseth, nor addeth to it. And to show how important it is to learn the Scripture in its exactness he gives an example. To Abraham were the promisesmade, and to his seed. He says not and to his seeds as of many, but as of one; and to thy seed, who is Christ. See, I beg you, how the change from singular to plural would have spoilt the mysterious meaning of this word. The Ephrathites [Ephraimites] said Sibolleth, not forgetting a single letter, but because they did not pronounce it thickly enough, the Galaadites slew them at the fords of Jordan.900 The simple difference of pronunciation in speaking, and in writing the mere transposition of one single point on the letter scin caused the ambiguity, and changing the janin into semol, instead of an ear of wheat expressed a weight or a burden. Whosoever alters or adds the slightest accent in the Scripture is a sacrilegious man and deserves the death of him who dares to mingle the profane with the sacred.

Of the tendency, Angus said, of things to get better Dogs and the optimistic are usually convinced; Others, perhaps, are more cautious: When I was your age I remember Thinking that most of life’s problems Would be over by the next day; I still think that, I suppose, And am often pleasantly surprised To discover that it is occasionally true; Thinking something, you see, Can make it happen, or so we believe, Though how that works, I doubt If I shall ever find out. From your perspective, where you are Is probably the only place It is possible to be; some time soon You will discover that we can, if lucky, Decide who we shall become. A word of warning here: Of all the tempting roles You will be offered, being yourself Is unquestionably the safest, Will bring the most applause Will make you feel best; Greasepaint, dear Bertie, is greasy: Leave it to the actors; The most comfortable face to wear, You’ll find, is your own. So what do I wish for you? Freedom? I imagine You know all about that Even if so far you’ve had To contemplate it from a distance. I could think of other things; I might wish, for example, That you should be whatever You fervently want to be: a sailor, A fireman, an explorer? You may live, you know, To seventy-seven and beyond: What, I wonder, will Scotland Be like seven decades from now? I’ll never know, but what I wish Is that some of it will be left for you, Some of the things we’ve loved. Happy birthday, then, Bertie: Be strong, be thoughtful; Don’t be afraid to cry, when necessary: In operas, as in life, it is the strong Who are always the first to weep. Be kind, which you already are, Even to those who deserve it least; Kindness, you see, Bertie, is a sort of love, That is something I have learned, And you’ll learn too if you listen To the teacher we all should trust: The human heart, my dear, the human heart, Where kindness makes its home.

I raised the very general topic of relations with the royal family, based on what I’d been reading in the English newspapers since I’d arrived. Diana said that the widely held belief that the Queen Mother had guided her during the period of her engagement was “completely untrue.” She’d received virtually no support or advice from the royal family, ever. I laughed when Diana good-naturedly referred to the royal family as “that lot.” She went on, “They never praise you when you do something right, but they certainly let you know when you’ve done something wrong. Diana proceeded to say that she had “little use for the upper classes.” This comment intrigued me, since she’d been born and raised among the aristocracy. Her attitude marked a true departure from her past. Diana found “ordinary people so much more real.” She loved her contact with people and related two incidents as examples. She had recently been driving her own car in London and had stopped for a traffic light. A total stranger recognized her, walked over, and immediately told her how worried he was about his wife’s illness. Diana was sympathetic to his anxiety and touched by his need. To me, this story demonstrated how sincerely her compassion for others came across. A complete stranger felt comfortable speaking to her about his deepest worry and she responded with natural concern.

Cats. The original source of the, er, taint is a wee bit obscure. Twas either brought back by a Crusader or from some ancient Celtic bride, a priestess in the old religion, a shape-shifter.” He shrugged. “Despite what I am, I find that a wee bit difficult to imagine. But, there it is. The Callans appear to have done what ye plan to do—bred it out. There are tales from the old, misty past that hint at some difficulties because of this trait, but the Callans began to be verra particular in their mates. Their family lines are kept meticulously complete right to the most distant of cousins. Intermarriage, no matter how rich the prize, is strictly forbidden for fear that this trait will blossom in its full glory again and pull them all back into danger.” “So, they have bred it out then?” Cathal could understand why Bridget might hide this fact about her clan, but still felt hurt and angry that she would hide it from him. “Most of it. There lingers a hint, though. In the coloring, for example. Twas the medallion that set me on the right path. It reminded me of a tale I had once been told. I found that and soon tracked down the rest. It also explains a lot of things such as how your wife hisses and scratches, how she can run as she does.” “How she purrs,” Cathal whispered. “Does she? How intriguing.” Jankyn met Cathal’s scowl with a sweet smile. “The way she seems to sense danger, her keen eyesight, especially in the dark, and that certain grace she has. All Callan women are rumored to be small, lovely, graceful, passionate, and fertile. Verra, verra fertile. Your wee wife comes from a verra big family.” “Do ye recall the first night she was here? The way she acted when she first awoke?” Jankyn nodded. “Verra like a cat.” “Aye, but for one fleeting moment there was something in her face, something verra catlike.” “Why didnae ye say so?” “I thought it a trick of the light. Now I think not. It also means it might be impossible to breed out all our MacNachton traits. The Callans havenae fully succeeded, have they?” “Would that be such a bad thing? I can think of a few that would only serve us weel and would only raise envy, nay fear.” “True. I suspicion some of the things in the Callan bloodline do the same. The more I think on it, the more I curse myself as a blind fool. Aye, some of what Bridget does could just be considered, weel, a female’s ways. But nay all of them. Certainly nay the way she fought Edmee. I was but stunned when Edmee tossed me aside. Couldnae move, but I could see how Bridget leapt at Edmee. She used those cursed long nails of hers on Edmee and it took Edmee a few moments to get a firm grasp on Bridget. I can now see that the way Bridget moved to try to stay out of Edmee’s grasp was verra like a cat. Then Edmee threw Bridget and, somehow, e’en as she was flying through the air, she curled that wee body of hers into a ball. That and the heather saved her.” “Aye. Raibeart and I were close enough to see that. Raibeart still mutters about it. That and the fact that your wee wife made sure to take a few large hanks of Edmee’s hair with her when she was thrown. Of course, a cat is said to land on its feet. For one wee minute, I truly thought she was about to perform that wondrous feat, but then she curled up into the ball. I wonder why.” “Mayhap when I have finished bellowing at her, I will ask her that question.” He smiled faintly when Jankyn laughed. “So, ye will keep her?” “Aye. E’en when I feared ye were about to tell me she had MacNachton blood, something that would near ruin all my grand plans, I meant to keep her.” He sighed, finished off his wine, then rose to refill his goblet. “I had best send for her, confront her with this, and hear what she has to say for herself.” “No need. I believe I hear the patter of wee paws approaching.” Cathal gave Jankyn a disgusted look as he retook his seat. “I would be wary of teasing her too much. Dinnae forget those nails.” “Cathal?

Just tell me. What is odd about the Callans? Something that is carried in the blood?” Jankyn nodded. “Cats. The original source of the, er, taint is a wee bit obscure. Twas either brought back by a Crusader or from some ancient Celtic bride, a priestess in the old religion, a shape-shifter.” He shrugged. “Despite what I am, I find that a wee bit difficult to imagine. But, there it is. The Callans appear to have done what ye plan to do—bred it out. There are tales from the old, misty past that hint at some difficulties because of this trait, but the Callans began to be verra particular in their mates. Their family lines are kept meticulously complete right to the most distant of cousins. Intermarriage, no matter how rich the prize, is strictly forbidden for fear that this trait will blossom in its full glory again and pull them all back into danger.” “So, they have bred it out then?” Cathal could understand why Bridget might hide this fact about her clan, but still felt hurt and angry that she would hide it from him. “Most of it. There lingers a hint, though. In the coloring, for example. Twas the medallion that set me on the right path. It reminded me of a tale I had once been told. I found that and soon tracked down the rest. It also explains a lot of things such as how your wife hisses and scratches, how she can run as she does.” “How she purrs,” Cathal whispered. “Does she? How intriguing.” Jankyn met Cathal’s scowl with a sweet smile. “The way she seems to sense danger, her keen eyesight, especially in the dark, and that certain grace she has. All Callan women are rumored to be small, lovely, graceful, passionate, and fertile. Verra, verra fertile. Your wee wife comes from a verra big family.” “Do ye recall the first night she was here? The way she acted when she first awoke?” Jankyn nodded. “Verra like a cat.” “Aye, but for one fleeting moment there was something in her face, something verra catlike.” “Why didnae ye say so?” “I thought it a trick of the light. Now I think not. It also means it might be impossible to breed out all our MacNachton traits. The Callans havenae fully succeeded, have they?” “Would that be such a bad thing? I can think of a few that would only serve us weel and would only raise envy, nay fear.” “True. I suspicion some of the things in the Callan bloodline do the same. The more I think on it, the more I curse myself as a blind fool. Aye, some of what Bridget does could just be considered, weel, a female’s ways. But nay all of them. Certainly nay the way she fought Edmee. I was but stunned when Edmee tossed me aside. Couldnae move, but I could see how Bridget leapt at Edmee. She used those cursed long nails of hers on Edmee and it took Edmee a few moments to get a firm grasp on Bridget. I can now see that the way Bridget moved to try to stay out of Edmee’s grasp was verra like a cat. Then Edmee threw Bridget and, somehow, e’en as she was flying through the air, she curled that wee body of hers into a ball. That and the heather saved her.” “Aye. Raibeart and I were close enough to see that. Raibeart still mutters about it. That and the fact that your wee wife made sure to take a few large hanks of Edmee’s hair with her when she was thrown. Of course, a cat is said to land on its feet. For one wee minute, I truly thought she was about to perform that wondrous feat, but then she curled up into the ball. I wonder why.” “Mayhap when I have finished bellowing at her, I will ask her that question.” He smiled faintly when Jankyn laughed. “So, ye will keep her?” “Aye. E’en when I feared ye were about to tell me she had MacNachton blood, something that would near ruin all my grand plans, I meant to keep her.” He sighed, finished off his wine, then rose to refill his goblet. “I had best send for her, confront her with this, and hear what she has to say for herself.” “No need. I believe I hear the patter of wee paws approaching.” Cathal

Rogers (1959) maintained that most parents provide their children with conditional positive regard—the sense that the child is valued and loved only when she behaves in a way that is acceptable to others. The problem with conditional positive regard is that it causes the child to learn to deny or distort her genuine feelings. For example, if little Amy’s parents scold and reject her when she expresses angry feelings, her strong need for positive regard will cause her to deny her anger, even when it’s justifi ed or appropriate.Eventually, Amy’s self-concept will become so distorted that genuine feelings of anger are denied because they are inconsistent with her self-concept as “a good girl who never gets angry. ” Because of the fear of losing positive regard, she cuts herself off from her true feelings

heritage a secret. This secrecy is probably a matter of protection for her and for Mordecai. As Ahasuerus is preparing for a new wife, as Mordecai is preparing Esther for a new life, Esther is preparing to be come a queen. It is important to notice that Esther is obedient and faithful without being certain of the outcome of this year. She has no guarantee of ever returning to her own life, she has no guarantee that she will become queen, so we must assume that she is not motivated by results in her service to the Lord. Esther is obedient without any promise other than the knowledge inside her that she will not be abandoned by the Lord at any time. She will be faithful regardless of foreseeable consequences, and the example that this kind of faithfulness sets for us is fantastic. Once evaluated by Hegai worthy of the expense of the preparations, each young woman must undergo Ahasuerus’ scrutiny as well. After a year, Esther is prepared to face the king, and is now awaiting her turn to enter his chambers. Each young woman’s turn came to go in to King Ahasuerus after she had completed twelve months’ preparation, according to the regulations for the women, for thus were the days of their preparation apportioned: six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with perfumes and preparations for beautifying women.Thus prepared, each young woman went to the king, and she was given whatever she desired to take with her from the women’s quarters to the king’s palace.In the evening she went, and in the morning she returned to the second house of the women, to the custody of Shaashgaz, the king’s eunuch who kept the concubines. Esther 2:12-13 After their period of preparation, the women go, one at a time, in to the king’s palace. They leave the women’s quarters in the evening and return in the morning… and their life’s course is determined within a period of 24 hours or less. Imagine the scene: these women were taken from their families and everything familiar to them a year or so before they are sent into the king. For a year, they are in the custody of Hegai the custodian of the women. Each step that these women take toward the palace is a step toward one of two things: either the beginning of a new life or the death of every possible dream that each one might have had for her life. A step toward becoming Ahasuerus’ wife and queen of Persia — tremendous honor and riches; or a step toward becoming one of the king’s concubines — a life devoid of true love or passion. Each candidate completed these twelve months and went into the king as a potential queen. The next morning, each woman left the king’s chambers as one of a countless number of mistresses in his harem. The history does not indicate that they were rejected and returned to their own homes. They were returned to Shaashgaz, the keeper of the king’s concubines. The finality and sadness of the conclusion of this year must have been excruciating. “She would not go into the king again unless the king delighted in her and called for her by name.” Esther 2:14 Like a splash of ice water, that sentence feels cold. A rush of emptiness and loneliness all of a sudden, they have been used and, for all practical purposes, thrown away. When they returned the next morning, they did not even go to the court that has been their home for the past year. These women went into the custody of Shaashgaz, the eunuch custodian of the concubines. That is quite a demotion for these young women — their future has just been decided, and they had no say in it. Hopes of marriage to anyone for one of these rejected women is completely over. “She would not go into the king again...” These women must have felt a tremendous loss and sorrow. Whether or not they had actually wanted to be queen (remember that they had no choice in the matter — they had to come to the palace either way), they had been preparing for this moment for a year. Perhaps they had waited even longer

Suppose (to take a most improbable example) you decided, or were told and chose to believe, that the world was created by an invisible person who, despite all the evidence that he occasionally disliked us but was mostly indifferent, actually loved us and thought about us all the time. Suppose, piling absurdity upon improbability, you also decided, or were told, and chose to believe, that this same person decided to split himself in two and turn one part of himself into an ordinary person like you or me, and pay a visit to a desert tribe and get himself executed for treason; at which point he performed a conjuring trick, came back from the dead, vanished mysteriously but planned to return and punish all the bad people and make everything nice (though in the meantime, the bad people could go on getting away with it and the good people could go on getting buggered up by the bad people – that is, when they weren’t getting cancer, or run over, or bankrupt, or tortured, or flogged or worked like beasts or raped or killed in power struggles which were nothing to do with them). Suppose you were misguided enough to believe that lot. What would you do? Would you devote all your spare hours to finding someone who would disabuse you of these intensely peculiar delusions, so that you could finally sleep at night? Or would you go, once a week or more, to listen to someone telling you that you were quite right, and everything you believed was true, and, what’s more, if you ever stopped believing it, terrible things would happen to you even after you had died?

April 2 MORNING “He answered him to never a word.” — Matthew 27:14 HE had never been slow of speech when He could bless the sons of men, but He would not say a single word for Himself. “Never man spake like this Man,” and never man was silent like Him. Was this singular silence the index of His perfect self-sacrifice? Did it show that He would not utter a word to stay the slaughter of His sacred person, which He had dedicated as an offering for us? Had He so entirely surrendered Himself that He would not interfere in His own behalf, even in the minutest degree, but be bound and slain an unstruggling, uncomplaining victim? Was this silence a type of the defenselessness of sin? Nothing can be said in palliation or excuse of human guilt; and, therefore, He who bore its whole weight stood speechless before His judge. Is not patient silence the best reply to a gainsaying world? Calm endurance answers some questions infinitely more conclusively than the loftiest eloquence. The best apologists for Christianity in the early days were its martyrs. The anvil breaks a host of hammers by quietly bearing their blows. Did not the silent Lamb of God furnish us with a grand example of wisdom? Where every word was occasion for new blasphemy, it was the line of duty to afford no fuel for the flame of sin. The ambiguous and the false, the unworthy and mean, will ere long overthrow and confute themselves, and therefore the true can afford to be quiet, and finds silence to be its wisdom. Evidently our Lord, by His silence, furnished a remarkable fulfillment of prophecy. A long defence of Himself would have been contrary to Isaiah’s prediction. “He is led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth.” By His quiet He conclusively proved Himself to be the true Lamb of God. As such we salute Him this morning. Be with us, Jesus, and in the silence of our heart, let us hear the voice of Thy love.

Gold chuckled, remembering the true thing F. told her another time. In a place where people threw their kids away all the time just for existing, a parent who loved you because you were your could sometimes look and feel like God. "But remember," F. had said, "that even when their love feels divine, they're not God. They're your parent. It's okay if you still don't know what that means. I don't either, because I mean, you know how my story goes. We don't have many examples. But what is life for, if not figuring it out, abi?