Exist On Your Own Terms Quotes

I regret nothing. No woman with any self-respect would have done less. The question of good and evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I'm not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race.

What if the point of life has nothing to do with the creation of an ever-expanding region of control? What if the point is not to keep at bay all those people, beings, objects and emotions that we so needlessly fear? What if the point instead is to let go of that control? What if the point of life, the primary reason for existence, is to lie naked with your lover in a shady grove of trees? What if the point is to taste each other's sweat and feel the delicate pressure of finger on chest, thigh on thigh, lip on cheek? What if the point is to stop, then, in your slow movements together, and listen to the birdsong, to watch the dragonflies hover, to look at your lover's face, then up at the undersides of leaves moving together in the breeze? What if the point is to invite these others into your movement, to bring trees, wind, grass, dragonflies into your family and in so doing abandon any attempt to control them? What if the point all along has been to get along, to relate, to experience things on their own terms? What if the point is to feel joy when joyous, love when loving, anger when angry, thoughtful when full of thought? What if the point from the beginning has been to simply be?

Life is beautiful because it is insecure. Life is beautiful because there is death. Life is beautiful because it can be missed. If you cannot miss it, everything is forced upon you, then even life becomes an imprisonment. You will not be able to enjoy it. Even if you are ordered to be blissful, commanded to be free, then bliss and freedom both are gone. “Will existence protect me when I allow myself to let go?” Try! Only one thing I can say to you.… I am not talking to your fear, remember. Only one thing I can say to you—all those who have tried have found that it protects. But I am not talking to your fear. I am simply encouraging your adventure, that’s all. I am persuading, seducing you toward adventure. I am not talking to your fear. All those who have tried have found that infinite is the protection.

Who are we to say getting incested or abused or violated or any of those things can’t have their positive aspects in the long run? … You have to be careful of taking a knee-jerk attitude. Having a knee-jerk attitude to anything is a mistake, especially in the case of women, where it adds up to this very limited and condescending thing of saying they’re fragile, breakable things that can be destroyed easily. Everybody gets hurt and violated and broken sometimes. Why are women so special? Not that anybody ought to be raped or abused, nobody’s saying that, but that’s what is going on. What about afterwards? All I’m saying is there are certain cases where it can enlarge you or make you more of a complete human being, like Viktor Frankl. Think about the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust a good thing? No way. Does anybody think it was good that it happened? No, of course not. But did you read Viktor Frankl? Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning? It’s a great, great book, but it comes out of his experience. It’s about his experience in the human dark side. Now think about it, if there was no Holocaust, there’d be no Man’s Search for Meaning… . Think about it. Think about being degraded and brought within an inch of your life, for example. No one’s gonna say the sick bastards who did it shouldn’t be put in jail, but let’s put two things into perspective here. One is, afterwards she knows something about herself that she never knew before. What she knows is that the most totally terrible terrifying thing that she could ever have imagined happening to her has now happened, and she survived. She’s still here, and now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows. Look, totally terrible things happen… . Existence in life breaks people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time, trust me I know. I’ve been there. And this is the big difference, you and me here, cause this isn’t about politics or feminism or whatever, for you this is just ideas, you’ve never been there. I’m not saying nothing bad has ever happened to you, you’re not bad looking, I’m sure there’s been some sort of degradation or whatever come your way in life, but I’m talking Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning type violation and terror and suffering here. The real dark side. I can tell from just looking at you, you never. You wouldn’t even wear what you’re wearing, trust me. What if I told you it was my own sister that was raped? What if I told you a little story about a sixteen-year-old girl who went to the wrong party with the wrong guy and four of his buddies that ended up doing to her just about everything four guys could do to you in terms of violation? But if you could ask her if she could go into her head and forget it or like erase the tape of it happening in her memory, what do you think she’d say? Are you so sure what she’d say? What if she said that even after that totally negative as what happened was, at least now she understood it was possible. People can. Can see you as a thing. That people can see you as a thing, do you know what that means? Because if you really can see someone as a thing you can do anything to him. What would it be like to be able to be like that? You see, you think you can imagine it but you can’t. But she can. And now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows. This is what you wanted to hear, you wanted to hear about four drunk guys who knee-jerk you in the balls and make you bend over that you didn’t even know, that you never saw before, that you never did anything to, that don’t even know your name, they don’t even know your name to find out you have to choose to have a fucking name, you have no fucking idea, and what if I said that happened to ME? Would that make a difference?

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

When you're traumatized, your sense of self, your individuality, is beaten up. Your skin color, your background, your pain, your hope, your gender, your faith, it's all defiled. Those essential pieces of yourself are stolen. You, as a person, are emptied and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own. To continue to exist, as a whole person, you need to re-create, for yourself, an identity untouched by everything that's been used against you. You need to imagine and build a self out of elements that are not tainted. You need to remake yourself on your own terms.

Do not destroy the dignity of the other person. That person is as valuable in existence as you are. There is no need to impose your ideas on anybody. Who are you? What authority have you got to impose your ideas on others? You can share, you can tell, you can expose your heart. And if the other feels that something falls in tune with him, and chooses it, it is their decision, not your imposition. Revolutionaries

You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn’t have to see your life as any kind of triumph – his own had hardly been that – but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful.

In existence there is no inferiority complex anywhere, and as a corollary there is no superiority complex either.

You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training – if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they leaf to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance)... I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world… It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of the creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our significant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more significant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it.

In terms of experience, we want to make this (referring to the self) very pleasant. We want this to be blissful, ecstatic. But, as I said before, even being ecstatic is not goal by itself. If you are blissful by your own nature, then the important thing is that you are no more the issue. There are other issues in this existence; we can look at those. But if you are an issue, what other issue will you take in your hands? You will not touch anything. When I am enough trouble myself, why do I want to take on this one or that one? When I am no more an issue, now I am willing to dig into the whole existence and see what it is all about.

Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people. —Albert Einstein

Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and the observed: the person conducting the experiment — the observing consciousness — cannot be separated from the observed phenomena, and a different way of looking causes the observed phenomena to behave differently. If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each other. Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears. But whatever you perceive is only a kind of symbol, like an image in a dream. It is how your consciousness interprets and interacts with the molecular energy dance of the universe. This energy is the raw material of so-called physical reality. You see it in terms of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival. An infinite number of completely different interpretations, completely different worlds, is possible and, in fact, exists — all depending on the perceiving consciousness. Every being is a focal point of consciousness, and every such focal point creates its own world, although all those worlds are interconnected. There is a human world, an ant world, a dolphin world, and so on. There are countless beings whose consciousness frequency is so different from yours that you are probably unaware of their existence, as they are of yours. Highly conscious beings who are aware of their connectedness with the Source and with each other would inhabit a world that to you would appear as a heavenly realm — and yet all worlds are ultimately one.

Because to exist meant making copies and copies of your own DNA with less and less accuracy with time, to lose the spring in your skin, to inhale a poisonous gas that both allowed your next breath and exploded you from the inside at an insidiously slow pace. To exist was to give way to entropy. To live, in no uncertain terms, was to die.

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

Vincent van Gogh committed suicide when he was only thirty-three. It was impossible to live; he could not earn a single cent. His brother used to give him money, but just enough to exist, to survive. He needed money to paint—for the canvas and the colors and the brushes. So this was his arrangement: He used to get money every Sunday for one week, so every week for three days he would eat and for four days he would fast, so that money could be saved to purchase canvases, colors, and other things that he needed. To me, van Gogh’s fasting is far more significant than all the fasts that have been done by your so-called saints. This fasting has something beautiful in it, something spiritual in it. When your so-called saints go on a fast, it is a means; they are fasting so that they can reach heaven and enjoy all the heavenly joys. But van Gogh’s fasting has a totally different quality to it: It is his love to create. And

Up until this point Harry had lived by the admonition of E. T. Jaynes that if you were ignorant about a phenomenon, that was a fact about your own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself; that your uncertainty was a fact about you, not a fact about whatever you were uncertain about; that ignorance existed in the mind, not in reality; that a blank map did not correspond to a blank territory. There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms. A phenomenon could be mysterious to some particular person, but there could be no phenomena mysterious of themselves. To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.

Consider the death of the body in terms of God and His law. Your life, the life within you, encompasses everything within itself -- not only those whom you have lost but everything -- it includes God within itself. And if there is a God in your soul, then your soul is full, and there is no loss. And if there is a God, then there is love towards Him and towards people, towards those unfortunates who are in need of love. If you believe that everything that has happened to us in our life has been for our own good, then that which happens to us in our death is also for our own good. All of our misfortunes reveal to us the presence in us of the divine, of the immortal, of the self-sufficient which constitutes the foundation of our life. Death reveals to us fully our true Self. That which happens to man after his death we cannot and ought not to know. We could not live or do God's work if we knew it. If what awaits us after death were worse than what we meet with here on earth, we would prize this life even more than we do now, and there is no greater impediment to the fulfillment of God's will than concern for one's own life. If what awaits us after death were better than now, then we would scorn this life and make every effort to flee from it. We do not know what awaits us after death, but we do know one thing without any doubt, namely, that the spiritual Being into which, according to Christian teachings, I have passed over is indissoluble, eternal, free and omnipotent because this Being is God. I shall go into that Source of Love from which I came and into that which I feel is Love. 'Into thine hands I commit my spirit.' That is all we can say, yet this too is something. For the person who believes in the existence of Him from whom he came and to Whom he is going, this is all there is, and nothing more is needed.

There is point in your life when you come face to face with the reality that you cannot take another step on your own. For me, I had never experienced that point, but depression brought me there. I have slowly, painfully and continually been confronted by my brokenness. Coming to terms with the fact that I am broken has been at the center of my accepting my being loved. For me, now, there exists a sense of desperate need for what God brings to my spiritual and mental self. Without His voice I cannot cope with the darkness, but with His whisper of "you are My beloved", I can take a step each day away from the chasm. I am broken but not beyond mending, not beyond love. It has been this desperation that has opened a crevice in which I am seeing Him for the first time. He is why my soul can find some peace even when my mind is dark and numb. It is this love that continually has brought me back from the edge of the impostor to the honesty of my broken, inner self

Resting is doing You don’t need to be busy. You don’t need to justify your existence in terms of productivity. Rest is an essential part of survival. An essential part of us. An essential part of being the animals we are. When a dog lies in the sun I imagine it does it without guilt, because as far as I can tell dogs seem more in tune with their own needs. As I grow older, I think that resting might actually be the main point of life. To sit down passively, inside or outside, and merely absorb things—the tick of a clock, a cloud passing by, the distant hum of traffic, a bird singing—can feel like an end in itself. It can actually feel and be more meaningful than a lot of the stuff we are conditioned to see as productive. Just as we need pauses between notes for music to sound good, and just as we need punctuation in a sentence for it to be coherent, we should see rest and reflection and passivity—and even sitting on the sofa—as an intrinsic and essential part of life that is needed for the whole to make sense.

When you think of the purpose of your existence, you think in terms of daily waking life, but you also work at your purpose in these other dream dimensions, and you are then in communication with other portions of your own entity, at work at endeavors quite as valid as those you are about in waking life.

Victor Frankl: By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

Want me to say it? Want me to confess what makes me an actual felon and reserves me a choice spot in hell?” “Please, Alexandria Patra,” Preton said, “tell me all your regrets.” Her eyes narrowed. “I taught children to surrender their developing minds to concepts like the greater good or the good of society which can’t exist in any form in this world without actual kids being trampled underneath their untouchable banners.” Pointing at her own chest, she added, “I taught children that in order to live up to those ‘higher’ ideals they must be obedient—to others, must sacrifice their dreams—to the needs of others. I taught them it was more important to be a part of a group than to stand on their own judgment. I told the non-conforming kids they should feel guilty for wanting to live on their own terms.” Alexa swept a hand forward, pointing it at Preton. “I then delivered every ego-stripped, dream-crushed child to the power mongers of the world like you, who will use this universally accepted mirage of morality to control them.

The God Source of life is a huge energy that has no personality as you would know it in human terms It expresses personality through all things Your own existence is expressing the personality of God As are the rolling waves, the stars, and the trees It is a mighty force in the Universe which is bringing creation to wholeness A perfection to life

HOW BENDING REALITY FEELS Bending reality feels almost magical. Everything seems to “click.” You’re working, but it doesn’t feel like work because you love what you’re doing. When I’m in this state, I almost feel as if work doesn’t exist. Plus, intuition and insights seem to come easily, out of the blue. Maybe this is because your mind is focused so intensely on your vision that you’re alert to everything that will help achieve it and you’re in a happy, joyous state that opens you up to creativity. Sometimes it seems as if the right people, coincidences, and opportunities come to you, nudging and pushing you toward your goals. Is this the mystical law of attraction? Or is it what’s known as the brain’s reticular activating system? To me it doesn’t matter. It’s a model of reality that serves me well.

At the root of every excuse is fear. As Wayne Dyer points out in his book Excuses Begone!, there are really only two emotions: fear and love. Here's how I see it: If we were coming from a place of love - for ourselves, for others, for our purpose, for our existence as a representation of the divine - then there would be no place for excuses (that is, fear). The excuses are simply a way to put a label on fear.

[I]n the present moment, when (your mind) remains in its own condition without constructing anything, Awareness at that moment in itself is quite ordinary. And when you look into yourself in this way nakedly (without any discursive thoughts), Since there is only this pure observing, there will be found a lucid clarity without anyone being there who is the observer; Only a naked manifest awareness is present. (This awareness) is empty and immaculately pure, not being created by anything whatsoever. It is authentic and unadulterated, without any duality of clarity and emptiness. It is not permanent and yet it is not created by anything. However, it is not a mere nothingness or something annihilated because it is lucid and present. It does not exist as a single entity because it is present and clear in terms of being many. (On the other hand) it is not created as a multiplicity of things because it is inseparable and of a single flavor. This inherent self-awareness does not derive from anything outside itself. This is the real introduction to the actual condition of things. —Padmasambhava13

Your Godliness speaks through your creaturehood. It is not debased and no entities took upon themselves the disreputable descent into matter. Your souls are not slumming. You are not the garbage heap of the universe. You are yourselves becoming and you are creating, in your way, a unique reality in which, in your terms, each moment is miraculous; in which your own identities are forever original and unduplicated..." "You are not cosmic princesses and princes who come down here to immerse yourselves in lives of sorrow and degradation; who wear physical bodies of great weight, gross and sinful. You are spirits who express yourselves through the miraculous joy of flesh. Who bring to the Universe a reality unknown, in your terms. Who wear as your badge of identity, joy and exultation; and those that tell you that physical life is evil, do not know what they are speaking." "As I have told you before, those who speak to you in terms of guilt; ignore them. Those who tell you that to be spiritual is not to be physical do not understand the great physical-spiritual nature of your being. They have not dreamed in their minds. They have not sparkled in themselves like stars and so experiencing night they think that existence is dark." "Open up your eyes and perceive your reality and that will lead you to other realities. You have legs; use them. You have consciousness; use it. You have minds; use them, and use your joy and smile. You know what I am about to do now, but for you, listen to the vitality of your own being. Be alert to your own identity and let it ring throughout the reality of your own being and it will lead you to what you want to do and don't fear shadows.

According to the book Good without God by Greg M. Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, the fourth biggest life adherence in the world today after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism is now humanism. Humanism is the idea that we do not need religion in order to be good. It differs from atheism in the sense that humanists believe that there is a “God,” but He’s certainly not the judgmental, angry being that many religious texts make Him out to be. Instead, to a humanist, “God” might be the universe, or the connectedness of life on Earth, or spirit. Humanism is opening up a new spiritual path for people who want to reject the Brules of religion but who don’t embrace atheism. One billion humanists now exist on the planet, and their numbers are growing.

You must give up your right to decide what is good and evil on your own terms. That is a hard pill to swallow—choosing to live only in me. To do that, you must know me enough to trust me and learn to rest in my inherent goodness.” Sarayu turned toward Mack; at least that was his impression. “Mackenzie, evil is a word we use to describe the absence of good, just as we use the word darkness to describe the absence of light or death to describe the absence of life. Both evil and darkness can be understood only in relation to light and good; they do not have any actual existence. I am light and I am good. I am love and there is no darkness in me. Light and Good actually exist. So, removing yourself from me will plunge you into darkness. Declaring independence will result in evil because apart from me, you can draw only upon yourself. That is death because you have separated yourself from me: Life.

Be calm! I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous." "Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies. Begone, or let us try our strength in a fight, in which one must fall." "How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me. The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge. These bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than your fellow-beings. If the multitude of mankind knew of my existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction. Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies. I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power to recompense me, and deliver them from an evil which it only remains for you to make so great that not only you and your family, but thousands of others, shall be swallowed up in the whirlwinds of its rage. Let your compassion be moved, and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale: when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve. But hear me. The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man! Yet I ask you not to spare me: listen to me; and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.

Look, you and I are in the same boat,” he said softly. “We’re loners in the crew. Unlike Bailey, we don’t want to hook-up for good. We just want to let off some steam. We could be friends with benefits.” “Fuck buddies, huh?” “I like your term better,” Vaughn said, giving a flash of anger at the men still eyeing us. “I might need to leave you, so I can kick their asses.” “I think I can manage without you.” “Was that a masturbation hint?” “No, but you bring up a very good point. I could blow off steam on my own.” Vaughn finished his beer then smiled. “I’ll give you oral. No vibrator in the world can say the same.” Holding his gaze, I was silent until finishing my beer. Finally, I gave Vaughn a smile and nodded. “One night of empty awesome sex. Tomorrow, we act like acquaintances, not even friends. I want to be someone you barely remember exists.” “No problem, gingersnap. Do you like Harleys? Mine really likes snuggling between a hot girl’s thighs.” “Stop while you’re ahead.” Standing up, Vaughn held out a hand. I ignored his gesture and stood up on my own. When I noticed the two guys still watching us, I flipped them off before taking Vaughn’s arm. “Like they ever had a chance,” I muttered and Vaughn’s smile grew. “Takes a special man to talk a girl out of abstinence.” “Whatever you need to tell yourself.

Adam threw himself into the middle of the pentagram. Curiously, there was no sound here, not in any reasonable way. The end of Blue's cry was muffled, as if it had been shoved under water. The air was still around him. It was as if time itself had become a sluggish thing, barely existing. The only true sensation he felt was that of electricity--the barely perceptible tingly of a lightning storm. Neeve had said that it wasn't about the killing, that it was about sacrifice. It was obvious that stymied Whelk completely. But Adam knew what sacrifice meant, more than he thought Whelk or Neeve had ever had to know. He knew it wasn't about killing someone or drawing a shape made of bird bones. When it came down to it, Adam had been making sacrifices for a very long time, and he knew what the hardest one was. On his terms, or not at all. He wasn't afraid. Being Adam Parrish was a complicated thing, a wonder of muscles and organs, synapses and nerves. He was a miracle of moving parts, a study in survival. The most important thing to Adam Parrish, though, had always been free will, the ability to be his own master. This was the important thing. It had always been the most important thing. This was what it was to be Adam. Kneeling in the middle of the pentagram, digging his fingers into the soft, mossy turf, Adam said, "I sacrifice myself." Gansey's cry was agonized. "Adam, no! No!" On his terms, or not at all. I will be your hands, Adam thought. I will be your eyes. There was a sound like a breaker being thrown. A crackle. Beneath them, the ground began to roll.

Eventually the term ended and I was on the windy mountain road to camp, still slightly worried that I’d made a wrong turn in life. My doubt, however, was short-lived. The camp delivered on its promise, concentrating all the idylls of youth: beauty manifest in lakes, mountains, people; richness in experience, conversation, friendships. Nights during a full moon, the light flooded the wilderness, so it was possible to hike without a headlamp. We would hit the trail at two A.M., summiting the nearest peak, Mount Tallac, just before sunrise, the clear, starry night reflected in the flat, still lakes spread below us. Snuggled together in sleeping bags at the peak, nearly ten thousand feet up, we weathered frigid blasts of wind with coffee someone had been thoughtful enough to bring. And then we would sit and watch as the first hint of sunlight, a light tinge of day blue, would leak out of the eastern horizon, slowly erasing the stars. The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day’s blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered—pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.

Expansion or Extinction Identity is selfishness, heritage is selfishness, culture is selfishness, that is, the way these constructs have been sustained in society all this time. All this time things have been going on like this - my identity versus all others - my heritage versus all others - my culture versus all others. And such behavior has only fostered a paradigm of division. This must change - from division to unison. And how will it happen? We gotta perform a complete overhaul of notions of identity, heritage and culture. We gotta turn each of them from a prison into a path. In simple terms, we gotta humanize them all - we gotta make them more about people than anything else - more about the people of the present and future than those of the past. We gotta make them about life, not habits, beliefs and rituals. One may wonder, aren't habits, beliefs and rituals also life! No they ain't - they are part of life, a microscopic part at that, but not life itself. So first and foremost, feel, think and walk past habits, beliefs and rituals, of your ancestors as well as your own. Expansion, expansion, expansion - only way forward is expansion. If you are afraid that your ancestors would be offended at your expansion, then let me tell you this. It's better to have no ancestor than to have one offended at your expansion. All our ancestors made this mistake. They were all against expansion. Make not the same mistake my friend. Expand yourself, and encourage the children towards further expansion. Encourage them to surpass you, instead of sentencing them to the prison of your own beliefs and notions. Without expansion there ain't gonna be no earth left, that is, one fit for human existence. And to be honest, the day is not far when planet earth will be absolutely unfit for human existence, both psychologically and physically.

I’m not sure I see your point.” “Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?” “Get where?” “Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly like—” eloquently, he batted at the air as if at a blown leaf. “But—maybe not so random and impersonal as all that, if you get me.” “Sorry but I’m not really appreciating your point here.” “You don’t need a point. The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own. Because—” up went the batwing eyebrow—“well, if you didn’t take picture from museum, and Sascha didn’t steal it back, and I didn’t think of claiming reward—well, wouldn’t all those dozens of other paintings remain missing too? Forever maybe? Wrapped in brown paper? Still shut in that apartment? No one to look at them? Lonely and lost to the world? Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?” “I think this goes more to the idea of ‘relentless irony’ than ‘divine providence.’ ” “Yes—but why give it a name? Can’t they both be the same thing?

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past. So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Yehuda has seen, up close, the effect of such antisocial divisions on traumatized vets. “If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America’s ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.

One of the positive side-effects of maintaining a very high degree of awareness of death is that it will prepare the individual to such an extent that, when the individual actually faces death, he or she will be in a better position to maintain his or her presence of mind. Especially in Tantric Buddhism, it is considered that the state of mind which one experiences at the point of death is extremely subtle and, because of the subtlety of the level of that consciousness, it also has a great power and impact upon one’s mental continuum. In Tantric practices we find a lot of emphasis placed on reflections upon the process of death, so that the individual at the time of death not only retains his or her presence of mind, but also is in a position to utilize that subtle state of consciousness effectively towards the realization of the path. From the Tantric perspective, the entire process of existence is explained in terms of the three stages known as ‘death’, the ‘intermediate state’ and ‘rebirth’. All of these three stages of existence are seen as states or manifestations of the consciousness and the energies that accompany or propel the consciousness, so that the intermediate state and rebirth are nothing other than various levels of the subtle consciousness and energy. An example of such fluctuating states can be found in our daily existence, when during the 24-hour day we go through a cycle of deep sleep, the waking period and the dream state. Our daily existence is in fact characterized by these three stages. As death becomes something familiar to you, as you have some knowledge of its processes and can recognize its external and internal indications, you are prepared for it. According to my own experience, I still have no confidence that at the moment of death I will really implement all these practices for which I have prepared. I have no guarantee! Sometimes when I think about death I get some kind of excitement. Instead of fear, I have a feeling of curiosity and this makes it much easier for me to accept death. Of course, my only burden if I die today is, ‘Oh, what will happen to Tibet? What about Tibetan culture? What about the six million Tibetan people’s rights?’ This is my main concern. Otherwise, I feel almost no fear of death. In my daily practice of prayer I visualize eight different deity yogas and eight different deaths. Perhaps when death comes all my preparation may fail. I hope not! I think these practices are mentally very helpful in dealing with death. Even if there is no next life, there is some benefit if they relieve fear. And because there is less fear, one can be more fully prepared. If you are fully prepared then, at the moment of death, you can retain your peace of mind. I think at the time of death a peaceful mind is essential no matter what you believe in, whether it is Buddhism or some other religion. At the moment of death, the individual should not seek to develop anger, hatred and so on. I think even non-believers see that it is better to pass away in a peaceful manner, it is much happier. Also, for those who believe in heaven or some other concept, it is also best to pass away peacefully with the thought of one’s own God or belief in higher forces. For Buddhists and also other ancient Indian traditions, which accept the rebirth or karma theory, naturally at the time of death a virtuous state of mind is beneficial.

In physical terms, we know that every human action can be reduced to a series of impersonal events: Genes are transcribed, neurotransmitters bind to their receptors, muscle fibers contract, and John Doe pulls the trigger on his gun. But for our commonsense notions of human agency and morality to hold, it seems that our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them. Consequently, some scientists and philosophers hope that chance or quantum uncertainty can make room for free will. For instance, the biologist Martin Heisenberg has observed that certain processes in the brain, such as the opening and closing of ion channels and the release of synaptic vesicles, occur at random, and cannot therefore be determined by environmental stimuli. Thus, much of our behavior can be considered truly “self-generated”—and therein, he imagines, lies a basis for human freedom. But how do events of this kind justify the feeling of free will? “Self-generated” in this sense means only that certain events originate in the brain. If my decision to have a second cup of coffee this morning was due to a random release of neurotransmitters, how could the indeterminacy of the initiating event count as the free exercise of my will? Chance occurrences are by definition ones for which I can claim no responsibility. And if certain of my behaviors are truly the result of chance, they should be surprising even to me. How would neurological ambushes of this kind make me free? Imagine what your life would be like if all your actions, intentions, beliefs, and desires were randomly “self-generated” in this way. You would scarcely seem to have a mind at all. You would live as one blown about by an internal wind. Actions, intentions, beliefs, and desires can exist only in a system that is significantly constrained by patterns of behavior and the laws of stimulus-response. The possibility of reasoning with other human beings—or, indeed, of finding their behaviors and utterances comprehensible at all—depends on the assumption that their thoughts and actions will obediently ride the rails of a shared reality. This is true as well when attempting to understand one’s own behavior. In the limit, Heisenberg’s “self-generated” mental events would preclude the existence of any mind at all. The indeterminacy specific to quantum mechanics offers no foothold: If my brain is a quantum computer, the brain of a fly is likely to be a quantum computer, too. Do flies enjoy free will? Quantum effects are unlikely to be biologically salient in any case. They play a role in evolution because cosmic rays and other high-energy particles cause point mutations in DNA (and the behavior of such particles passing through the nucleus of a cell is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics). Evolution, therefore, seems unpredictable in principle.13 But few neuroscientists view the brain as a quantum computer. And even if it were, quantum indeterminacy does nothing to make the concept of free will scientifically intelligible. In the face of any real independence from prior events, every thought and action would seem to merit the statement “I don’t know what came over me.” If determinism is true, the future is set—and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior. And to the extent that the law of cause and effect is subject to indeterminism—quantum or otherwise—we can take no credit for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will.

only the dead keep secrets." "it is not easy. Taking a life, even when we knew it was required." "most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I'd get nowhere at all." "a flaw of humanity. The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness." "someone always gains, just like someone always loses." "most women are less in love with the partners they choose than they are simply desperate for their approval, starving for their devotion. They want most often to be touched as no one else can touch them, and most of them inaccurately assume this requires romance. But the moment we realize we can feel fulfilled without carrying the burdens of belonging to another, that we can experience rapture without being someone's other half, and therefore beholden to their weaknesses, to their faults and failures and their many insufferable fractures, then we're free, aren't we? " " enough, for once, to feel, and nothing else. " " there was no stopping what one person could believe. " " I noticed that if I did certain things, said things in certain way, or held her eye contact while I did them, I could make her... Soften toward me. " " I think I've already decided what I'm going to do, and I just hope it's the right thing. But it isn't, or maybe it is. But I suppose it doesn't matter, because I've already started, and looking back won't help. " " luck is a matter of probabilities. " "you want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, make you feel better? It doesn't. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don't you see it's because we're riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal, that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn. " " ask yourself where power comes from, if you can't see the source, don't trust it. " " an assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether he lived or died as a result of his own choice? Unimportant. He didn't raise an army didn't fight for good, didn't interfere much with the queen's other evils. It was whether or not he could live with his own decision because life was the only thing that truly matters. " " the truest truth : mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn't buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In term of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself. " " humans were mostly sensible animals. They knew the dangers of erratic behavior. It was a chronic condition, survival. My intention is as same as others. Stand taller, think smarter, be better. " " she couldn't remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn't anymore. " " conservative of energy meant that there must be dozens of people in the world who didn't exist because of she did. " " what replace feelings when there were none to be had? " " the absence of something was never as effective as the present of something. " "To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight." "apology accepted. Forgiveness, however, declined." "there cannot be success without failure. No luck without unluck." "no life without death?" "Everything collapse, you will, too. You will, soon.

{Excerpt from a message from one of the Cherokee chiefs - Onitositaii, commonly known as Old Tassle} ... 'If, therefore, a bare march, or reconnoitering a country is sufficient reason to ground a claim to it, we shall insist upon transposing the demand, and your relinquishing your settlements on the western waters and removing one hundred miles back towards the east, whither some of our warriors advanced against you in the course of last year's campaign. Let us examine the facts of your present eruption into our country, and we shall discover your pretentions on that ground. What did you do? You marched into our territories with a superior force; our vigilance gave us no timely notice of your manouvres [sic]; your numbers far exceeded us, and we fled to the stronghold of our extensive woods, there to secure our women and children. Thus, you marched into our towns; they were left to your mercy; you killed a few scattered and defenseless individuals, spread fire and desolation wherever you pleased, and returned again to your own habitations. If you meant this, indeed, as a conquest you omitted the most essential point; you should have fortified the junction of the Holstein and Tennessee rivers, and have thereby conquered all the waters above you. But, as all are fair advantages during the existence of a state of war, it is now too late for us to suffer for your mishap of generalship! Again, were we to inquire by what law or authority you set up a claim, I answer, none! Your laws extend not into our country, nor ever did. You talk of the law of nature and the law of nations, and they are both against you. Indeed, much has been advanced on the want of what you term civilization among the Indians; and many proposals have been made to us to adopt your laws, your religion, your manners, and your customs. But, we confess that we do not yet see the propriety, or practicability of such a reformation, and should be better pleased with beholding the good effect of these doctrines in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them, or reading your papers to us upon such subjects. You say: Why do not the Indians till the ground and live as we do? May we not, with equal propriety, ask, Why the white people do not hunt and live as we do? You profess to think it no injustice to warn us not to kill our deer and other game for the mere love of waste; but it is very criminal in our young men if they chance to kill a cow or a hog for their sustenance when they happen to be in your lands. We wish, however, to be at peace with you, and to do as we would be done by. We do not quarrel with you for killing an occasional buffalo, bear or deer on our lands when you need one to eat; but you go much farther; your people hunt to gain a livelihood by it; they kill all our game; our young men resent the injury, and it is followed by bloodshed and war. This is not a mere affected injury; it is a grievance which we equitably complain of and it demands a permanent redress. The Great God of Nature has placed us in different situations. It is true that he has endowed you with many superior advantages; but he has not created us to be your slaves. We are a separate people! He has given each their lands, under distinct considerations and circumstances: he has stocked yours with cows, ours with buffaloe; yours with hogs, ours with bear; yours with sheep, ours with deer. He has indeed given you an advantage in this, that your cattle are tame and domestic while ours are wild and demand not only a larger space for range, but art to hunt and kill them; they are, nevertheless, as much our property as other animals are yours, and ought not to be taken away without consent, or for something equivalent.' Those were the words of the Indians. But they were no binding on these whites, who were living beyond words, claims ...

Wittgenstein uses this beetle analogy to suggest that the felt states and sensations that occur in a person’s mind; things like smell, pain, love, happiness, sadness, and so on are things that no one can communicate sufficiently enough to share and reveal their experiences to others. I can never see your beetle, and you can never see mine. When we attempt to think and communicate about the beetle, though, the word has to be a word that everyone understands and can be taught for the word to have any meaning. According to Wittgenstein and many others, language is entirely social. This theory is known as the Private Language Argument, which proposes that no language can be understandable if it is solely to one individual. Rather, language is only formed through shared use amongst a community of others. Thus, the sensation of something might exist exclusively to one’s self, but it can never be understood in terms of language exclusively to one’s self. Meaning, we can never know if anyone experiences anything the same way we experience it, even if everyone talks about it in the same words. We can only assume. Arguably, trying to rationalize, communicate, and comprehend the mental experience of a sensation as it actually is, becomes inconceivable after a certain point. For example, one could say that fresh cut grass smells good, but when asked what it smells like, they would have to go on to say things like it smells natural or like the season of spring. If then asked, what that smells like, perhaps if one tried hard enough, they could come with a few other smells to compare it to, but they would eventually and inevitably reach the limits of language. There would be a final question of what it smells like that would have no answer. A sensation beyond words that no one besides the smeller could know for sure what is like. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein writes when referring to the notion of subjective experience and that which exceeds language and logical understanding. Beyond the suggestions of language and shared meaning, arguably what is most thought-provoking about all of this is the notion that we can never know what it feels like to be anyone else other than our self. We can never know what the world might look, taste, smell, sound, and feel like from outside our own heads. We can never verify what anyone else’s color blue looks like, or what anyone else’s punch in the arm feels like, or what anyone else’s sense of love or happiness is like. We are all locked inside our minds, yelling out to each other in an attempt to find out, but never capable of entering anyone else’s to find out for sure. Even if the framework, structure, and wiring of each of our brains are mostly identical, the unknowable conscious psychological layer on top of it all transmutes the experience of neurological occurrences into something abstract, distanced enough from the measurable and communicable to ever know exactly what any of it is, where it comes from, and how it might change in different heads. Ultimately, no matter the philosophical stance or scientific theory, it is fair to argue that at a minimum no one can or will ever know what it means to have navigated and experienced this universe in the way that you have and will. Each moment that you experience, a particular sense or image of the world with your particular conditions of consciousness, is forever yours exclusively, withholding the mystery of what it means to actually be you for all of eternity. Perhaps we all feel and experience in nearly identical ways, or perhaps we all feel and experience in very dissimilar ways. Your version of blue, your sensation of pain, your experience of love, could perhaps be its only version of blue, its only version of pain, and its only version of love to ever exist in the entire universe. The point is, we don’t know because each of us holds the answer that no one can ever access.

In the past, when dogs’ functions were mostly rural, it was accepted that they were intrinsically messy and needed to be managed on their own terms. Today, by contrast, many pet dogs live in circumscribed, urban environments and are expected to be simultaneously better behaved than the average human child and as self-reliant as adults. As if these new obligations were not enough, many dogs still manifest the adaptations that suited them for their original functions—traits that we now demand they cast away as if they had never existed. The collie who herds sheep is the shepherd’s best friend; the pet collie who tries to herd children and chases bicycles is an owner’s nightmare. The new, unrealistic standards to which many humans hold their dogs have arisen from one of several fundamental misconceptions about what dogs are and what they have been designed to do.

Remember and Share - The Hook Model helps the product designer generate an initial prototype for a habit-forming technology. It also helps uncover potential weaknesses in an existing product’s habit-forming potential. - Once a product is built, Habit Testing helps uncover product devotees, discover which product elements are habit forming (if any), and why those aspects of your product change user behavior. Habit Testing includes three steps: identify, codify, and modify. - First, dig into the data to identify how people are behaving and using the product. - Next, codify these findings in search of habitual users. To generate new hypotheses, study the actions and paths taken by devoted users. - Lastly, modify the product to influence more users to follow the same path as your habitual users, and then evaluate results and continue to modify as needed. - Keen observation of one's own behavior can lead to new insights and habit-forming product opportunities. - Identifying areas where a new technology makes cycling through the Hook Model faster, more frequent or more rewarding provides fertile ground for developing new habit-forming products. - Nascent behaviors — new behaviors that few people see or do, and yet ultimately fulfill a mass-market need — can inform future breakthrough habit-forming opportunities. - New interfaces lead to transformative behavior change and business opportunities.   *** Do This Now Refer to the answers you came up with in the “Do This Now” section in chapter five to complete the following exercises: - Perform Habit Testing, as described in this chapter, to identify the steps users take toward long-term engagement. - Be aware of your behaviors and emotions for the next week as you use everyday products. Ask yourself: - What triggered me to use these products? Was I prompted externally or through internal means? - Am I using these products as intended? - How might these products improve their on-boarding funnels, re-engage users through additional external triggers, or encourage users to invest in their services? - Speak with three people outside your social circle to discover which apps occupy the first screen on their mobile devices. Ask them to use these apps as they normally would and see if you uncover any unnecessary or nascent behaviors. - Brainstorm five new interfaces that could introduce opportunities or threats to your business.

How about first ensuring that people within in a twenty-mile radius like the food before worrying about scaling the restaurant? That is, see if the business will work at all. For example, a company that I advise called Tutor Universe provides tutoring service via smartphones. Think of it as Uber for tutoring. The long-term plan was that students could ask questions about any topic and receive help in under fifteen minutes. However, in the beginning, a critical mass of tutors for every subject didn’t yet exist. Many startups face just such a chicken-or-egg challenge: If you had enough tutors, you’d attract enough students. If you had enough students, you’d attract enough tutors. What do you do when you’re faced with this kind of challenge? The answer is simple: you cheat! You use your own employees to answer questions, and hire tutors in the Philippines (highly educated, English speaking, and cheap) until you can reach a critical mass of a marketplace. Skeptics and inexperienced entrepreneurs might object, “You can’t scale if you have to use employees or hire tutors, because they are too expensive.” This might be true, but it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you establish three key points: you can get the word out, students are willing to install an app, and they will pay for help. Your priority, in short, is proving that people will use your product at all. If they won’t, then it won’t matter if you can’t scale. If they will, then you will figure out a way to scale. I’ve never seen a startup die because it couldn’t scale fast enough. I’ve seen hundreds of startups die because people simply refused to embrace their product.

The aim of the sermon—forcefully indicated by its concluding verses—is to help people come to hopeful and realistic terms with their lives here on earth by clarifying, in concrete terms, the nature of the kingdom into which they are now invited by Jesus’ call: “Repent, for life in the kingdom of the heavens is now one of your options.” The separate parts of the discourse are to be interpreted in the light of this single purpose. They are not to be read as one disconnected statement after another. One must discern the overall plan of life within which the separate parts of the discourse make sense. So far from being additional laws to crush us or show us we can’t make it on our own (of course we can’t!), the separate parts are distinct perspectives on the sweet life of love and power, of truth and grace, that those who count on Jesus can even now lead in his kingdom. “The law came by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus the Anointed” (John 1:17). His teachings illustrate how those alive in the kingdom can live, through the days and hours of their ordinary existence, on their way to the full world of God.

I see professional advisors cold-call perfect strangers rather than do a call rotation for existing clients. I see advisors do prospecting seminars rather than a client advisory council or client appreciation event, and I see advisors run advertising campaigns rather than network with existing strategic allies and other professional influencers. “Spray and pray” marketing strategies are flawed on so many levels. Why, then, do so many advisors still attempt them? The reason for this is simple; nurturing existing relationships and other tried and true strategies can be boring and rarely results in instant gratification. Too many advisors want to find the next “new idea”, something with some “sizzle”, and, as a result, are continually searching for and dabbling with concepts that ultimately have minimal impact. It’s not unlike investing. How many times have you seen someone try to hit a home-run with a high-risk investment opportunity rather than stick with a methodical long-term approach? It’s not just money that compounds. As I’ve said before, discipline compounds, too. You have to be patient and let your efforts gather momentum. Too many advisors get themselves into the proverbial “Red Zone” and, rather than stick to the plan and see it through, they self-sabotage by abandoning the fundamentals and trying something new. Neglect also compounds. If we neglect our existing relationships it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be lured away and we’ll have to throw our own Hail Mary. Don’t deviate from your process. Identify the most fundamentally sound and proven trust-building activities, stick with them and tune out all the other noise. It’s much more effective to strengthen and nurture existing relationships over the long haul, rather than perpetually trying to start new ones. The prospecting treadmill is draining and you are building a business that is chaotic and unfocused. Relationships are proprietary and are a big part of the equity that you are building in your business.

Here are several rules that worked for me as I grew from a wild amateur into an erratic semiprofessional and finally into a calm professional trader. You may change this list to suit your personality. Decide that you are in the market for the long haul—that is, you want to be a trader even 20 years from now. Learn as much as you can. Read and listen to experts, but keep a degree of healthy skepticism about everything. Ask questions, and do not accept experts at their word. Do not get greedy and rush to trade—take your time to learn. The markets will be there, offering more good opportunities in the months and years ahead. Develop a method for analyzing the market—that is, “If A happens, then B is likely to happen.” Markets have many dimensions—use several analytic methods to confirm trades. Test everything on historical data and then in the markets, using real money. Markets keep changing—you need different tools for trading bull and bear markets and transitional periods as well as a method for telling the difference (see the sections on technical analysis). Develop a money management plan. Your first goal must be long-term survival; your second goal, a steady growth of capital; and your third goal, making high profits. Most traders put the third goal first and are unaware that goals 1 and 2 exist (see Section 9, “Risk Management”). Be aware that a trader is the weakest link in any trading system. Go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous to learn how to avoid losses or develop your own method for cutting out impulsive trades. Winners think, feel, and act differently than losers. You must look within yourself, strip away your illusions, and change your old ways of being, thinking, and acting. Change is hard, but if you want to be a professional trader, you have to work on changing and developing your personality.

Because of the constant media surveillance, I could not venture out to see the countless tributes that mourners laid down in front of the zoo. But all the items were collected and stored safely, and we now display a lovely memorial selection. The public response to Steve’s death would have overwhelmed him most of all--the kind thoughts, prayers, sympathy, and tears. I wasn’t facing this grief on my own. So many people from around the world were trying to come to terms with it as well. The process seemed particularly difficult for children who had not had the opportunity to experience the circle of life as Bindi had. I felt it was important to get a message out to them. When your hero dies, everything he stood for does not end. Everything he stood for must continue. There was never a doubt in my mind that I’d keep working toward stopping the destruction of our environment and wildlife that was spiraling out of control. There were so many triumphs that Steve had already worked so hard for. I sat down with Wes. “First, we’re going to work on everything Steve wanted to achieve,” I said. “Then we’ll move on to everything that we were collectively working toward. And finally, I want to continue with my own goals, in terms of our conservation work.” We strategized about the expansion of the zoo. I didn’t want to just maintain the zoo as it was, I wanted to follow Steve’s plans for the future. I felt that I was still having this wonderful, cheeky, competitive relationship with Steve. Wes and I took the stacks of plans, blueprints, and manila folders from Steve’s desk. I assembled them and laid them out on a conference table. “This was Steve’s plan for Australia Zoo over the next ten years,” I said. “I want to do it in five.” We would secure more land. I remember the first two acres we ever bought to enlarge the zoo, how Steve and I sat with our arms around each other, looking at the property next door and dreaming. Now we were negotiating for an additional five hundred acres of forestry land. This tract would join the existing zoo property with the five hundred acres of our conservation property, bringing our total to fifteen hundred acres at Australia Zoo. This winter we christened Steve’s Whale One, a whale-watching excursion boat that will realize another of his long-held dreams. He always wanted to expand the experience of the zoo to include whales. Steve’s Whale One is a way for people to see firsthand some of the most amazing creatures on earth. The humpbacks in Australian waters approach whale-watching boats with curiosity and openness. It is a delightful experience, and one that I am confident will work to help inspire people and end the inhumane practice of whaling.

There's nothing as useful as the truth, in terms of ruining anyone's day, week, month, year, decade, or life… Unless, of course, you own a remotely operated automatic flamethrower-drone-tower and have some marinated pork-chops on your person, to lure unsuspecting dogs in close proximity to it, but since dogs don’t really have lives - by using this specific method of torture, you can only improve the remaining few seconds of their existence.

The twanging of life Thirteenth part : The essence of the beauty is unity in variety We are only able to contempt and treat people in a bad way, when we forget that the other person belongs to us and to the society as well as we too, when we only forget that in the form of doing the action, there is a strong relationship between the subject and the object so avarice, violence, egoism, sadness and looking at others as pawns of market's chess to get money arise from losing their unity, from forgetting their spirit of cooperation and collaboration and then starting perceiving others in terms of their individual differences. A humanitarian action that isn't intended to be done can make a huge storm of humanity, a single word can give people the feeling of unity, just like every time when a person passes by you and you say for him "السلام عليكم" both of you start to feel like there is a candle within both of you turning into clemency, the more love, the more mercy and the more salaam you show on your face the more light is reflected form that candle, you should start thinking that, greeting the people is proclamations of peace, every time you say "السلام عليكم" to a stranger your heart admits over and over again that we are all united, what I am trying to say is, in your heart's deepest place where the onus of your ego are fallen to pieces and the enigma of your soul is infiltrated, you find the awareness isn't different in any way from what all others may find, the mutuality of Sudanese people is appeared as the sun in the morning but only when our own humanness is surpassed our own dishumanness by accepting that we are all one in the fact that we are all made of diversified differences. We are all equal in the fact that our own society is made by different tribes, we are all the same in the fact that we will never have the same colour, life, thinking, dreams, feelings and luxury, we are united by the reality that Sudan is able to combine all colours, all cultures, all tribes and all of us in the fact that every one believes his tribe and culture are distinguished and individual, we are compatible in the reality that we are all recaptured to this country by the same history, the same conditions of living and the longest river in the world that all of them together give us a light to shine the darkness that covers the sky to allow for us to walk as one hand in the right direction, we don't share the colours but we share the blood, we aren't equal in existence of happiness but we drink River Nile's water that keeps us alive, we are different in existence of tribes but we share the same air that is blended by our breath, so I am you as much as I am me and you are me as much as I am you. Finally swingeing internal ructions and overmuch narcissism of a society devastate the tissue of its unity, not the differences of that society, Lord Robin said that unity begins at home within family is the strength to survive and win the fight of life.

Our culture has many ways of forcing this particular delusion upon us, especially through the manipulation of language. We are told that people may come up with their own “preferred pronouns” and it is then our obligation to use them when referring to those persons. This is nonsense, of course. You don’t get your own “preferred pronouns” for the same reason that you don’t get your own “preferred prepositions.” These aren’t subjective terms. These are classes of words that exist to convey factual information, not feelings.

For our purposes here, the term “spiritual worldview” is shorthand for the supposition that reality—your own nature and your conscious being—involve both tangible, physical matter and an immaterial “something.” This immaterial “something” is intimately, indeed essentially, involved in the existence of consciousness and life, and is ultimately traceable to a divine origin and purpose.

Governor Fielding Wright’s radio address to the “Negroes of Mississippi.” His speech was aired eighteen months after the shooting in Anguilla. He was a Sharkey County native and a lawyer, who might have represented my father. But the reason this article jumped out of the library files and into my hands was the fact that Dad was then the editor of the Deer Creek Pilot, and he was a press agent for Governor Wright, who said: This morning I am speaking primarily to the negro citizens of Mississippi … We are living in troublous times and it is vital and essential that we maintain and preserve the harmonious and traditional relationship which has existed in this state between the white and colored races. It is a matter of common knowledge to all of you who have taken an interest in public affairs that in my inaugural address as governor some four months ago, I took specific issue with certain legislative proposals then being made by President Truman … These proposals of President Truman are concerned with the enactment of certain laws embraced within the popular term of “Civil Rights.” … [O]ur opposition to such legislation is that it is a definite, deliberate and outright invasion of the rights of the states to control their own affairs and meet their own duties and responsibilities. This same radical group pressing this particular proposal is also seeking to abolish separate schools in the South, separate cars on trains, separate seats in the picture shows, and every other form of physical separation between races. Another recommendation made by the President, and one of the main objectives of the many associations claiming to represent the negroes of this nation, is the abolition of segregation. White people of Mississippi and the Southland will not tolerate such a step. The good negro does not want it. The wise of both races recognize the absolute necessity of segregation. With all of this in mind, and with all frankness, as governor of your state, I must tell you that regardless of any recommendation of President Truman, despite any law passed by Congress, and no matter what is said to you by the many associations claiming to represent you, there will continue to be segregation between the races in Mississippi. If any of you have become so deluded as to want to enter our white schools, patronize our hotels and cafes, enjoy social equality with the whites, then true kindness and true sympathy requires me to advise you to make your homes in some state other than Mississippi.

My eyes widened and my face turned red as embarrassment gushed through my person. I had never thought of myself in such a manner. But now I knew the reasons I was sought after by dominant, bearded Arab men. I understood why I had the power to make men feeble in the knees and languid at my commands. Victor’s words that morning certainly took on a new meaning in my adolescent life. Before I could continue to bask in this glorious revelation, my teacher suggested, “Use your temporal assets wisely, or you may end up like many before you, in self destructive jeopardy.” I stared at him, speechless. “Pay attention, young man…” he proceeded slowly. “There are four basic homoerotic notions in Arab societies: * First, the acknowledgment of male beauty, even in other males’ eyes, and its capability of inducing ‘fitna’ (disorder). * Second, the recognition of the natural vulnerability of a grown man to be charmed by a handsome adolescent, to the point that mainstream scholars and theologians urged readers to resist the related temptation that follows this natural appreciation. * Third, the affirmation that love and passion exist hand in hand with related dangers - and not just sexual desires - that might be the driving force in a man-to-man attraction. * Fourth, and certainly not the least, the focus in classical literature and poetry on man-boy love, whereas grown male attraction is marginalized and regarded as mujun (ribaldry) or sukhf (obscenity).”               Señor Victor Angel Triqueros added, “No social definition of homosexuality existed in the Arab world during the reign of the Ottoman Empire. There was no native concept applicable to all and only those men who were sexually attracted to members of their own sex rather than to women. Therefore, no single word exists in Arabic to describe men engaging in same-sex relationships. But there is a categorization of sexual acts: language that uses such specific terms as liwat (anal sex), luti (active sodomite who prefers boys over women, ma’bun (passive sodomite), mukhannath (effeminate passive sodomite), mu’ajir (passive male prostitute), dabb (active sodomite who likes raping his victims in their sleep regardless of their age), musahiqa (lesbian), along with a string of others.

[THE DAILY BREATH] In today's world we seem to have a conflict between science and the existence of God. This conflict is meaningless and it does nothing except to confuse people and prevent them from living their life healed, whole and fulfilled. Blaise Pascal said: "To those who wish to see, God gives them sufficient light. To those who doesn't wish yo see, God gives them sufficient darkness." Do you know most people do not even think with clarity about the words they speak? Have you ever heard of the term "scientific creation"? We hear every day of "scientific discoveries", but never of "scientific creations". Have you ever heard of "God's discoveries"? We know the story of creation, but never about God discovering anything. The reality must have logic. We discover what God has created. There are two distinct levels of reality and of understanding. If some scientists are confused about the words their own mouth speaks, can you truly trust their judgement and put your life in their hands? Think.

freethinking as we’d like to think we are. The world of absolute truth is fact-based. The world of the culturescape is opinion-based and agreement-based. Yet even though it exists solely in our heads, it is very, very real.

The world of absolute truth is fact-based. The world of the culturescape is opinion-based and agreement-based. Yet even though it exists solely in our heads, it is very, very real.

If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. A common way of earning a living gives them a common attitude toward life. Even their speech is colored and shaped by what they must undergo. Your Honor, injustice blots out one form of life, but another grows up in its place with its own rights, needs, and aspirations. What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this new form of life that has grown up here in our midst that puzzles us, that expresses itself, like a weed growing from under a stone, in terms we call crime. Unless we grasp this problem in the light of this new reality, we cannot do more than salve our feelings of guilt and rage with more murder when a man, living under such conditions, commits an act which we call a crime.

It’s so easy to think of your parents as existing solely for you—to see their actions only in terms of how well they address your needs. Even as an adult, it’s hard to think of your parents as people with goals and circumstances different from your own. As I sat at the table, pouting, I suddenly thought about all the things my mother had lost when she and my father moved: her garden, her home, her friends, the life she’d worked so long to build.

are constantly taking transient experiences, cramming them into prearranged slots, turning discontinuity into continuity, and making solid what is actually fluid. The technical term for what’s happening is reification—giving immaterial experiences “thingness.” So convincing is this transformation that rocks seem solid and heavy when, in fact, your mind reified them—you have created solidity and heaviness in your own awareness. This constitutes another outrageous conclusion to anyone who is out to reinforce and reaffirm the spell/dream/illusion. But you cannot thaw out the “thingness” of the physical world unless you break down the process that created it. I’m hesitant to use any kind of jargon, but we need to delve into how reification works. The dictionary definition of reify is “to make something more concrete or real.” The mental image of money gets reified into a dollar bill, which you can fold up and stick in your wallet. “Parenting” gets reified when you decide to have a baby you can hold in your arms. What’s earthshaking is that virtual reality owes its existence entirely to reification. The web of connections that entangles everything in the spell/dream/ illusion with everything else comes down to the mind, because connections are mind-made. No object is actually a physical thing, pure and simple. “Object” and “thing” and “physical” are strands of a mental web. People find it relatively easy to accept that a piece of paper currency is the reified form of a concept (money), but they balk when they are told that the same is true of body, brain, and universe. The key is to

Finally, when it comes to your own self-opinion, try to have some ironic distance from it. Make yourself aware of its existence and how it operates within you. Come to terms with the fact that you are not as free and autonomous as you like to believe. You do conform to the opinions of the groups you belong to; you do buy products because of subliminal influence; you can be manipulated. Realize as well that you are not as good as the idealized image of your self-opinion. Like everyone else, you can be quite self-absorbed and obsessed with your own agenda. With this awareness, you will not feel the need to be validated by others. Instead you will work at making yourself truly independent and concerned with the welfare of others, as opposed to staying attached to the illusion of your self-opinion.

The term menopause came to be before science knew hormones existed. It was never meant to signify a pause. It was invented by a man who felt women should cover their arms and not wear blush—whose book on the subject contributed nothing valuable to the body of knowledge except it left a term that ties women forever to menstruation. The word menopause was then weaponized by the pharmaceutical industry and transformed from troublesome phase of life into a lifelong disease that affected every woman. And not just any disease, the worst kind of disease—one that made women undesirable to men. It’s not a great origin story. The word menopause is due for an update.

The most important behavior on your part involves dedicating a disproportionate share of your own time, attention, and discretionary resources to creating new business models. Existing businesses, and the leaders in charge of them, face little difficulty in articulating their needs, building a case for their support, and attracting people. Entrepreneurial initiatives, on the other hand, are usually seen as marginal or unimportant in their early stages. Unless you personally allocate to them disproportionate attention, disproportionate resources, and disproportionate talent, they will get squeezed by the existing business to the extent that they never have a chance to take off. Your challenge is to provide counterpressure to the inertial forces that lead your people to constantly attend to the demands of today’s business. [...] By disproportionate resources, we mean budget, access to operating capacity or operating assets, and, most vitally, the very best people. Ironically, these are the very resources that are highly desired by managers of the existing business, who are apt to hotly contest any other claim on them. Like the payment of disproportionate attention, the disproportionate allocation of resources to new business models has its costs. Every dollar and every hour of operations capacity allocated disproportionately to entrepreneurial initiatives is money and time denied the existing business. Disproportionate allocation must be a deliberate process, with commitment of resources being visibly recognized as a matter of strategic choice, not a struggle between long- and short-term goals. [...] Finally, you must be prepared for your organization’s top talent to work on entrepreneurial initiatives. This can create a painful dilemma. When top talent works on an entrepreneurial initiative, the current business is weakened accordingly. However, if only mediocre talent is assigned to the difficult task of new business development, the ventures are doomed. Furthermore, allowing ventures to be run by mediocre people sends an even stronger signal to the rest of the business about your real priorities. The smart people in the firm will recognize that business development is not truly a priority for you, and they will organize their own priorities accordingly. The message: If you don’t walk the talk, only the dumb people will listen.

The term menopause came to be before science knew hormones existed. It was never meant to signify a pause. It was invented by a man who felt women should cover their arms and not wear blush—whose book on the subject contributed nothing valuable to the body of knowledge except it left a term that ties women forever to menstruation.

Your potential to create wealth is found between your education on how to make money, and your willingness to live in poverty. By education on how to make money, I am referring here to the many skills you need to acquire for a job, in communication, but also organizational and ethical skills. By willingness to live in poverty, I am referring here to the sacrifices you are willing to make. You see, people fear poverty as if they could avoid it, but the one who escapes it faster, is the one who embraces it better. This means spending as less as possible in your habits, not worrying about what others think of you, and committing yourself to become a servant, even a slave, to your higher self. The reason why so many people struggle to accumulate wealth, is because they are avoiding both of these things just mentioned. They don't want to work, for themselves or others, they aren't willing to make sacrifices, they care a lot about what others think of them, they don't want to save any money, they spend without any sense of responsibility, and they also have no interest in investing on their education, either through formal means or by reading books. Most people don't read, they are waiting for the world to offer them the solutions they want, and the trust luck and shortcuts more than they trust their own capacity to achieve things with their own efforts. That's why they can't get to where they want in life. What I just said, can be applied to any other area of life. Even a good marriage requires education on how to make it work and sacrifices to make it work, and just as much as a dog will require you to sacrifice your time and learn better ways of communicating with him. Your own existence depends on a balance of an education on opportunities and a commitment to find them. So what is the most imbecile thing anyone can tell you? The most dumb persons you will ever find, are those who tell you the exact opposite of what I just said, and in doing so, separate everything in different categories. They will say that happiness doesn't require wealth, or that wealthy individuals are miserable. They will say that love requires luck, or that education isn't necessary to become successful. And you have quite a bunch of idiots in this world, marketing their foolish views on others, as if they were absolute truth. You tend to buy into such views with the love and attachment you feel for them. Thus, be wary of the merchants of incompetence. They will try to sell you the most stupid ideas about life. And if you trust them, you will fail, and keep on failing, until you realize you trusted the wrong people. If you think education is expensive, know that stupidity is a lot more. It can cost you an entire existence in the dark. The path to enlightenment is a path of integration, while the distance is measured in segregations. Stupidity is found in the relativity of everything. The dumber one is, the more he or she will think in terms of differentiations. The wiser one is, the more he or she will focus on the similarities and correlations, because enlightenment is found in an upward route towards oneness.

The strategy of exorcizing the sexual body by wildly exaggerating the signs of sex, of exorcizing desire by its secret depolarization and the exaggeration of its mise en scene, is much more effective than that of good old repression, which , by contrast, used prohibition to create difference. Yet it is not clear who benefits from this strategy, as everyone suffers it without distinction. This travestied regime - in the broadest sense — has become the very basis of our institutions. You find it everywhere — in politics, architecture, theory, ideology and even in science. You even find it in our desperate quest for identity and difference. We no longer have the time to seek out an identity in the historical record, in memory , in a past, nor indeed in a project or a future. We have to have an instant memory which we can plug in to immediately - a kind of promotional identity which can be verified at every moment. What we look for today, where the body is concerned , is not so much health, which is a state of organic equilibrium, but fitness, which is an ephemeral , hygienic , promotional radiance of the body - much more a performance than an ideal state — which turns sickness into failure. In terms of fashion and appearance , we no longer pursue beauty or seductiveness, but the 'look' . Everyone is after their 'look'. Since you can no longer set any store by your own existence (we no longer look at each other - and seduction is at an end!), all that remains is to perform an appearing act, without bothering to be, or even to be seen. It is not: 'I exist, I'm here' , but 'I'm visible, I'm image — look , look!' This is not even narcissism. It's a depthless extraversion, a kind of promotional ingenuousness in which everyone becomes the impresario of his/her own appearance. The 'look ' is a kind of minimal, low-definition image, like the video image or, as McLuhan would say, a tactile image , which provokes neither attention nor admiration, as fashion still does, but is a pure special effect without any particular meaning . The look is not exactly fashion any more; it is a form of fashion which has passed beyond. It no longer subscribes to a logic of distinction and it is no longer a play of difference; it plays at difference without believing in it. It is indifference. Being oneself becomes an ephemeral performance , with no lasting effects, a disenchanted mannerism in a world without manners.

To make things more confusing, for most physics equations, time can go in either direction (forward or backwards, +t or -t). This doesn’t really match with our everyday experience, even though the equations work out. Suffice it to say that so far, physicists have not been super helpful in improving our everyday understanding of the flow of time, although they are working hard on it.c What about philosophers? If you think time is completely subjective or mental and does not or cannot exist in the physical world, you are in good company with the likes of John McTaggartd and St Augustine.e In contrast, if you feel that time is both a physical fact as well as a mental experience, you will be in good company with most present-day philosophers, who think of time as the thing that describes how change happens; the thing that we try to measure by using a clock.f That’s not really clear either, but it seems a bit ahead of the physicists – maybe. How about the psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists? Most of them focus their investigations on the mental experience of time as opposed to physical time. People generally agree that there is a kind of order to the events we experience in our lives, which, when put together, we call the flow of time, temporal flow, or the “stream of consciousness” as psychologist William James famously put it.g Many psychologists and neuroscientists studying time and time perception try to understand this mystery by trying to figure out how the mind and brain create a sense of temporal flow.h The subjective sense of temporal flow is all very interesting, but it won’t get us precisely where we want to be, which is to understand how precognition of actual physical future events might actually be possible. Understanding the science of precognition can be thought of as understanding how we might access information about events that occur in the future of our own personal temporal flow, relative to our own personal “now”. This sounds like mental time travel rather than physical time travel, and that is a reasonable way to think about it. It could even be completely accurate. But you can also think about the science of precognition in physical terms, as trying to understand how future physical events can influence past physical events. Either way, when we have premonitions, it feels as if the future is pulling us forward both physically and mentally.

Let me tell you what the Wilds have shown me, way out beyond civilization and its web of lies.’ He held up his hands, palm tilted to catch the last of the day’s light. ‘No good and evil, no right and wrong. The real scales upon which we are all judged are much simpler, Rant. Take a life, no matter how short or long. What’s it made up of? Well: choices, deeds, promises, beliefs, mysteries, fears, a whole list of things – whatever you care to think of, in fact. That’s what makes a life. Want to see it in terms of good and evil, of right and wrong? That’s not the way of the Wilds, because those words are really about people judging other people and the problem with that is, you can’t find truth studying the scales if your own eye’s skewed. And everyone’s eyes are skewed, whether they admit it or not.’ Damisk studied his upturned palms. ‘A soul collects marks, Rant. Like you’d find on a factor’s ledger. Some are burned into the surface. Some are placed there with a kiss. Forget good and evil, right and wrong. Think instead in terms of suffering and blessing.’ He paused, studying the half-breed’s heavy-boned face. ‘That’s the only ledger that counts. Take a life, like I said before, and now look back on it. Choices, deeds, promises. Which ones made for suffering, and which ones blessed?’ He lifted his hands higher and then let them drop. ‘Every mortal soul lives a thousand lives, even more, but that don’t mean a thousand ledgers for each soul. No, it’s just one ledger, the same ledger. The soul brings it with it every time it lands in a body, and that body plays out its life, adding one mark at a time. Suffering. Blessing. And there’s no escaping it, no cheating, no hiding it all away. What I call the Wilds is just raw nature, the universe itself, and it misses nothing and never blinks. And that’s how souls pay for every choice, every decision, every promise, broken or kept.’ ‘Pay how?’ Rant asked. ‘Whatever you put in, you get back. Spend a lifetime making others hurt and suffer, your next lifetime delivers the same upon you. No escaping it. Those scales of justice, Rant, they ain’t out there somewhere. Those are just flawed reflections.’ He jabbed his own chest. ‘They’re in here. Justice doesn’t exist in the Wilds, you see. I spent a lifetime looking for it out there, never found it. No, justice resides in each soul. So, when you cheat and think you got away with it, you didn’t. When you cause suffering in someone, either directly or with your own indifference, the ledger inside records it. And the scales tip, and that suffering will return to you, and your soul will one day know the anguish you delivered.’ He

we suffer also from our inevitable confrontation with the human condition-the "givens" of existence. What precisely are these "givens"? The answer is within each of us and readily available. Set aside some time and meditate on your own existence. Screen out diversions, bracket all preexisting theories and beliefs, and reflect on your "situation" in the world. In time you will inevitably arrive at the deep structures of existence or, to use the theologian Paul Tillich's felicitous term, ultimate concerns. In my view, four ultimate concerns are particularly germane to the practice of therapy: death, isolation, meaning in life, and freedom. These four ultimate concerns constitute the spine of my 1980 textbook, Existential Psychotherapy, in which I discuss, in detail, the phenomenology and the therapeutic implications of each of these concerns.

What draws ants to even the most remote sugar crystals? What entices bees to flowers? It's the fundamental code of life. Hunger is a taste of yearning your life code carries that, when seated into a human body, translates into mental and bodily desires. In the short term, within a single life, childhood limitations or arousals sow the majority of the seeds of desire. Most human goals frequently revolve around good food, good clothing, intimacy, artistic/scientific expression, and financial success. Across multiple lifetimes, it all ties back to our underlying evolutionary hunger. That is why some of our dreams are unexpectedly different from our waking life goals. That is why siblings born from the same parents, nurtured similarly, have weirdly different life goals - they are two different manifestations of two different derivative codes. This multi-life journey, when unaware, is exactly what we attribute to destiny, and when a little aware, we attribute to Karma. Once these little tributaries are done with their own little flow, they flow back to the original river. In the grand existential scheme, as temporary and evolutionary desires are satisfied, we flow back with the current of existential hunger. This cosmic hunger is more of playfulness than a hunger, simply consciousness, with minimal interference from senses or other impurities, being drawn towards matter, like a playful snake chasing its own tail. Yes, it might be perplexing to our worldly mind. You remember the symbol Ying Yang? The dark dot is the matter in consciousness, and the white dot is the consciousness in Matter - like a lover playfully chasing their loved one. It's a merging of the two fundamental ingredients of existence. Spirituality strives us to ride the original current, fulfilling and freeing us from temporary desires, allowing us to become one with that primordial life code. That is why a Buddha's desires can be attributed to the desires of existence itself. Life, in its microcosm, is complex enough, let alone the macro one.

Corvallis and most of the other techies hated this idea because of its sheer bogosity, which was screamingly obvious to any person of technical acumen who thought about it for more than a few seconds. If their pattern-recognition software could identify the moving travelers and vectorize their body positions well enough to translate their movements into T’Rain, then it could just as easily notice, automatically, with no human intervention, when one of those figures was walking the wrong way and sound the alarm. There was no need at all to have human players in the loop. They should just spin out the pattern-recognition part of it as a separate business. Richard understood and acknowledged all of this—and did not care. “Did you, or did you not, tell me that this was all marketing? What part of your own statement did you not understand?” The purpose of the exercise was not really to build a rational, efficient airport security system. It was, rather (to use yet another of those portentous phrases cribbed from the math world), an existence proof. Once it was up and running, they could point to it and to its 100 percent success rate as vindicating the premise of APPIS, which was that real-world problems—especially problems that were difficult to solve because of hard-wired deficiencies of the human neurological system, such as the tendency to become bored when given a terrible job—could be tackled by metaphrasing them into Medieval Armed Combat scenarios, and then (here brandishing two searingly hip terms from high tech) putting them out on the cloud so that they could be crowdsourced.

You who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders—there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions—there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it up—and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own. “You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder—the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live. But their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape. They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself. “You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’—may the God you invented forgive you!—they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

Stories collide at the table. In your own life, you can establish your own narrative. You don’t have to be the athletic one or the artsy one. You can exist on your own terms.

In the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum of our own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can’t have both. We do not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours. “You who are worshippers of the zero—you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing—and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: ‘Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.’ I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.

Healing Mantra Mantras use the auditory sound to heal. Every chakra is associated with different sounds. Such different sounds can be used, or the mantra "om" can be used for each chakra. Om is the fundamental tone, said to be creation's own breath — the noise from which all sounds derive. Sound Vibration Another option for you is to chant the vowel associated with each chakra if you enjoy chanting one sound. Again, slight variations exist, so play with it until you feel the resonance in the right place: • O as in OM for the Root • OO as in POOL for the Sacral • AH as in DHARMA for the Solar Plexus • A as in SPACE for the Heart • E as in FREE for the Throat • MM as in MEDIUM for the Third-Eye • NNG as in WING for the Crown There are key words om, lake, dharma, place, safe, knowledge, and wing that clarify how the sounds are spoken. You can also use such terms as mnemonics to help you remember what sound goes with each chakra. Om is for the Root, and you can remember that om is the universal sound, the first physical creation vibration. You are connected to the earth by the Root Chakra. For the second chakra, the aspect of this chakra, a pool is filled with water. The third chakra, dharma, is associated with your will, and with that strength and will, how you build your life. The term space is the dimension of the heart. The term free is connected to the Throat Chakra; you feel free to speak the truth when this chakra is in harmony. Through the third eye, you can cultivate the word medium. And metaphorically, it's as if you had wings to experience bliss at the crown. Pronounce the vowels to bring the appropriate vibration to that energy center when visualizing each chakra.

Saying “I slept around with a bunch of random people in my 20s and now I’m happily married so it’s fine,” is the same as saying…. “I was addicted to drugs for a decade and now I’m clean, so it’s fine.” I’m glad it turned out well for you but these comments are destructive for the future generations to hear. They gloss over the consequences. I’m happy junkies can get help and become clean, but do we need to add that to conversations with our teens and young adults? “You can always get help later and get clean and turn out just fine!!” Hashtag: There is Life after cocaine! No, we don’t. Why? Because these statements don’t take into account the long term opportunity cost & consequences of your actions. The woman who gives away her body to random men without any legal, spiritual claiming and forever commitment from her partner- LOST a lot. Sure she can stop a decade later and hopefully rebuild her life. But we can’t discount her suffering. The hormonal effects of having multiple partners. The health issues resulting from hormonal birth control. The loss of self esteem and confidence. The questioning of her own worthiness. The changes to her physical and energetic body. The mental anguish of thinking “what’s wrong with me”. The repeated activation of the abandonment wound. Having to grieve “relationships” that never even existed! The loss of trust in masculine energy and MEN! The creation of stories and neural pathways that will take years of inner work! And the changes to her DNA.

I was well aware this wasn’t a word most lethal operatives like myself would use, but I had always marched to the beat of my own drummer. “You paint quite the scary picture, Professor,” I continued, raising my eyebrows. “Why do I have the feeling this isn’t the first time you’ve thought about this?” Singh smiled. “Not quite the first time, no,” she replied. “I guess I have gone into lecture mode. And it’s a lot to absorb. So let me wind this down. The bottom line is that the rates of substance and behavioral addictions have skyrocketed. Our levels of stress and neurosis have too. The furious pace of our advancements, and the toxicities and manipulations I just described, are outstripping our psyches, which were evolved for a simpler existence.” “Do you have statistics on the extent of the problem?” asked Ashley. “It’s impossible to really get your arms around,” replied Singh, “but I’ll try. In 1980, fewer than three thousand Americans died of a drug overdose. By 2021 that number had grown to over a hundred thousand. More than thirty-fold! And it’s only grown since then. “And these are just the mortality stats. Many times this number are addicts. Estimates vary pretty widely, but I can give you numbers that I believe to be accurate. Fifteen to twenty million Americans are addicted to alcohol. Over twenty-five million suffer from nicotine dependence. Many millions more are addicted to cocaine, or heroin, or meth, or fentanyl—which is a hundred times stronger than morphine—or an ever-growing number of other substances. Millions more are addicted to gambling. Or online shopping. Or porn.” Singh frowned deeply. “When it comes to the internet, cell phones, and other behavioral addictions, the numbers are truly immense. Probably half the population. The average smart phone user now spends over three hours a day on this device. And when it comes to our kids, the rate of phone addiction is even higher. Much higher. In some ways, it’s nearly universal. “Meanwhile, many parents insist their children keep this addiction device with them at all times. They’re thrilled to be able to reach their kids every single second of their lives, and track their every movement.” There was a long, stunned silence in the room. “I could go on for days,” said Singh finally. “But I think that gives you some sense of what we’re currently facing as a society.” I tried to think of something humorous to say. Something to lighten the somber mood, which was my instinctive reaction when things got depressing.  But in this case, I had nothing. Singh had called the current situation a crisis. But even this loaded term couldn’t begin to do it justice.

Anxiety does not exist to control you. You exist to control it. It is, as I said, a simple fact of life that can be managed. In fact, used properly, it can actually give you an extra boost by heightening your energy and awareness. If you have social anxiety about such things as giving a presentation, speaking up at a meeting, attending a social gathering, initiating plans, developing intimacy in friendships and dating, then learning to manage your anxiety will help. This book will teach you how to channel your anxiety—not how to eliminate it. The twelve chapters delineate a five-step program that essentially works like this: Step I: Identify your anxiety symptoms and recognize the ways in which they interfere with your life. Your social fears prevent you from doing things you would like to do (pursue friendships, date, achieve career success). Pinpointing your stress responses and noting what causes them give you the information you need to move on to Step 2. Step 2: Set short- and long-term social goals. Having identified the situations you have trouble confronting, you can identify immediate goals to work toward, and start to form a vision of your ideal social self. Goal-setting is a valuable way of letting your imagination offer a reward for your hard work. Next, you will begin to learn skills that can make your dream a reality. Step 3: Learn stress management and self-awareness. The techniques outlined in this book will allow you to control your anxiety response and tune in to your own desires and strong points, giving you more to share as you become more comfortable interacting. With your anxiety in check and your self-awareness guiding you toward fulfillment, anxiety becomes positive energy and will be the base of your self-empowerment. Now you are ready to polish your social skills. Step 4: Learn or refine social skills. Your fear has diminished, making it possible to refine social skills and enhance your interactive productivity, which will make the difference between social success and failure. Good conversation, active listening, an awareness of what behavior is appropriate—all of these skills will add to your overall social ability and self-empowerment. Step 5: Expand and refine your social network. At this point, you are ready to roll. You understand your anxiety, your stress is manageable, and you have learned the finer points of interacting in a positive, productive manner. The final step is to use your community’s resources to create, expand, or refine your social network to best meet your interactive goals. No matter who you are, you can improve your social network to better suit your needs. From here, anything is possible!

For those who start walking this sometimes arduous path, the long term blessings for you and your children and their children will far surpass the tangles along the way. So much is at stake. As the great nineteenth-century theologian R.L. Dabney explained: The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God—this is his task on earth.13 FOOTNOTE:

Well, the following are my own so they probably "don't already exist in the data base". ------------------------------------------------------ Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you - take your life up to now, and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

(Well, the following are my own so they probably 'don`t already exist in the data base'). ---------------------------------------------- Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you - take your life up to now, and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

(Well, the following are my own so they probably 'don`t already exist in the data base'). -------------------------------------------- Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you - take your life up to now, and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

(Well, the following are my own so they probably 'don`t already exist in the data base'). -------------------------------------------- Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you, take your life up to now and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

(Well, the following are my own so they probably 'don`t already exist in the data base'.) -------------------------------------------- Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you - take your life up to now, and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

The Divine Dance Christianity, alone among the world faiths, teaches that God is triune. The doctrine of the Trinity is that God is one being who exists eternally in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity means that God is, in essence, relational. The Gospel writer John describes the Son as living from all eternity in the ‘bosom of the Father’ (John 1:18), an ancient metaphor for love and intimacy. Later in John’s Gospel, Jesus, the Son, describes the Spirit as living to ‘glorify’ him (John 16:14). In turn, the Son glorifies the Father (17:4) and the Father, the Son (17:5). This has been going on for all eternity (17:5b). What does the term ‘glorify’ mean? To glorify something or someone is to praise, enjoy and delight in them. When something is useful you are attracted to it for what it can bring you or do for you. But if it is beautiful, then you enjoy it simply for what it is. Just being in its presence is its own reward. To glorify someone is also to serve or defer to him or her. Instead of sacrificing their interests to make yourself happy, you sacrifice your interests to make them happy. Why? Your ultimate joy is to see them in joy. What does it mean, then, that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit glorify one another? If we think of it graphically, we could say that self-centredness is to be stationary, static. In self-centredness we demand that others orbit around us. We will do things and give affection to others, as long as it helps us meet our personal goals and fulfils us. The inner life of the triune God, however, is utterly different. The life of the Trinity is characterised not by self-centredness but by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we centre on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two. So it is, the Bible tells us. Each of the divine persons centres upon the others. None demands that the others revolve around him. Each voluntarily circles the other two, pouring love, delight and adoration into them. Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love. The early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this – perichoresis. Notice the root of our word ‘choreography’ within it. It means literally to ‘dance or flow around’.1 The Father. . . Son . . . and Holy Spirit glorify each other. . . . At the center of the universe, self-giving love is the dynamic currency of the Trinitarian life of God. The persons within God exalt, commune with, and defer to one another. . . . When early Greek Christians spoke of perichoresis in God they meant that each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being. In constant movement of overture and acceptance each person envelops and encircles the others.2 In Christianity God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing – not even just one person – but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance. . . . [The] pattern of this three-personal life is . . . the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality.3 The doctrine of the Trinity overloads our mental circuits. Despite its cognitive difficulty, however, this astonishing, dynamic conception of the triune God is bristling with profound, wonderful, life-shaping, world-changing implications.4

I don’t mean to sound mystical, except inasmuch as there is a persistent, insistent mystery at the center of our existence, which art both derives from and sustains. This mystery is not, in any ultimate sense, explicable to anyone, but it is available to everyone who will not actively resist those moments when the self and all it suffers are finished—again, in both senses of the term. It may happen in art, your own or that of others. It may happen in love, grand or minor. It may happen at any moment in life when, “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy” (Wordsworth), we cease to be ourselves and become, paradoxically, more ourselves. Our souls.

What “If” than better “Oops”? Can you ever think this what if i did this? what if we will do it? what if …. what if? If yes then unfortunately, you are in right blog and right things will catch you rarely in life. What you think ? what about our life is? Our life is about always what if or our life is always about oops? Both terms are exist in our life but situations are different every time. If we can choose right thing at right time half of your our life’s shit will be flushed. Now, how to choose right thing? Its depend on you that in what way you think. ;Like if you are free and think you can’t do anything, you don’t have any job and blah! blah! blah! its your one way of thinking. What if you think from another way? I have time so i can learn a much more. I have time i can utilize in my efforts, i need a job but i have my own efforts and skills - I will be my own Boss. Your heart and mind are two different platform but in reality, there are two minds conscious and sub-conscious and that conscious mind will produce most powerful feeling in the form of thoughts and we feel our heart is generating feelings. Such a foolishness! Lets think with our sub conscious mind, can you do that? No you can’t do that because it never thinks it just follow the rules or thoughts generated by conscious mind. So, when ever your mind strikes with if and oops just think patiently because both are important and we can’t follow our life on one thing.

If you are a person who needs trust and is therefore committed to staying in control, the less that you believe you are supported, the more your negative coping mechanisms are going to flare up. Perhaps this could happen in the form of disruptive eating patterns, isolating yourself, or hyper-fixation on physical appearance. If you are committed to freedom and therefore need a sense of autonomy, the less that you build a life on your own terms, the more you are going to sabotage opportunities and feel drained and exhausted when you “should” feel happy. The more you lean into fulfilling your core needs, the more your commitment symptoms will disappear. Once you understand what a person really wants, you will be able to explain the intricacies of their habits and behaviors. You will be able to predict down to the detail what they will do in any given situation. More importantly, once you start asking yourself what you really want, you’ll be able to stop battling the symptoms and start addressing the only issue that has ever really existed in your life, which is living out of alignment with your core needs and, therefore, your core purpose.

Well, where does that leave us with regard to social action and practice? The answer is very far away. There still remains an enormous gap between what we have to grasp in order to ground moral action, to choose a course of action on moral grounds. An enormous gap between that and what we, in fact, understand about human nature and the human needs that derive from it, and the human rights that derive from it. Big gap. So, we are left where we were, with the need to make an intuitive leap and to posit some judgment about what real, intrinsic human nature is. In a sense, you're staking your faith in what you think or hope human beings may be. Now, if you take as your faith that of, say, the classical liberal doctrine, you will conclude that there is no justification, there's no moral justification for the commissar, the central committee, or the cultural or corporate manager, or any of the others who control and coerce us on species grounds. The actual classical liberal view, which is very different from what is known with its deep innatist roots, is very subversive and radical because it challenges the existence of any form of authority and requires that it be justified, which can rarely be done. It's not too surprising, I think, that the actual ideas of the Enlightenment have been subjected to such a broad-ranging attack. They are radical and subversive because of the faith that they express in human capacity, and human rights, and human needs, and their richness. And that's a deeply upsetting view from the point of view of any institutional structure which is concerned with control and manipulation, or any of the people who operate within those institutional structures. Well, if one takes this position, the next thing to do is to make the intuitive leap and turn to the concrete substantive questions of acting as a moral agent, choosing a course of action. And here what you do is seek out structures of authority and domination. Often we don't see them, so you have to try to find them even though they're there. Once you notice them, you see them and seek them out. Ask the question as to whether they, in fact, are legitimate for some contingent reason, say, self-defense or whatever argument is put forth. And if they fail that test, as they almost invariably do, to move forward to dismantle them, which means solidarity, organization, and so on. That's a hard task. But there are achievements. There are real achievements. For most of human history, for example, literal human slavery was considered legitimate. In fact, considered quite praiseworthy. It was for the benefit of these depraved creatures who shouldn't be left on their own. It's only a little tiny period of human history where this is considered a total obscenity. And the fact that it is considered a total obscenity is an achievement. In the 18th century, it was pointed out that wage slavery is fundamentally not very different from slavery. If people are compelled to rent themselves in order to survive, it's not very different than selling yourself in order to survive. That's an insight that has yet to be recovered, but it's a valid one. And, in fact, notice that it grows from these same conceptions of human nature. But, at least, literal human slavery would no longer be justified by, I suppose, almost anyone. That's an achievement. It's a moral achievement. It's a moral advance. Just in our own lifetimes, the questions of the legitimacy of sexist oppression have come to the fore. It's not like anybody noticed before, but there's been a sustained and committed effort to bring them to consciousness. And it's not long ago, anybody my age will know, that it's not long ago they just didn't see it, notice it. It was just part of the background. Now, at least you see it. The problems are there, but it's a moral advance that the problems are recognized to be there. There's some effort to come to terms with them.