Expansion And Contraction Quotes

Strength is Life, Weakness is Death. Expansion is Life, Contraction is Death. Love is Life, Hatred is Death.

All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.

Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.

Birthing is never easy or without pain, be it a universe, a child, or a fresh start in life. Contraction precedes expansion. Darkness comes before dawn. Joy follows pain. This is the way of things.

What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.

All of life's conflicts are between letting go or holding on, opening into the present or clinging to the past, expansion or contraction.

I am a black bird, a Raven, I am Raven. I know and I am knowing—I know and see life and death, expansion and contraction and I do not shiver and cry—I am unafraid. I am Raven. I am black as liquid night with wings and my eyes are stars to see by. The light within me leads the way and it is revealed through my eyes and I am what lies between the dark and light. I am the balance between.

Initially, I feel expansive when I try something new, and then contract as soon as I encounter difficulty or the unknown. I am learning to experiment with my tolerance of difficulty and the not knowing, in order to go further with my creative dreams. Whenever I experience contraction, I explore it by asking, "Where did I stop and why?" Building a creative dream life is not just about achieving, succeeding, or "meeting goals." It is also about floundering, stumbling, tripping and failing.

The notion is that human beings are born, (as my Guru has explained many times,) with equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it's up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth - the virtues or the malevolence. The madness of this planet is largely a result of human being's difficulty in coming into virtuous balance with himself. Lunacy (both collective and individual) results.

In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry.

Every trauma provides an opportunity for authentic transformation. Trauma amplifies and evokes the expansion and contraction of psyche, body, and soul. It is how we respond to a traumatic event that determines whether trauma will be a cruel and punishing Medusa turning us into stone, or whether it will be a spiritual teacher taking us along vast and uncharted pathways. In the Greek myth, blood from Medusa’s slain body was taken in two vials; one vial had the power to kill, while the other had the power to resurrect. If we let it, trauma has the power to rob our lives of vitality and destroy it. However, we can also use it for powerful self-renewal and transformation. Trauma, resolved, is a blessing from a greater power.

Because the state uses violence to achieve its ends, and there is no rational end to the use of violence, states grow until they destroy civilized interactions through the corruption of money, contracts, honesty, family and self-reliance. No state in history has ever been contained. It’s only taken a little more than a century for the US – founded on the idea of limited government, to break the bonds of the constitution, institute the income tax, take control of the money supply and the educational system and begin its catastrophic expansion.

Every contraction is naturally followed by an expansion; every time you feel your heart shrivel be confident that it will blossom in turn.

The up moments might feel like progress while the down moments feel like failure, but they are both a part of the process. Healing and recovery is like breathing, with expansion and contraction. It's like a heartbeat, up and down. It is natural for it to seesaw until you find balance.

erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

The contraction is concentration; the expansion is medita­tion. The movement is thought.

The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.

You will remember that every psychological or inner state finds some outer representation via the moving centre—that is, it is represented in some particular muscular movements or contractions, etc. You may have noticed that a state of worry is often reflected by a contracted wrinkling of the forehead or a twisting of the hands. States of joy never have this representation. Negative states, states of worry, or fear, or anxiety, or depression, represent themselves in the muscles by contraction, flexion, being bowed down, etc. (and often, also, by weakness in the muscles), whereas opposite emotional states are reflected into the moving centre as expansion, as standing upright, as extension of the limbs, relaxing of tension, and usually by a feeling of strength. To stop worry, people who worry and thereby frown too much or pucker up and corrugate their foreheads, clench their fists, almost cease breathing, etc., should begin here—by relaxing the muscles expressing the emotional state, and freeing the breath. Relaxing in general has behind it, esoterically speaking, the idea of preventing negative states. Negative states are less able to come when a person is in a state of relaxation. That is why it is said so often that it is necessary to practise relaxing every day, by passing the attention over the body and deliberately relaxing all tense muscles.

Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven. He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the infinite. Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and non- sentient tumult, the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue. Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depths of engulfment. Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip! Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death! The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness. The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall resuscitate it?

Just as the expansion and contraction of our lungs in necessary for the continuance of our physical life, so regular fellowship with God in prayer is essential to our spiritual well-being. Without prayer our spiritual lives will shrivel up and return to an infantile state.

Each and every component of our being – from our consciousness as a whole to our least of thoughts, emotions and sensations – yearns for one and only state: an ever-growing expansion, a complete shattering of the sense of contraction and limitation, a total liberation from the confined structure of distinct barriers and sidewalls.

For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth

Resist the suppressive pressure to contract, and instead expand in defiance.

Strength is Life, Weakness is Death, Expansion is Life, Contraction is Death, Love is Life, Hatred is Death.” — Swami Vivekananda

Ego contraction, however, prevents precisely the free expansion that enables us to find our connection to spirit. This is often described as the difference between the self and the Self. The self is the isolated ego clinging to its small reality; the Self is the unbounded spirit that can afford not to cling at all. Detachment means that you live from the Self instead of the self.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one comer of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

I glimpse again that biblical rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, assertion-and-subversion. As that rhythm becomes ever clearer as the very heartbeat of the biblical tradition, we will see the basic solution for How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. Read it all carefully and thoughtfully, recognize radicality’s assertion, expect normalcy’s subversion, and respect the honesty of a story that tells the truth.

Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love. But could love—simple, banal love—explain the so-called anthropic principle which scientists had shaken their collective heads over for seven centuries and more—that almost infinite string of coincidences which had led to a universe that had just the proper number of dimensions, just the correct values on electron, just the precise rules for gravity, just the proper age to stars, just the right prebiologies to create just the perfect viruses to become just the proper DNAs—in short, a series of coincidences so absurd in their precision and correctness that they defied logic, defied understanding, and even defied religious interpretation. Love? For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.

[Self]-distrust manifests blatantly in the judge's reaction to your experiences of expansion. 'Expansion' here refers to situations when you try something new, success at something you're never done before, stop a self-destructive habit, speak up in your own defense, recognize a truth about yourself, take on a new responsibility, and so on. The expansion is a shift in your sense of who you are or who you have taken yourself to be: who you are becomes a little bigger, includes a little more than it did before. What does the judge do with these moments? Most everyone has experienced some sort of contraction after they expand: some letdown, some fear creeping in, some shame about being bigger, some withdrawal from the expansion. In one sense, this is part of a natural cycle of expansion and contraction. However, the contraction is seldom seen as part of the normal flow of the unfolding soul.

A cycle is the basic unit of life: birth, growth, transformation, decline and death, followed once again by birth. It is a circular, repeating journey. A process of expansion and contraction, which is echoed in the pulsations of the womb, the beating of our hearts, the in and out of our breath. Cycles can be observed in every life form on the planet, in the seasons and the phases of the moon. Our menstrual cycles connect our female bodies directly to nature.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding. The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.

If the laws of nature are unpredictably reassorted at the cusps (the transition from contraction to expansion of the universe), then it is only by the most extraordinary coincidence that the cosmic slot machine has this time come up with a universe consistent with us.

Progression is part regression. Moving forward sometimes involves taking a few steps back during the process. Nothing has gone wrong. This is how we all move forward. Every project has setbacks. Every plan runs into a wall every once in a while. Every relationship has miscommunications and conflicts. Some days you will wake up feeling good; other days you will feel off. You will lose some money; you will gain some money. You will lose some weight; you will gain some weight. All of life is a process of expansion and contraction. This is how life breathes.

Lopez reached into his pocket, took out a small packet of white lozenges, and popped one into his mouth. He didn’t offer one to Holden. Lopez’s pupils contracted to tiny points as he sucked the lozenge. Focus drugs. He’d be watching every tic of Holden’s face during questioning. Tough to lie to.

Throughout the biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation, every radical challenge from the biblical God is both asserted and then subverted by its receiving communities— be they earliest Israelites or latest Christians. That pattern of assertion-and-subversion, that rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, is like the systole-and-diastole cycle of the human heart. In other words, the heartbeat of the Christian Bible is a recurrent cardiac cycle in which the asserted radicality of God’s nonviolent distributive justice is subverted by the normalcy of civilization’s violent retributive justice. And, of course, the most profound annulment is that both assertion and subversion are attributed to the same God or the same Christ. Think of this example. In the Bible, prophets are those who speak for God. On one hand, the prophets Isaiah and Micah agree on this as God’s vision: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, / and their spears into pruning hooks; / nation shall not lift up sword against nation, / neither shall they learn war any more” (Isa. 2:4 = Mic. 4:3). On the other hand, the prophet Joel suggests the opposite vision: “Beat your plowshares into swords, / and your pruning hooks into spears; / let the weakling say, ‘I am a warrior’” (3:10). Is this simply an example of assertion-and-subversion between prophets, or between God’s radicality and civilization’s normalcy? That proposal might also answer how, as noted in Chapter 1, Jesus the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount preferred loving enemies and praying for persecutors while Jesus the Christ of the book of Revelation preferred killing enemies and slaughtering persecutors. It is not that Jesus the Christ changed his mind, but that in standard biblical assertion-and-subversion strategy, Christianity changed its Jesus.

Our affections are the motions of our minds. Joy is expansion of the mind; sorrow, contraction of the mind; desire, a forward movement of the mind; and fear, the flight of the mind. For thou art expanded in mind when thou art glad; contracted in mind when thou art in trouble; thou movest forward in mind when thou hast an earnest desire; and thou fleest in mind when thou art afraid.

I learned that impermanence is not merely something that you experience in your sensory circuits. It also informs your motor circuits. It’s a kind of effortless energy that you can “ride on” in daily life. It imparts a bounce to your step, a flow to your voice, and a vibrancy to your creative thought. I also learned about the expansion-contraction paradigm for how consciousness works.

Nature is both passive and active, product and productivity, but a productivity that always needs to produce something else (for example, human generation, which ceaselessly repeats without end). There is a double moment of expansion and contraction, which Lowith compared to respiration, which never goes to the end of its movement except in death, and which designates the character of a relative production as always begun again. Nature is beyond the World and on this side of God, and as such, Nature is neither God nor World. It is a producer that is not all-powerful, which does not succeed in ending its production: it is a rotary movement that produces nothing definitive. There is a general 'duplicity' of Nature as necessary as Nature itself is. If productive Nature were withdrawn from the product, it would mean only death.

The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.

I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation—EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce—and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter—all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist. Or so I heard. No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn’s cat. I decided to kill myself.

The same cosmic forces that mold galaxies, stars, and atoms also mold each moment of self and world. The inner self and the outer scene are born in the cleft between expansion and contraction. By giving yourself to those forces, you become those forces, and through that, you experience a kind of immortality—you live in the breath and pulse of every animal, in the polarization of electrons and protons, in the interplay of the thermal expansion and self-gravity that molds stars, in the interplay of dark matter that holds galaxies together and dark energy that stretches space apart. Don’t be afraid to let expansion and contraction tear you apart, scattering you in many directions while ripping away the solid ground beneath you. Behind that seeming disorder is an ordering principle so primordial that it can never be disordered: father-God effortlessly expands while mother-God effortlessly contracts. The ultimate act of faith is to give yourself back to those forces, give yourself back to the Source of the world, and through that, become the kind of person who can optimally contribute to the Mending of the world.

On the cosmological level, the primary polarity is between the expansive impulse that underlies the growth of the universe and the contractive field of gravitation that holds everything together. If the centrifigual force is predominant, the universe will expand indefinitely; if the centripetal, the universe will sooner or later stop growing and begin to contract until everything is annihilated in the Big Crunch. No one knows what will happen. But in the meantime, the interplay between these expansive and contractive principles underlies the processes of cosmic evolution.

The retaining membrane that held Dutch culture together for more than a century was a marvel of elasticity. Responding to appropriate external stimuli, it could expand or contract as the conditions of its survival altered. Under pressure, it could tighten to compress the Dutch into a sense of their indissoluble unity. In more expansive times it could relax and swell, allowing for internal differentiation and the absorption of a whole gamut of beliefs, faiths and even tongues. An omniscient kind of social filter swallowed up those foreign bodies and spat them out again as burghers: civically salubrious and residentially reliable.

Willpower is not about resisting, forcing, or controlling—it’s about choosing. And there are just two basic choices: to feel expansive, loving, and connected to the high vibrations of your soul—to literally be your soul—or to feel contracted, afraid, and immersed in the low vibrations of suffering—to not be your soul. If you choose to feel alone and separate, you’ll assume you must do everything under your own steam by controlling yourself and the world, as I did for many years. If you choose to feel connected to life, you’ll need very little of the old type of willpower. You’ll discover that concepts like flow and synchronicity take the place of willpower.

It had been a quiet few days for Hungry Paul since his Yahtzee conversation with Leonard, quiet days not being uncommon in his schedule. This had given him the opportunity to ponder the expansion and contraction of the universe as observed in localised form in the life of his best friend. Edwin Hubble, had he looked inside Leonard with his telescope, would have recorded that everything was just as the universe would ordain it. The thing is, for Hungry Paul the world was a complicated place, with people themselves being both the primary cause and chief victims of its complexity. He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was otherwise best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing. Though his life had been largely quiet and uneventful, his choices had turned out to be wise ones: he had already lived longer than Alexander the Great, and had fewer enemies, too. But he had now become awakened by the thought that, no matter how insignificant he was when compared to the night sky, he remained subject to the same elemental forces of expansion. The universe, it seemed, would eventually come knocking. And so it was that over a mid-morning scone he read a short article in the local freesheet with a sense of cosmic destiny.

Gardening Work There was a man breaking up the ground, getting ready to plant, when another man came by, "Why are you ruining this land?" "Don't interfere. Nothing can grow here until the earth is turned over and crumbled. There can be no roses and no orchard without first this devastation. You must lance an ulcer to heal. You must tear down parts of an old building to restore it." So it is with the sensual life that has no spirit. A person must face the dragon of his or her appetites with another dragon, the life energy of the soul. When that's not strong, everyone seems to be full of fear and wanting, as one thinks the room is spinning when one's whirling around. If your love has contracted into anger, the atmosphere itself feels threatening, but when you're expansive and clear, no matter what the weather, you're in an open windy field with friends. Many people travel as far as Syria and Iraq and meet only hypocrites. Others go all the way to India and see only people buying and selling. Others travel to Turkestan and China to discover those countries are full of cheats and sneak thieves. You always see the qualities that live in you. A cow may walk through the amazing city of Baghdad and notice only a watermelon rind and a tuft of hay that fell off a wagon. Don't repeatedly keep doing what your lowest self wants. That's like deciding to be a strip of meat nailed to dry on a board in the sun.

...if love...is a function of man's sadness, friendship is a function of his cowardice; and if neither can be realised because of the impenetrability (isolation) of all that is not 'cosa mentale,' at least the failure to possess may have the nobility of that which is tragic, whereas the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible is merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the madness that holds a conversation with the furniture. - For an artist therefore, the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication.

Introducing higher dimensions may be essential for prying loose the secrets of Creation. According to this theory, before the Big Bang, our cosmos was actually a perfect ten-dimensional universe, a world where interdimensional travel was possible. However, this ten-dimensional world was unstable, and eventually it "cracked" in two, creating two separate universes: a four-and a six dimensional universe. The universe in which we live was born in that cosmic cataclysm. Our four-dimensional universe expanded explosively, while our twin six-dimensional universe contracted violently, until it shrank to almost infinitesimal size. This would explain the origin of the Big Bang. If correct, this theory demonstrates that the rapid expansion of the universe was just a rather minor aftershock of a much greater cataclysmic event, the cracking of space and time itself. The energy that drives the observed expansion of the universe is then found in the collapse of ten-dimensional space and time. According to the theory, the distant stars and galaxies are receding from us at astronomical speeds because of the original collapse of ten-dimensional space and time. This theory predicts that our universe still has a dwarf twin, a companion universe that has curled up into a small six-dimensional ball that is too small to be observed. This six-dimensional universe, far from being a useless appendage to our world, may ultimately be our salvation.

Thus the no boundary proposal is a good scientific theory in the sense of Karl Popper: it could have been falsified by observations but instead its predictions have been confirmed. In an expanding universe in which the density of matter varied slightly from place to place, gravity would have caused the denser regions to slow down their expansion and start contracting. This would lead to the formation of galaxies, stars, and eventually even insignificant creatures like ourselves. Thus all the complicated structures that we see in the universe might be explained by the no boundary condition for the universe together with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Thus the no boundary proposal is a good scientific theory in the sense of Karl Popper: it could have been falsified by observations but instead its predictions have been confirmed. In an expanding universe in which the density of matter varied slightly from place to place, gravity would have caused the denser regions to slow down their expansion and start contracting. This would lead to the formation of galaxies, stars, and eventually even insignificant creatures like ourselves. Thus all the complicated structures that we see in the universe might be explained by the no boundary condition for the universe together with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Back in the 1920s, when Einstein first began to apply his theory to the universe itself, astronomers told him that the universe was static, neither expanding nor contracting. But Einstein found something disturbing in his equations. When he tried to solve them, the equations told him that the universe was dynamic, either expanding or contracting. (He did not realize this at the time, but this was the solution to the question asked by Richard Bentley. The universe did not collapse under gravity because the universe was expanding, overcoming the tendency to collapse.) In order to find a static universe, Einstein was forced to add a fudge factor (called the cosmological constant) into his equations. By adjusting its value by hand, he could cancel out the expansion or contraction of the universe.

The big question in cosmology in the early 1960s was did the universe have a beginning? Many scientists were instinctively opposed to the idea, because they felt that a point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God to determine how the universe would start off. This was clearly a fundamental question, and it was just what I needed to complete my PhD thesis. Roger Penrose had shown that once a dying star had contracted to a certain radius, there would inevitably be a singularity, that is a point where space and time came to an end. Surely, I thought, we already knew that nothing could prevent a massive cold star from collapsing under its own gravity until it reached a singularity of infinite density. I realised that similar arguments could be applied to the expansion of the universe. In this case, I could prove there were singularities where space–time had a beginning. A eureka moment came in 1970, a few days after the birth of my daughter, Lucy. While getting into bed one evening, which my disability made a slow process, I realised that I could apply to black holes the casual structure theory I had developed for singularity theorems. If general relativity is correct and the energy density is positive, the surface area of the event horizon—the boundary of a black hole—has the property that it always increases when additional matter or radiation falls into it. Moreover, if two black holes collide and merge to form a single black hole, the area of the event horizon around the resulting black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the event horizons around the original black holes.

Seeing that I would never manage to fall asleep, I arose, lit a candle, and after dressing went outside. Beneath the dull glow of the winter moon the snow glowed like pale blue china. The sidewalks sparkled weakly beneath the rays of the flickering street lamps; the benumbed streets slumbered forlornly. I walked, passing one corner after the other, and suddenly found myself on the edge of town. Further, beyond the square, an endless expanse began to glisten with a somber silverness. I stopped just before the gates. My intent gaze could distinguish nothing in the distant white expanse. Before me rose the imposing bank of the Volga like a gigantic snowdrift. So barren and uninviting was this deserted view resembling eternity that my heart contracted. I turned to the right and approached quite close to the monastery enclosure. From behind the bronze gates, glimmered a dense net of crosses and gravestones. The ancient eyes of the church gazed forbiddingly down on me, and with an eerie feeling I thought of the monks sleeping at this moment in tomb-like cells together with corpses. Were any of them thinking of the hour of death on this night? ("Lamia")

Pedigree was the centerpiece of Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision (1857). Though this case assessed whether a slave taken into a free state or federal territory should be set free, its conclusions were far more expansive. Addressing slavery in the territories, the proslavery Marylander dismissed Jefferson’s prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance as having no constitutional standing. He constructed his own version of the original social contract at the time of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention: only the free white children of the founding generation were heirs to the original agreement; only pedigree could determine who inherited American citizenship and whose racial lineage warranted entitlement and the designation “freeman.” Taney’s opinion mattered because it literally made pedigree into a constitutional principle. In this controversial decision, Taney demonstrably rejected any notion of democracy and based the right of citizenship on bloodlines and racial stock. The chief justice ruled that the founders’ original intent was to classify members of society in terms of recognizable breeds.

so much carbon has been allowed to accumulate in the atmosphere over the past two decades that now our only hope of keeping warming below the internationally agreed-upon target of 2 degrees Celsius is for wealthy countries to cut their emissions by somewhere in the neighborhood of 8–10 percent a year.27 The “free” market simply cannot accomplish this task. Indeed, this level of emission reduction has happened only in the context of economic collapse or deep depressions. I’ll be delving deeper into those numbers in Chapter 2, but the bottom line is what matters here: our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.

You can grow in love, and if you make different choices you can degrade in love. If you make a choice that is disharmonious with love, and out of truth, out of alignment with your soul, then your soul condition degrades. When you make a choice that is harmonious with love and is aligned and in truth, your soul condition expands. You can feel this happening, as in you can feel the joy, the expansion and the peaceful clarity of making choices harmonious with love, and feel the contraction, the pain, and the roughness of making choices disharmonious with love. For example, when you are generous with someone without wanting something back, how do you feel? What happens within yourself when you are harsh to someone, or judge another? Feel the truth of each of these choices and actions. When you choose love, when you do an action of love, you feel that inside yourself and you grow a little bit more in love.

The cycle of optimism and euphoria leading to greed, fear and capitulation, giving way to hope and building back to optimism, drives the expansion and contraction of our financial world in a market cycle of collective human emotion.

But with the fifth sutra it gets bad. Suffering begins. Chiti Itself, Consciousness Itself, descending from its stage of perfect expansion, becomes chitta (the mind) through the process of contraction. Now our hero has his first really bad day. Universal Consciousness becomes chitta, your mind. This is a significant statement. Universal Consciousness, which creates and underlies the whole universe, has become your little mind. The ocean has withdrawn and left a puddle on the beach. But it is the same water. Your mind, your awareness, is exactly like universal Consciousness. There is not one bit of difference between them, except that it’s a smaller, more limited thing. There is something else here: the hint that by examining awareness you can know the highest truth. You can know Shiva by examining your own awareness.

Pasquale considered his friend’s face. It had such an open quality, was such a clearly American face, like Dee’s face, like Michael Deane’s face. He believed he could spot an American anywhere by that quality—that openness, that stubborn belief in possibility, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires. This reminded him of Alvis Bender’s contention that stories were like nations—Italy a great epic poem, Britain a thick novel, America a brash motion picture in Technicolor—and he remembered, too, Dee Moray saying she’d spent years “waiting for her movie to start,” and that she’d almost missed out on her life waiting for it.

The Modus Operandi of THE REGULUS CONCLAVE as spelled out in 1853! “We hold such and such opinions upon one point only; and that one point is, mutual interest, and under that; 1st, that we can govern this nation; 2d, that to govern it, we must, subvert its institutions; and, 3d, subvert them we will! It is our interest; this is our only bond. Capital must have expansion. This hybrid republicanism saps the power of our great agent by its obstinate competition. We must demoralize the republic. We must make public virtue a by-word and a mockery, and private infamy to be honor. Beginning with the people, through our agents, we shall corrupt the State. “We must pamper superstition, and pension energetic fanaticism—as on ’Change we degrade commercial honor, and make success the idol. We may fairly and reasonably calculate, that within a succeeding generation, even our theoretical schemes of republican subversion may be accomplished, and upon its ruins be erected that noble Oligarchy of caste and wealth for which we all conspire, as affording the only true protection to capital. “Beside these general views, we may in a thousand other ways apply our combined capital to immediate advantage. We may buy up, through our agents, claims upon litigated estates, upon confiscated bonds, mortgages upon embarrassed property, land-claims, Government contracts, that have fallen into weak hands, and all those floating operations, constantly within hail, in which ready-money is eagerly grasped as the equivalent for enormous prospective gains. “In addition, through our monopoly of the manufacturing interest, by a rigorous and impartial system of discipline, we shall soon be able to fill the masses of operators and producers with such distrust of each other, and fear of us, as to disintegrate their radical combinations, and bring them to our feet. Governing on ’Change, we rule in politics; governing in politics, we are the despots in trade; ruling in trade, we subjugate production; production conquered, we domineer over labor. This is the common-sense view of our interests—of the interests of capital, which we represent. In the promotion of this object, we appoint and pension our secret agents, who are everywhere on the lookout for our interests. We arrange correspondence, in cipher, throughout the civilized world; we pension our editors and our reporters; we bribe our legislators, and, last of all, we establish and pay our secret police, local, and travelling, whose business it is, not alone to report to us the conduct of agents already employed, but to find and report to us others, who may be useful in such capacity. “We punish treachery by death!” (from YIEGER'S CABINET or SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM, published 1853)

I want the right to outbid anyone else who tries to hire you. No contracts without my counteroffer.” Holden held out his hand, and Fred shook it.

It turns out that we each have our own built-in GPS that leads us toward happiness in the form of an expansion/contraction feedback system. If you feel more expanded, you’re going in the right direction; if you feel contracted, it’s time for a course correction.

What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion.

dialogue. Most troubling, the modest criminal justice reforms that were achieved during the Obama administration coincided with the expansion of the system of mass deportation. At the same time that the administration was phasing out federal contracts for private prisons, it was making enormous investments in private detention centers for immigrants, including the granting of a $1 billion contract to Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison company (recently renamed Core Civic), to build a massive detention facility for women and children seeking asylum from Central America.

In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik draws a useful distinction between the “spotlight consciousness” of adults and the “lantern consciousness” of young children. The first mode gives adults the ability to narrowly focus attention on a goal. (In his own remarks, Carhart-Harris called this “ego consciousness” or “consciousness with a point.”) In the second mode—lantern consciousness—attention is more widely diffused, allowing the child to take in information from virtually anywhere in her field of awareness, which is quite wide, wider than that of most adults. (By this measure, children are more conscious than adults, rather than less.) While children seldom exhibit sustained periods of spotlight consciousness, adults occasionally experience that “vivid panoramic illumination of the everyday” that lantern consciousness affords us. To borrow Judson Brewer’s terms, lantern consciousness is expansive, spotlight consciousness narrow, or contracted.

President Truman laid out bold, new policies to contain Soviet expansion.142 Global tensions translated to federal contracts for the region's defense industries, especially Boeing. The company built B-50 and B-52 bombers for the newly established U.S. Air Force,

They all have exactly that combination we have noted: the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense.

On the other hand, a generous capital market is usually associated with the following: fear of missing out on profitable opportunities reduced risk aversion and skepticism (and, accordingly, reduced due diligence) too much money chasing too few deals willingness to buy securities in increased quantity willingness to buy securities of reduced quality high asset prices, low prospective returns, high risk and skimpy risk premiums It’s clear from this list of elements that excessive generosity in the capital markets stems from a shortage of prudence and thus should give investors one of the clearest red flags. The wide-open capital market arises when the news is good, asset prices are rising, optimism is riding high, and all things seem possible. But it invariably brings the issuance of unsound and overpriced securities, and the incurrence of debt levels that ultimately will result in ruin. The point about the quality of new issue securities in a wide-open capital market deserves particular attention. A decrease in risk aversion and skepticism—and increased focus on making sure opportunities aren’t missed rather than on avoiding losses—makes investors open to a greater quantity of issuance. The same factors make investors willing to buy issues of lower quality. When the credit cycle is in its expansion phase, the statistics on new issuance make clear that investors are buying new issues in greater amounts. But the acceptance of securities of lower quality is a bit more subtle. While there are credit ratings and covenants to look at, it can take effort and inference to understand the significance of these things. In feeding frenzies caused by excess availability of funds, recognizing and resisting this trend seems to be beyond the ability of the majority of market participants. This is one of the many reasons why the aftermath of an overly generous capital market includes losses, economic contraction, and a subsequent unwillingness to lend. The bottom line of all of the above is that generous credit markets usually are associated with elevated asset prices and subsequent losses, while credit crunches produce bargain-basement prices and great profit opportunities. (“Open and Shut”)

It's about shopping more generally. When you shop, you expand, Melba. You stretch out your hand and also your psyche to compass the thing that you desire, and then, when the moment is right, you clamp down, you squeeze around the thing! Expansion and contraction, Melba, that's shopping. It's a spasm! A special spasm. You've heard of these spasms? Not just a pleasant jolt. Jolts don't penetrate to great depths and they have no duration. A spasm is different; it's a rippling that works the fascia to keep your inner linings from drying out.

The trumpet, an incredible brass invention, is the king of instruments. This wild machine, its curved pipes, valves, and flowering bell. A puzzle of cold metal and grease, but when placed against the lips of a human being, and love is blown into it, it becomes warm and alive, a conduit for god, a spokesman for the divine. The more love in, the more warmth out, its finger-propelled pistons changing the shape and speed of the rainbows of curved air blown through its passageways. The expansion and contraction of lip muscles a feat of strength. From the first second I put that cold mouthpiece against my chops and started blowing warm, I yearned to create a beautiful sound, to feel my whole being vibrating one with a tone. I wanted that same oneness I felt when I hit a sweet jumper, or when I euphorically rolled on the floor as Walter and his friends jammed the hard bebop back in New York. When I played it right, I was living in the infinite present.

Sometimes I scream in the car, driving along lost in the roar of turnpike driving, screaming, letting it out, making the windows vibrate. I need it, it helps me to have a soft belly. It makes me think life is a process of expansion and contraction. It pulsates. There are good things and bad things, but it is always shifting and changing, pulsating. Freedom, an elusive sensation, comes only in sudden spontaneous bursts like the wind that afternoon on the dock, when I was caught between sky and water. It came up suddenly, out of the west when the sun was behind the trees pouring huge sunbeams all over the land.

For the Buddha and Early Buddhism, this is above all the defining crisis at the heart of the human condition: we are bound to a chain of rebirths, and bound to it by nothing other than our own ignorance and craving. The pointless wandering on in saṃsāra occurs against a cosmic background of inconceivably vast dimensions. The period of time that it takes for a world system to evolve, reach its phase of maximum expansion, contract, and then disintegrate is called a kappa (Skt: kalpa), an eon.

In a market-based economy, expansions and contractions in credit drive economic cycles, which occur for perfectly logical reasons.

Every cycle has four phases: expansion, peak, contraction, and trough.

There is a rhythm throughout the universe. The pulsation throbs within every heart, during each moment of ecstasy, in every birth contraction. The rhythm exists in the pull of the ocean tide, around the weight of each raindrop, woven into every cocoon. The sequence, the progression, is what we call time. Our time of influence affects the expansion of the universe. Heaven is eager to learn how we will add to the growth of eternal existence. God is ready to respond as you take part in creation. The rhythm never ends, it only strengthens and expands. This life force is you. You are the mystery. You are the journey. You are exquisite. You are here. Now, it’s your time.

We are all wired with a natural propensity to learn, grow, and expand. Think of the positive things that make you happy, bring you joy, deepen your understanding, and make you feel wonderful. These things enlarge and grow with positive energy, don’t they? The opposite is true as well; negative things make us feel stressed, sad, angry, or overwhelmed. They leave us feeling depleted and contracted.

People who cast a negative energy can make us feel doubtful, devalued, and disrespected. In response, we contract and are left cold as our awesome energy evaporates in their shadow. Downward emotional spirals ensue.

I was an I, an opera of feeling with a very small audience, a writer of articles about culture but with no real voice, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, a dream of love growing ever more expansive because it was impossible, especially in the gay bars I sometimes frequented in Manhattan, where AIDS loved everyone up the wrong way, or in a way some people weren’t surprised by, particularly by those gay men who were too indifferent to be sad — in any case night sweats were a part of the conversation people weren’t having in those bars, in any case, taking your closest friend in because he was shunned by his family was part of the conversation people weren’t having, still, there was this to contend with: that friend’s shirt collars getting bigger, still, there was this to contend with: his coughing and wheezing in the little room off your bedroom in Brooklyn because TB was catching, your friends didn’t want you to catch it, loving a man was catching, your friends didn’t want you to get it; his skin was thin as onionskin, there was a lesion, he couldn’t control his shit, not to mention the grief in his eyes, you didn’t want to catch that; those blue eyes filled with why? Causing one’s sphincter to contract, your heart to look away, a child’s question you couldn’t answer, what happened to our plans, why was the future happening so fast? You didn’t want to catch that, nor the bitterness of the sufferer’s family after death, nor the friends competing for a bigger slice of the death pie after the sufferer’s death, you certainly didn’t want to catch what it left: night sweats, but in your head, and all day, the running to a pay phone to share a joke, but that number’s disconnected, your body forgets, or rushes toward the love you remember, but it’s too late, he’s closer to the earth now than you are, and you certainly don’t want to catch any of that.

Addressing this doubt, in order to explain the mind, it is taught: || citir eva cetana-padād avarūḍhā cetya-saṅkocinī cittam || 5 || Awareness (citi) itself, descending from its state of pure consciousness (cetana), becomes contracted by the object perceived: this is [called] the mind (citta). Far from teaching an absolute distinction of divine spirit and mundane matter, Tantra teaches that they are in fact different phases of one thing, i.e., Awareness. Take the example of h2o: in one phase, we call it steam, in another, water, in another, ice. These three states are very different from one another, and we necessarily interact with each of them in very different ways. This is a perfect analogy for what Kṣemarāja intends here: there are three different states or phases of one ‘thing’—in one state, we call it God, in another, pure consciousness, in another, the mind. The implications of this are of course huge. First, though, let’s explore the specific three terms that Kṣemarāja is using here for these three states of the One. First we have citi, introduced in the first sūtra, which we translate (imperfectly) as Awareness. Citi (pronounced CHIT-ee) is the state in which Awareness is fully expanded, that is to say, untouched by any trace of contraction, including that of subjectivity or selfhood. In other words, there is no concealment whatsoever operative on the citi level (not that it’s really a level, of course). When citi manifests as an individuated subject, then that is the phase called cetana, here translated as ‘pure consciousness’. We have to define this second phase, cetana, more carefully so that we don’t confuse it with the third phase (the mind). Cetana (CHAY-tuh-nuh) is the state of being the conscious knower or agent of consciousness. We experience cetana in the space between trains of thought, a space of awareness momentarily devoid of thought-forms (vikalpas). That’s why I translate it as ‘pure consciousness’. We experience it dozens of times a day, but usually only for a second, and usually without the reflective self-awareness (vimarśa) by which we can know that we are experiencing cetana. (This ‘knowing’, when it does occur, does not take the form of a thought, or else it is no longer the cetana state.) The cetana state is open and expansive awareness; in fact, it is as expanded as awareness can be while still having a subtle ‘sense of self’.

The catastrophe began four days later. Quietly, and with near-military precision, the city opened a contract with Star Helix security. Soldiers from across the globe arrived in small groups and sat through debriefings. The plan to end the criminal networks operating in Baltimore would be announced after the fact, or at least after the first wave. The thought, widely lauded by the self-congratulatory minds in administration, was to take the criminal element by surprise. In catching them flat-footed, the security teams could cripple their networks, break their power, and restore peace and the rule of law.

Pasquale considered his friend’s face. It had such an open quality, was such a clearly American face, like Dee’s face, like Michael Deane’s face. He believed he could spot an American anywhere by that quality—that openness, that stubborn belief in possibility, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

Expansion is lethal to contraction - expansion is lethal to sectarianism - expansion is lethal to segregation, just like turmeric is lethal to infection.

Expand in the midst of contraction. Basically, what I have come to realize for myself, is this bottom line. Get up one more time than I fall. When I stretch into moving through the fear, doubt, the worry, then something meets me there and I see the next step. Sometimes I take that step with just the faith that I will be met, sometimes I feel myself being carried. Either way, the movement, the expansion is what opens me up to the awareness of my connection with Soul or Spirit, or whatever you want to call it. Expand into the truth. Expand into the joy. Expand into the abundance. Expand in the midst of contraction. This is a constant exercise in Mastery. Peace be still.

The first thing I do when I feel frustration is to allow myself to feel it. And then I immediately ask myself, What does this mean? And within seconds I find an empowering meaning. It means I’m learning and growing. It means something better is on the way. This is the contraction before the expansion. I work the problem and try to mine whatever I’m supposed to be learning from it. It can be very painful, but my meaning is: this is how you grow.

In the way of humankind since before the first contract was pressed into Sumerian clay, the temporary accommodations lasted long enough to become invisible.

The last and perhaps most interesting class of stablecoins are non-collateralized. Not backed by any underlying asset and using algorithmic expansion and supply contraction to shift the price to the peg, they often employ a seigniorage model where the token holders in the platform receive the increase in supply when demand increases. When demand decreases and the price slips below the peg, these platforms issue bonds of some form, which entitle the holder to future expansionary supply before the token holders receive their share.

Yin/Yang is used to describe the various qualities of paired items in relation to one another and that nothing in nature can exist without its counterpart.3 This is expressed in the following examples. Without day there can be no night, without right there can be no left, without hard there can be no soft, without East there can be no West, without expansion there can be no contraction, without rest there can be no activity. This list can go on forever. Just take a minute and think of the numerous like comparisons that you can make on your own. The complementary opposite characteristics of Yin/Yang should quickly become apparent. This comparison is even extended to like items, which means that there is no absolute in the concept. Take daytime for example. It is associated with Yang. The counterpart of daytime is nighttime, which is associated with Yin. As the sun moves through the sky during the course of the day it produces shadows. The shadows are associated with Yin, which is in comparison with areas that are receiving full sunshine. The shadows are the Yin within the Yang of the day. At night the moon will sometimes cast light on to the surface of the Earth. That occurrence is considered as Yang, which is in comparison to dark, shadowy areas. It is the Yang within the Yin of night. As the sun and moon move through the sky the positions of the corresponding light and shadow areas will merge and alternate. This represents the cyclic qualities of Yin/Yang. All events in nature, including the interactions of the human body, are cyclic and contain a complementary opposite according in Eastern thought.4 Yin/Yang, at the most basic level, is a simple comparison. Taoist philosophy does not separate cause from effect. In their view, everything is in a constant state of metamorphosis. Day is not caused by night, but simple precedes it. Winter is not caused by summer, but the two are linked in the cycle of the seasons.

Expansion causes health and harmony, contraction causes disease and division.

The formal mechanisms of mass liberal democracy – regular elections, competing political parties, universal suffrage, and legal and political rights – do not significantly mitigate the monolithic and uniform concentration of managerial power. The “despotism” of the regime – its tendency toward the monopolization of political, economic, and cultural power by a single social and political force of managerial and technical skills and the expansive, uniform, and centralized nature of its power – is a direct consequence of the contracted composition of the lite and the restriction of its membership to element proficient in managerial and technical skills. The narrowness of the elite that results fro this restriction insulates it from the influence of non-managerial social and political forces and reduces their ability to gain positions within the elite fro which they can moderate, balance or restrain its commands. Their exclusion from the elite contributes to the frustration of their aspirations and interests and encourages their alienation from the conflict with the elite and the destabilization and weakening of the regime.

In Hayek’s monetary theory of the cycle the upswing is generated by monetary expansions that cause an excess of investment over volun- tary saving and a shift in the structure of production toward more time- consuming processes. This structure, created by a depressed money rate of interest, cannot be sustained. Monetary expansion, then, will not pro- duce an everlasting boom, and when the expansion eventually stops, crisis and depression follow. With regard to the sources of monetary expansion, while others like Mises put the blame on the misguided (“inflationist” or “cheap money”) attitude of the monetary authorities, Hayek pointed to the endogenous process of money creation by the banks, in particular in a sys- tem of fractional reserve banking (see, e.g., Hayek 2012a [1933a], chap. 4, vs. Mises 2006b [1928]).

This is in direct relationship to nature’s pendulum. We also resolve overwhelm through the natural cycles of expansion and contraction. This tells us that no matter how badly we are feeling right now, this contraction will be followed by an expansion toward freedom.

Slow, relational touch can help us move from fear, contraction, and isolation to play, expansion, and community.

Panting, she pressed closer to him as he unfastened the row of buttons and freed his swollen erection. With a soothing murmur, Ross positioned her over his hips, canting them to just the right angle. She sank down eagerly, gasping as he filled her completely. Her hands clutched at the fabric of his coat, fingertips digging into the smooth broadcloth. "Hold onto me," he whispered. When she had wrapped herself around him, he picked his feet up from the stepping board and let the chamber-horse seat drop several inches in a sudden electrifying jolt. The movement forced Sophia harder onto the hilt of his shaft, and she whimpered in pleasure. Ross smiled as he stared into her wide, unfocused eyes. Color burnished the edges of his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and sweat misted his skin. His thighs went taut as he braced his feet on the board once more, then let them drop again. "Is this all right?" he murmured. "Is it too much?" "No," she gulped. "Do it again." Obligingly he began a bouncing motion that elicited a rhythmic squeak from the chamber horse. Air rushed from the contraction and expansion of the cushions like the sighing of fireplace bellows. Sophia held on tightly, her body gripping his intimately. Each drop of the seat caused the stiff, thick shaft to push harder inside her, again, again, until the stroking, grinding motion caused her to convulse in a release that had no end. Feeling the spasms of her body, Ross impaled her one last time and groaned in satisfaction. When at least he leaned backward with her body clasped in his arms, Sophia draped herself over him, utterly relaxed. Their bodies were still joined , and she moaned as he flexed inside her.

To know the self you must forget the self, To find the self you must lose the self. Focus on learning curves, not burning carbs - Focus on expansion, not on contracting descent.

That colossal sphere transformed itself into the stars and galaxies and everything else in the known universe.” I came to my answer to Oona’s question. “As this sphere moves forward in time, it evolves under the action of expansion and contraction. That is, as the sphere continues to expand, particular subsets are pulled together via the attraction of gravity. This dual action of expansion and contraction set in motion the creativity that has given rise to every existing entity in the universe. “If you want to know the meaning of life, look at your hand. Energy flows through your skin and bones without which you would freeze to stone. That flow of energy in your hand came from the beginning of time. Your hand grew out of the colossal sphere like a flower rising up from topsoil. No one in the history of humanity knew that the expansion and contraction of the universe transformed primal atoms into stars and galaxies. Nor did any person know the quantum field theory and the general theory of relativity that govern this sphere of

That colossal sphere transformed itself into the stars and galaxies and everything else in the known universe.” I came to my answer to Oona’s question. “As this sphere moves forward in time, it evolves under the action of expansion and contraction. That is, as the sphere continues to expand, particular subsets are pulled together via the attraction of gravity. This dual action of expansion and contraction set in motion the creativity that has given rise to every existing entity in the universe. “If you want to know the meaning of life, look at your hand. Energy flows through your skin and bones without which you would freeze to stone. That flow of energy in your hand came from the beginning of time. Your hand grew out of the colossal sphere like a flower rising up from topsoil. No one in the history of humanity knew that the expansion and contraction of the universe transformed primal atoms into stars and galaxies. Nor did any person know the quantum field theory and the general theory of relativity that govern this sphere of light. None of the sages or kings had the slightest notion of any

came to my answer to Oona’s question. “As this sphere moves forward in time, it evolves under the action of expansion and contraction. That is, as the sphere continues to expand, particular subsets are pulled together via the attraction of gravity. This dual action of expansion and contraction set in motion the creativity that has given rise to every existing entity in the universe. “If you want to know the meaning of life, look at your hand. Energy flows through your skin and bones without which you would freeze to stone. That flow of energy in your hand came from the beginning of time. Your hand grew out of the colossal sphere like a flower rising up from topsoil. No one in the history of humanity knew that the expansion and contraction of the universe transformed primal atoms into stars and galaxies. Nor did any person know the quantum field theory and the general theory of relativity that govern this sphere of

Expansion brings unification, Contraction brings castration.

The stars are our ancestors,” write Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Swimme in The Journey of the Universe. “Out of them, everything comes forth…For stars, creativity depends on maintaining a state of disequilibrium…It is the dynamic tension between gravity and fusion…outward expansion and contraction…Stars are wombs of immense creativity.

The depth of gratitude activates the infinite supply. The interesting part of how this world is wired is that when you are looking for abundance it can be when you are experiencing lack, it's when gratitude is low on the list. To have the strength to actually expand in times of contraction is Mastery. I believe that when Jesus said, "I have overcome the world," he was talking about complete expansion in the midst of hugely challenging situations. That's why he is viewed as a Spiritual Master. Not because he suffered, but because he overcame the suffering and rose to overcome the situation.