Exposure And Experience Quotes

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.

At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future—the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit—with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive, and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction—and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.”14 So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames, and nonstop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.

Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. That is obvious. But what is just as obvious — and what is too often overlooked — is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

There was a change in Boldwood's exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when they love.

The human brain has a safety switch that gets engaged by traumatic exposure and experiences. It’s similar to being in shock but we remain there until it’s long over. We detach. We create degrees of separation between ourselves and what we feel, think, perceive, and ultimately, this impacts not only our worldview but also our perception of self. Clinically, this is called “Dissociation.

Johnny Cash had all of the same talents and problems as Elvis - a poor upbringing in the rural South exposure to gospel music throughout his childhood a penchant for drug abuse...they had the same sort of influencing experiences but Johnny' Cash's problematic relationship was with his father not his mother. If he had had the mommy issues that Elvis had instead of a compelling need to prove himself to his father, he wouldn't have been the badass man in black, the guy in Folsom Prison watching the train roll by. Elvis was a lot of things but even with the karate and the gunplay he was more unstable than badass.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we're inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched. Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts -- that we are individuals, but not alone.

Exposure and experience is all, what counts.

The traumatic stress field has adopted the term “Complex Trauma” to describe the experience of multiple and/or chronic and prolonged, developmentally adverse traumatic events, most often of an interpersonal nature (e.g., sexual or physical abuse, war, community violence) and early-life onset. These exposures often occur within the child’s caregiving system and include physical, emotional, and educational neglect and child maltreatment beginning in early childhood - Developmental Trauma Disorder

...[I]t is simply impossible to predict the effects of lifetime exposure to chemical and physical agents that are not part of the biological experience of man.

Spaced and interleaved exposure characterizes most of humans’ normal experience.

Age is only a number. Maturity to a large extent is dependent on your exposure to life, its experiences and your lessons from them.

People who ought to die of shock and exposure don't die of shock and exposure, et cetera, et cetera. The human frame is tougher than one can imagine possible. Moreover, in my experience, a physical shock is more often fatal than a mental shock.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

... none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something that I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and were blind.

No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values, life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment, love without sacrifice, power without fairness, facts without rigor, statistics without logic, mathematics without proof, teaching without experience, politeness without warmth, values without embodiment, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, friendship without investment, virtue without risk, probability without ergodicity, wealth without exposure, complication without depth, fluency without content, decision without asymmetry, science without skepticism, religion without tolerance, and, most of all: nothing without skin in the game.

...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased... [They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

For Scudder, that which lives senses life. Like Hippocrates, he taught that the study of medicine begins by training the senses to experience life. The human senses are the foundation of medicinal knowledge and they are trained by exposure to life in all its forms.

There are people whom a lowered position degrades morally, to whom loss of connection costs loss of self-respect: are not these justified in placing the highest value on that station and association which is their safeguard from debasement? If a man feels that he would become contemptible in his own eyes were it generally known that his ancestry were simple and not gentle, poor and not rich, workers and not capitalists, would it be right severely to blame him for keeping these fatal facts out of sight--for starting, trembling, quailing at the chance which threatens exposure? The longer we live, the more our experience widens; the less prone are we to judge our neighbor's conduct, to question the world's wisdom: wherever an accumulation of small defences is found, whether surrounding the prude's virtue or the man of the world's respectability, there, be sure, it is needed.

Helen Keller, author, speaker, and advocate for disabled persons, asserted,"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

They're arguing for giving homework and tests to all young children, or separating them into winners and losers, because these tykes need to get used to such things -- as if exposure itself will inoculate them against the negative effects they would otherwise experience later. If we were interested in helping children to anticipate and deal with unpleasant experiences, it might make sense to discuss the details with them and perhaps guide them through role-playing exercises. But why would we subject kids to those experiences? After all, to teach children how to handle a fire emergency, we talk to them about the dangers of smoke inhalation and advise them where to go when the alarm sounds. We don't actually set them on fire. But the key point is this: From a developmental perspective, BGUTI [Better-Get-Used-To-It worldview] is flat-out wrong. People don't get better at coping with unhappiness because they were because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young On the contrary, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the real world is to experience success and joy, to feel supported and respected, to receive loving guidance and unconditional care and the chance to have some say about what happens to them.

How do we build grit in our children? For my dad and me, it was a combination of bribery and exposure to minor traumatic experiences.

We can’t opt out of the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure that’s woven through our daily experiences. Life is vulnerable.

Excellence is sum total of three E’s - Education, Experience, and Exposure

Good leaders have experience. Great leaders have exposure.

Toxic stress response can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress-response systems can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years.

Your health isn’t entirely within your control, either, despite what diet culture wants you to think. Health isn’t something you can wrestle into submission by sheer force; certain circumstances beyond our control—genetics, socioeconomic status, experiences of stigma, environmental exposures—can affect our health outcomes. We can’t permanently change our body size through food intake and exercise, the way we’ve been told we can, and the same is true of our health—which, of course, is not dependent on body size. That is, even if everyone ate the exact same things and moved their bodies in the exact same ways, we’d all still have different health outcomes because of genetic differences, experiences of poverty and discrimination, and even deprivation that our mothers experienced during pregnancy. Many things contribute to health, meaning it’s not all down to personal responsibility, the way diet culture wants us to believe—not by a long shot.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure. —

Truth is the eldest daughter of knowledge. Intelligence is the eldest daughter of wisdom. Perception is the eldest daughter of understanding. Exposure is the eldest daughter of awareness. Calmness is the eldest daughter of peace. Hope is the eldest daughter of faith. Charity is the eldest daughter of virtue. Humility is the eldest daughter of honor. Mercy is the eldest daughter of grace. Chastity is the eldest daughter of piety. Modesty is the eldest daughter of meekness. Desire is the eldest daughter of action. Prudence is the eldest daughter of caution. Trust is the eldest daughter of Integrity. Friendship is the eldest daughter of kindness. Tolerance is the eldest daughter of equality. Freedom is the eldest daughter of democracy. Praise is the eldest daughter of appreciation. Patience is the eldest daughter of diligence. Maturity is the eldest daughter of growth. Harmony is the eldest daughter of order. Sound is the eldest daughter of movement. Heat is the eldest daughter of motion. Acceleration is the eldest daughter of force. Experience is the eldest daughter of reality. Chance is the eldest daughter of destiny. Time is the eldest daughter of eternity.

Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill? No, said Connie, exposure brought understanding. Only by confronting the worst traumas of life could you comprehend them and face them down, and off we’d trot to watch another play about man’s inhumanity to man.

Woolly as it is, the best advice is perhaps to allow yourself broad life experience and exposure to the human condition in all its beauty and horror. Do your best, but even then you will make mistakes.

but what Hopper’s urban scenes also replicate is one of the central experiences of being lonely: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with a sense of near-unbearable exposure.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do children as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

we can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts. But the primal source of human intelligence comes from the development of mirror neurons (see here), which gives us the ability to place ourselves in the skin of another and imagine their experience. Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective, but this requires effort on our part. Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own beliefs and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware. When it comes to studying another culture, it is only through the use of our empathic powers and by participating in their lives that we can begin to overcome these natural projections and arrive at the reality of their experience.

Ritual abuse diagnosis research – excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008).Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients’ degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. “In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion.” Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members.

addiction is a learned relationship between the timing and pattern of the exposure to substances or other potentially addictive experiences and a person’s predispositions, cultural and physical environment, and social and emotional needs.

For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of man as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. HELEN KELLER

We are precarious. Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverse knowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanent construction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, social exposure).

Helen Keller said, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Think

Look, people need to conform the external reality they face daily with this subjective feeling they likewise experience constantly. To do this they have two options. First, they can achieve what passes for great things. Now the external reality matches their feeling; they really are better than the rest and maybe they'll even be remembered as such. These are the ambitious people, the overachievers. These are also, however, the people who go on these abominable talk shows where they can trade their psychoses for exposure on that box, modernity's ultimate achievement. Not that this tact, being ambitious, is not the preferred course of action. The reason is it's the equivalent of sticking your neck out which we all know is dangerous. Instead many act like they have no ambition whatsoever. Their necks come back in and they're safe. Only problem is now they're at everyone else's level, which we've seen is untenable. The remedy of course is that everyone else needs to be sunk. This helps explain racism's enduring popularity. If I myself don't appear to be markedly superior to everyone else at least I'm part of the better race, country, religion et cetera. This in turn reflects well on my individual worth. There are other options, of course. For example, you can constantly bemoan others' lack of moral worth by extension elevating yourself. Think of the average person's reaction to our clients. Do these people strike you as so truly righteous that they are viscerally pained by our clients' misdeeds or are they similarly flawed people looking for anything to hang their hat on? The latter obviously, they're vermin.

Helen Keller observed in 1957 in The Open Door, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Toxic shame, the shame that binds us, is experienced as the all-pervasive sense that “I am flawed and defective as a human being.” Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that signals our limits; it is a state of being, a core identity. Toxic shame gives you a sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self with the self. It is like internal bleeding—exposure to oneself lies at the heart of toxic shame. A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself. Toxic shame is so excruciating because it is the painful exposure of the perceived failure of self to the self. In toxic shame the self becomes an object of its own contempt, an object that can’t be trusted. As an object that can’t be trusted, one experiences oneself as untrustworthy.

Helen Keller, author, speaker, and advocate for disabled persons, asserted, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

The first step is to stop seeing everything as a threat. You can’t will this to happen—it requires wider exposure. If you’ve been punched in the face, you won’t worry as much about a mugger, for example. If you face the flinch in meditation, you don’t worry about a long line at the bank. Build your base of confidence by having a vaster set of experiences to call upon, and you’ll realize you can handle more than you used to. Doing the uncomfortable is key. It widens your circle of comfort. Second, rework the pattern of threat response. Learn habits that move you out of a fight-or-flight choice and into another pattern that’s more effective.

final day of the original experiment. When the scientists examined the rats’ brains, they saw cocaine-induced changes in the rats’ reward pathways consistent with persistent cocaine sensitization. These findings show that a drug like cocaine can alter the brain forever. Similar findings have been shown with other addictive substances, from alcohol to opioids to cannabis. In my clinical work I see people who struggle with severe addiction slipping right back into compulsive use with a single exposure, even after years of abstinence. This may occur because of persistent sensitization to the drug of choice, the distant echoes of earlier drug use.

I think my political transformation began with my exposure to the business-as-usual attitude of many civil service bureaucrats during the war; then came the attempted Communist take-over of the picture business, which a lot of my liberal friends refused to admit ever happened; next, I had a brief experience living in a country that promised the kind of womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence a lot of these liberal friends wanted to bring to America. In 1949, I spent four months in England filming The Hasty Heart while the Labor Party was in power. I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country.

involved direct experimentation on children without informed consent being given by their parents or guardians. In the case of the Tuskeegee Study, children were harmed by preventable congenital syphilis. In the radiation experiments they were harmed through direct exposure after birth or in utero exposure during experiments on their mothers.

Cold exposure helps mitochondria, and it also stimulates capillary beds to increase circulation in your skin. Just aim the coldest water that will come out of your shower at your face and neck area for one minute. It will be unbearable for exactly three days, and that’s if you can even do it for a full minute. After that, your mitochondria change their amount of cardiolipin, a component of the inner mitochondrial membrane, so they can produce heat more quickly. The side effect is they can also make energy better, and suddenly that cold shower goes from painful to strangely relaxing and invigorating. Your collagen will thank you if you decide to experience three days of discomfort.

The global population of Earth are involved in the following corporate government experiments: The long term effects of - 1. Nuclear bomb fallout radiation. 2. Man-made wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation. 3. Exposure to man-made electricity. 4. Eclipsing of the Sun by the International Space Station (ISS), satellites, airplanes and jet aircraft contrails (chemtrails). 5. Eating food forced grown using a variety of toxic industrial chemicals. 6. Adding massive amounts of pollution to the atmosphere and water bodies. 7. Living in metal structures. 8. Exposure to abnormally high solar radiation levels. 9. Relocating to areas that the human has no genetic adaptation to. 10. An indoor lifestyle.

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

Depression for me was total exposure. A red-raw, naked mind. A skinned personality. A brain in a jar full of the acid that is experience. I'm not talking about all that What doesn't kill you makes you stronger stuff. No. That's simply not true. What doesn't kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn't kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your life.

Roney (2003) hypothesized that mere exposure to attractive women would activate cognitive adaptations in men designed to embody the qualities that women want in a mate. Specifically, he predicted that exposure to young attractive women would (1) increase the importance men place on their own financial success, (2) experience feeling more ambitious, and (3) produce self-descriptions that correspond to what women want. Using a cover story to disguise the purpose of the study, Roney had one group of men rate the effectiveness of advertisements containing young, attractive models and another group of men rate the effectiveness of ads containing older, less-attractive models. Following this exposure, the men responded to the key measures to test his hypotheses.

Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with "exposure" and "experience." The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity—and quality—in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.

The hotel which had had the bad luck to draw Aunt Agatha's custom was the Splendide, and by the time I got there there wasn't a member of the staff who didn't seem to be feeling it deeply. I sympathized with them. I've had experience of Aunt Agatha at hotels before. Of course, the real rough work was all over when I arrived, but I could tell by the way everyone grovelled before her that she had started by having her first room changed because it hadn't a southern exposure and her next because it had a creaking wardrobe and that she had said her say on the subject of the cooking, the waiting, the chambermaiding and everything else, with perfect freedom and candour. She had got the whole gang nicely under control by now. The manager, a whiskered cove who looked like a bandit, simply tied himself into knots whenever she looked at him.

In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences and interesting recollections which I associate with my long and intimate friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have continually been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversion to publicity. To his sombre and cynical spirit all popular applause was always abhorrent, and nothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand over the actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the general chorus of misplaced congratulation. It was indeed this attitude upon the part of my friend and certainly not any lack of interesting material which has caused me of late years to lay very few of my records before the public. My participation in some of his adventures was always a privilege which entailed discretion and reticence upon me.

When we drink alcohol, artificially high levels of dopamine are released into the brain—a glass of wine will release more dopamine than good sex, good chocolate, or good coffee. The above-normal level of dopamine tells our brain that alcohol is really good at keeping us alive, and so the brain sends out higher levels of glutamate to lock in the experience. We remember the experience of drinking a cold glass of Chardonnay on a hot summer day more than we remember eating a slice of apple pie, or drinking a kale smoothie, because of this neurobiological process. If we drink enough alcohol over a long enough period of time, this cycle locks in, and our brains identify alcohol as necessary for survival. When the midbrain is working properly, it will normally prioritize fighting, procreating, and eating. But over time and with enough exposure, the midbrain will begin to identify alcohol as necessary for survival. If we drink enough alcohol, our midbrain will eventually elevate drinking alcohol above other survival

And yet, somehow concealed in the shadows of what you can see is something that is not yet visible, something that is beating like a thunderous pulse and promises still greater visions. All else is merely its membrane enclosing the ultimate thing waiting to be born, preparing for the cataclysm which will be both the beginning and the end. To behold the prelude to this event is an experience of unbearable anticipation, so that ecstasy and dread merge into a new emotion, one corresponding perfectly to the exposure of the ultimate source of all manifestation. The

Perhaps I am here because of last night’s dream, when I stood on the frozen lake before a kayak made of sealskin. I walked on the ice toward the boat and picked up a handful of shredded hide and guts. An old Eskimo man said, “You have much to work with.” Suddenly, the kayak was stripped of its skin. It was a rib cage of willow. It was the skeleton of a fish. I want to see it for myself, wild exposure, in January, when this desert is most severe. The lake is like steel. I wrap my alpaca shawl tight around my face until only my eyes are exposed. I must keep walking to stay warm. Even the land is frozen. There is no give beneath my feet. I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined. Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.” We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

HARV appeared in front of me, arms crossed, head tilted. “You really should read your e-mails from Randy more carefully,” he lectured. “I skim them,” I protested. “Well, if you skimmed them more carefully you would know that prolonged exposure to stealth mode may lead to side effects.” “I can handle . . .” “Impotence.” HARV smiled. “Oh,” I said. “Randy hasn’t really tested it on humans. It’s extra tough to get volunteers for those types of experiments,” HARV said. “Though he has computer simulated it and the results tend to support this conclusion.” “Let’s try to limit our use of stealth mode from now on,” I said.

SINCE my experiences in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum were published in the World I have received hundreds of letters in regard to it. The edition containing my story long since ran out, and I have been prevailed upon to allow it to be published in book form, to satisfy the hundreds who are yet asking for copies. I am happy to be able to state as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So, I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work.

Beyond identifying and admitting the cause of their challenge, people who lack humility need behavioral training in an exposure therapy kind of way. Don't be put off by the clinical sound of this. What I mean is that employees can make progress simply by acting like they are humble. By intentionally forcing themselves to compliment others, admit their mistakes and weaknesses, and take an interest in colleagues, employees can begin to experience the liberation of humility. This happens because they suddenly realize that focusing on others does not detract from their own happiness, but rather adds to it. After all, humility is the most attractive and central of all virtues.

abundant time in nature is a critical wellspring of human health, with a deep and formative influence on children in particular. Nature’s impacts extend far beyond physical fitness, encompassing intellectual and emotional health, self-identity, and basic values and morals. Health benefits of exposure to nature include enhanced healing, stress reduction, creativity, and self-esteem. Nature also has an unparalleled capacity to stir our emotions, fostering raw and powerful feelings of wonder, awe, mystery, joy—and, yes, fear. Smelling a wildflower in an alpine meadow, sprinting into the ocean surf, and sharing a face-to-face encounter with a coyote are all experiences that differ mightily from virtual alternatives.

Over the course of the last decade, we have witnessed something of a cultural awakening around the importance of embracing vulnerability in the quest for meaning and connection. The groundbreaking writing of Brene Brown has inspired millions to pursue what Brown calls "wholehearted living," a posture of resilience and compassion that begins with the conviction that "yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn't change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging." According to Brown, the only way to experience meaningful connection is to stop numbing and start engaging, to lean into uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure so we can "look at life and the people around us, and say, 'I'm all in.

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal. It’s for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic” events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.

According to a 2000 New York Times study of 100 "rampage" mass murders, where 425 people were killed and 510 injured, the killers: 1. Often have serious mental health issues 2. Are not usually motivated by exposure to videos, movies, or television 3. Are not using alcohol or other drugs at the time of the attacks 4. Are often unemployed 5. Are sometimes female 6. Are not usually Satanists or racists 7. Are most often white males although a few are Asian or African American 8. Sometimes have college degrees or some years of college 9. Often have military experience 10. Give lots of pre-attack warning signals 11. Often carry semiautomatic weapons obtained legally 12. Often do no attempt escape 13. Half commit suicide or are killed by others 14. Most have a death wish (Fessenden, 2000)

While Marie always believed in the importance of X-rays and the healing properties of radium, both she and Pierre suffered radium burns during their experiments; indeed, sometimes the burns were purposeful parts of the experiments. Marie also often carried test tubes of radium in her pockets for convenience. Marie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, a blood disease associated with radiation exposure. In 1956, Irène died of leukemia, likely from her decades of work with polonium. Frédéric died two years later of liver disease, also likely caused or exacerbated by his long work in radioactivity. The radiation experiments Marie conducted were so intense, and done without protective equipment (because no one yet knew how necessary it would be), that Marie’s notebooks and papers can still be viewed only by people wearing specially purposed protective gear

Chef Ayden says you have something special. An 'affinity with the things that come from the dirt,' he says. A master of spices. And coming from Ayden that means a lot. He doesn't usually believe in natural inclinations. Only in working hard enough to make the hard work seem effortless. Is it true about you?" I know my eyebrows look about ready to parachute off my face. "You mean the bay-leaf thing?" "No more oil, that's good." She takes the bowl of marinated octopus from my hand, covers it with a red cloth, and puts it in the fridge. "The 'bay-leaf thing' is exactly what I mean. You're new to Spain. From what your teacher tells me, not many of you have had exposure to world cuisines. Yet, you know a variety of herb that looks and smells slightly different when found outside of this region. I'm sure you've probably seen it in other ways. You've probably mixed spices together no one told you would go together. Cut a vegetable in a certain way that you believe will render it more flavorful. You know things that no one has taught you, sí?" I shake my head no at her. 'Buela always said I had magic hands but I've never said it out loud about myself. And I don't know if I believed it was magic as much as I believed I'm a really good cook. But she is right; most of my experimenting is with spices. "My aunt Sarah sends me recipes that I practice with. And I watch a lot on Food Network. Do you have that channel here? It's really good. They have this show called Chopped-" Chef Amadí puts down the rag she was wiping down the counter with and takes my hands in hers. Studies my palms. "Chef Ayden tells me you have a gift. If you don't want to call it magic, fine. You have a gift and it's probably changed the lives of people around you. When you cook, you are giving people a gift. Remember that.

This photo is classic aestheticism. The engaging expression, the loose dress and fluid posture. Early to mid-1860's, if I had to guess." "It reminded me of the Pre-Raphaelites." "Related, definitely; and of course the artists of the time were all inspired by one another. They obsessed over things like nature and truth; color, composition, and the meaning of beauty. But where the Pre-Raphaelites strove for realism and detail, the painters and photographers of the Magenta Brotherhood were devoted to sensuality and motion." "There's something moving about the quality of light, don't you think?" "The photographer would be thrilled to hear you say so. Light was of principal concern to them: they took their name from Goethe's color wheel theories, the interplay of light and dark, the idea that there was a hidden color in the spectrum, between red and violet, that closed the circle. You have to remember, it was right in the middle of a period when science and art were exploding in all directions. Photographers were able to use technology in ways they hadn't before, to manipulate light and experiment with exposure times to create completely new effects.

From another corner of neuroscience, we’re learning about a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Though there are more than fifty neurotransmitters (that we know of), scientists studying substance problems have given dopamine much of their attention. The brain’s reward system and pleasure centers—the areas most impacted by substance use and compulsive behaviors—have a high concentration of dopamine. Some brains have more of it than others, and some people have a capacity to enjoy a range of experiences more than others, owing to a combination of genetics and environment. The thing about dopamine is that it makes us feel really good. We tend to want more of it. It is naturally generated through ordinary, pleasurable activities like eating and sex, and it is the brain’s way of rewarding us—or nature’s way of rewarding the brain—for activities necessary to our survival, individually or as a species. It is the “mechanism by which ‘instinct’ is manifest.” Our brains arrange for dopamine levels to rise in anticipation and spike during a pleasurable activity to make sure we do it again. It helps focus our attention on all the cues that contributed to our exposure to whatever felt good (these eventually become triggers to use, as we explain later). Drugs and alcohol (and certain behaviors) turn on a gushing fire hose of dopamine in the brain, and we feel good, even euphoric. Dopamine produced by these artificial means, however, throws our pleasure and reward systems out of whack immediately. Flooding the brain repeatedly with dopamine has long-term effects and creates what’s known as tolerance—when we lose our ability to produce or absorb our own dopamine and need more and more of it artificially just to feel okay. Specifically, the brain compensates for the flood of dopamine by decreasing its own production of it or by desensitizing itself to the neurotransmitter by reducing the number of dopamine receptors, or both. The brain is just trying to keep a balance. The problem with the brain’s reduction in natural dopamine production is that when you take the substance or behavior out of the picture, there’s not enough dopamine in the brain to make you feel good. Without enough dopamine, there is no interest or pleasure. Then not only does the brain lose the pleasure associated with using, it might not be able to enjoy a sunset or a back rub, either. A lowered level of dopamine, combined with people’s longing for the rush of dopamine they got from using substances, contributes to “craving” states. Cravings are a physiological process associated with the brain’s struggle to regain its normal dopamine balance, and they can influence a decision to keep using a substance even when a person is experiencing negative consequences that matter to him and a strong desire to change. Depending on the length of time and quantities a person has been using, these craving states can be quite uncomfortable and compelling. The dopamine system can and does recover, starting as soon as we stop flooding it. But it takes time, and in the time between shutting off the artificial supply of dopamine and the brain’s rebuilding its natural resources, people tend to feel worse (before they feel better). On a deep, instinctual level, their brains are telling them that by stopping using, something is missing; something is wrong. This is a huge factor in relapse, despite good intentions and effort to change. Knowing this can help you and your loved one make it across this gap in brain reward systems.

Why had the introduction of a supposedly harmless virus carrying a gene into the liver caused such a devastating, fatal reaction? As physicians, scientists, and regulators sifted through the trial, the reasons for the failed experiment became evident. The vectors used to infect Gelsinger's cells had never been properly vetted in humans. But most important, Gelsinger's immune response to the virus should have been anticipated. Gelsinger had likely been naturally exposed to the strain of adenovirus that had been used in the gene-therapy experiment. His brisk immune response was not an aberration; it was the perfectly habitual response of a body fighting a pathogen that it had previously encountered, possibly during infection by a cold. In choosing a common human virus as their vehicle for gene delivery, gene therapists had made a crucial error of judgment: they had neglected to consider that genes were being delivered into a human body with a history, with scars, memories, and prior exposures. "How could such a beautiful thing go so, so wrong?" Paul Gelsinger had asked. We now know how: because-seeking only beauty-scientists were unprepared for catastrophe. The doctors pushing the frontiers of human medicine had forgotten to account for the common cold.

The big question that usually comes up at this point of our discussion is, “Abraham, how do I know that what comes forth from within me may be trusted? Isn’t there someone greater than I who makes all of the rules and wants me to be or do specific things?” And we say, you are the creator of your experience, and you have emerged forth into this physical body through the power of your desire. You are not here to prove yourself worthy of something else; you are not here because you seek greater salvation on some other plane. You are here because you have a specific purpose in being here. You want to be a Deliberate Creator, and you have chosen this physical dimension, where there is time and space, so that you may finely tune your understanding and then see the benefits of whatever you have created in thought by allowing it to come into your physical experience. You are adding to the expansion of the Universe, and All-That-Is benefits from your existence, by your exposure to this experience and by your expansion. All that you do pleases that which you seek to please. There is not a list of things that are right and a list of things that are wrong—there is only that which aligns with your true intent and purpose, and that which does not. You may trust your Guidance that comes forth from within you to help you know when you are in alignment with your state of natural Well-Being.

Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict when as a social collective we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations? To pose that question is to answer it. We despise, ostracize and punish the addict because we don’t wish to see how much we resemble him. In his dark mirror our own features are unmistakable. We shudder at the recognition. This mirror is not for us, we say to the addict. You are different, and you don’t belong with us. Like the hardcore addict’s pursuit of drugs, much of our economic and cultural life caters to people’s craving to escape mental and emotional distress. In an apt phrase, Lewis Lapham, long-time publisher of Harper’s Magazine, derides “consumer markets selling promises of instant relief from the pain of thought, loneliness, doubt, experience, envy, and old age.” According to a Statistics Canada study, 31 per cent of working adults aged nineteen to sixty-four consider themselves workaholics, who attach excessive importance to their work and are “overdedicated and perhaps overwhelmed by their jobs.” “They have trouble sleeping, are more likely to be stressed out and unhealthy, and feel they don’t spend enough time with their families,” reports the Globe and Mail. Work doesn’t necessarily give them greater satisfaction, suggested Vishwanath Baba, a professor of Human Resources and Management at McMaster University. “These people turn to work to occupy their time and energy” — as compensation for what is lacking in their lives, much as the drug addict employs substances. At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only towards the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future — the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the centre, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit, with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action- and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction— and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.” So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, emails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames and non-stop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.

Understand: we can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts. But the primal source of human intelligence comes from the development of mirror neurons (see here), which gives us the ability to place ourselves in the skin of another and imagine their experience. Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective, but this requires effort on our part. Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own beliefs and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware. When it comes to studying another culture, it is only through the use of our empathic powers and by participating in their lives that we can begin to overcome these natural projections and arrive at the reality of their experience. To do so we must overcome our great fear of the Other and the unfamiliarity of their ways. We must enter their belief and value systems, their guiding myths, their way of seeing the world. Slowly, the distorted lens through which we first viewed them starts to clear up. Going deeper into their Otherness, feeling what they feel, we can discover what makes them different and learn about human nature. This applies to cultures, individuals, and even writers of books. As Nietzsche once wrote, “As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion.

Second, most of the officers in this study did not have experience as tactical officers, and the teams they formed had very limited practice time together. It is possible that, with practice and experience, the effects of a threat on the performance of the dumps observed here can be overcome. This is the essence of the habituation findings in the orienting response literature (Sokolov et al., 2002). A SWAT team that regularly practices may be able to overcome the natural tendency to orient on a threat and cover their respective areas, producing exposure times that are consistent with those produced by the slice (many SWAT officers that we have spoken to insist that this is the case); however, we would like to point out that this means conducting training specifically to overcome a natural instinct, and this process is likely to take considerable effort and time. In the case of patrol officers, who are likely to be the first on the scene during an active shooter event, the officers are unlikely to receive the amount of training that is needed to overcome these natural instincts. With these caveats in mind, we think it is clear that the slice is a better style of entry to teach to patrol officers during active shooter training. The structure of the slice does not attempt to overcome the officer’s natural tendencies. It allows these tactically less-experienced officers to deal with the problem in smaller pieces and provides the officers with more time to think through the situation. For these reasons, the specific entries tested in the other studies presented in this book are conducted using a slice style.

It had had a fragrant element, reminding him of a regular childhood experience, a memory that reverberated like the chimes of a prayer bell inside his head. For a few moments, he pictured the old Orthodox church that had dominated his remote Russian village. The bearded priest was swinging the elaborate incense-burner, suspended from gold-plated chains. It had been the same odour. Hadn’t it? He blinked, shook his head. He couldn’t make sense of that. He decided, with an odd lack of enthusiasm, that he’d imagined it. The effects of the war played tricks of the mind, of the senses. Looking over his shoulder, he counted all seven of his men as they emerged from the remnants of the four-storey civic office building. A few muddied documents were scattered on the ground, stamped with the official Nazi Party eagle, its head turned to the left, and an emblem he failed to recognize, but which looked to him like a decorative wheel, with a geometrical design of squares at its centre. Even a blackened flag had survived the bomb damage. Hanging beneath a crumbling windowsill, the swastika flapped against the bullet-ridden façade, the movement both panicky and defiant, Pavel thought. His men were conscripts. A few still wore their padded khaki jackets and mustard-yellow blouses. Most, their green field tunics and forage caps. All the clothing was lice-ridden and smeared with soft ash. Months of exposure to frozen winds had darkened their skins and narrowed their eyes. They’d been engaged in hazardous reconnaissance missions. They’d slept rough and had existed on a diet of raw husks and dried horsemeat. Haggard and weary now, he reckoned they’d aged well beyond their years.

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

September 1995: Mark and I had our well documented book entitled TRANCE Formation of America published, complete with irrefutable graphic details which are in themselves evidence to present to Congress, all factions of law enforcement including the FBI, CIA, DIA, DEA, TBI, NSA, etc., all major news media groups, national and international human rights advocates, both American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations, the National Institute of Mental Health, and more… to no avail. TRANCE thoroughly exposes many of the perpe-TRAITORS and their agenda replete with names, which raises the question “why haven't we been sued?” The obvious answer is that the same “National Security Act” that continues to block our access to all avenues of justice and public exposure also prevents these criminals from inevitably bringing mind control to light through court procedures, an opportunity we would welcome. Meanwhile, as reported by both APAs, survivors of U.S. Government sponsored mind control began to surface all across our nation. The first to encounter the vast number of survivors were law enforcement and mental health professionals, and these professionals began to ask questions. in other countries, answers are being provided through somewhat less controlled media, reflecting the CIA's involvement in Project MK Ultra human rights atrocities. A television documentary entitled The Sleep Room aired across Canada by the Canadian Broadcast Corp. in the spring of 1998. Dr. Martin Orne, an associate boasted by Dr. William Mitchell M.D., Ph.D. who thrust Kelly into Vanderbilt's cover-up attempt (re: p.14), is named as an accomplice to Dr. Ewing Cameron's MK Ultra 'experiments' in Montreal, Quebec. Additionally, it should be known that Dr. Cameron went on to found the American Psychiatric Association, which has helped to maintain America's mental health profession in the dark ages of information control.

A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical and environmental information on cells and genomes—but this capacity is speculative, limited, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable: a parent with an experience of starvation produces children with obesity and overnourishment, while a father with the experience of tuberculosis, say, does not produce a child with an altered response to tuberculosis. Most epigenetic “memories” are the consequence of ancient evolutionary pathways, and cannot be confused with our longing to affix desirable legacies on our children. As with genetics in the early twentieth century, epigenetics is now being used to justify junk science and enforce stifling definitions of normalcy. Diets, exposures, memories, and therapies that purport to alter heredity are eerily reminiscent of Lysenko’s attempt to “reeducate” wheat using shock therapy. Mothers are being asked to minimize anxiety during their pregnancy—lest they taint all their children, and their children, with traumatized mitochondria. Lamarck is being rehabilitated into the new Mendel. These glib notions about epigenetics should invite skepticism. Environmental information can certainly be etched on the genome. But most of these imprints are recorded as “genetic memories” in the cells and genomes of individual organisms—not carried forward across generations. A man who loses a leg in an accident bears the imprint of that accident in his cells, wounds, and scars—but does not bear children with shortened legs. Nor has the uprooted life of my family seem to have burdened me, or my children, with any wrenching sense of estrangement. Despite Menelaus’s admonitions, the blood of our fathers is lost in us—and so, fortunately, are their foibles and sins. It is an arrangement that we should celebrate more than rue. Genomes and epigenomes exist to record and transmit likeness, legacy, memory, and history across cells and generations. Mutations, the reassortment of genes, and the erasure of memories counterbalance these forces, enabling unlikeness, variation, monstrosity, genius, and reinvention—and the refulgent possibility of new beginnings, generation upon generation.

I have come to think of the UFO problem in terms of three distinct levels. The first level is physical. We now know that the UFO behaves like a region of space, of small dimensions (about ten meters), within which a very large amount of energy is stored. This energy is manifested by pulsed light phenomena of intense colors and by other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The second level is biological. Reports of UFOs show all kinds of psychophysiological effects on the witnesses. Exposure to the phenomenon causes visions, hallucinations, space and time disorientation, physiological reactions (including temporary blindness, paralysis, sleep cycle changes), and long-term personality changes. The third level is social. Belief in the reality of UFOs is spreading rapidly at all levels of society throughout the world. Books on the subject continue to accumulate. Documentaries and major films are being made by men and women who grew up with flying-saucer stories. Expectations about life in the universe have been revolutionized. Many modern themes in our culture can be traced back to the "messages from space" coming from UFO contactees of the forties and fifties. The experience of a close encounter with a UFO is a shattering physical and mental ordeal. The trauma has effects that go far beyond what the witnesses recall consciously. New types of behavior are conditioned, and new types of beliefs are promoted. Aside from any scientific consideration, the social, political, and religious consequences of the experience are enormous if they are considered over the timespan of a generation. Faced with the new wave of experiences of UFO contact that are described in books like Communion and Intruders and in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, our religions seem obsolete. Our idea of the church as a social entity working within rational structures is obviously challenged by the claim of a direct communication in modern times with visible beings who seem endowed with supernatural powers. This idea can shake our society to the very roots of its culture. Witnesses are no longer afraid to come forward with personal stories of abductions, of spiritual exchanges with aliens, even of sexual interaction with them. Such reports are folklore in the making. I have discovered that they form a striking parallel to the tales of meetings with elves and jinn of medieval times, with the denizens of "Magonia," the land beyond the clouds of ancient chronicles. But they are something else, too: a portent of important things to come.

Most disconcerting of all were those experiences in which the patient's consciousness appeared to expand beyond the usual boundaries of the ego and explore what it was like to be other living things and even other objects. For example, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female prehistoric reptile. She not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species' anatomy she found most sexually arousing was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. Although the woman had no prior knowledge of such things, a conversation Grof had with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles, colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. Patients were also able to tap into the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors. One woman experienced what it was like to be her mother at the age of three and accurately described a frightening event that had befallen her mother at the time. The woman also gave a precise description of the house her mother had lived in as well as the white pinafore she had been wearing—all details her mother later confirmed and admitted she had never talked about before. Other patients gave equally accurate descriptions of events that had befallen ancestors who had lived decades and even centuries before. Other experiences included the accessing of racial and collective memories. Individuals of Slavic origin experienced what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan's Mongolian hordes, to dance in trance with the Kalahari bushmen, to undergo the initiation rites of the Australian aborigines, and to die as sacrificial victims of the Aztecs. And again the descriptions frequently contained obscure historical facts and a degree of knowledge that was often completely at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. For instance, one uneducated patient gave a richly detailed account of the techniques involved in the Egyptian practice of embalming and mummification, including the form and meaning of various amulets and sepulchral boxes, a list of the materials used in the fixing of the mummy cloth, the size and shape of the mummy bandages, and other esoteric facets of Egyptian funeral services. Other individuals tuned into the cultures of the Far East and not only gave impressive descriptions of what it was like to have a Japanese, Chinese, or Tibetan psyche, but also related various Taoist or Buddhist teachings.

Beyoncé and Rihanna were pop stars. Pop stars were musical performers whose celebrity had exploded to the point where they could be identified by single words. You could say BEYONCÉ or RIHANNA to almost anyone anywhere in the industrialized world and it would conjure a vague neurological image of either Beyoncé or Rihanna. Their songs were about the same six subjects of all songs by all pop stars: love, celebrity, fucking, heartbreak, money and buying ugly shit. It was the Twenty-First Century. It was the Internet. Fame was everything. Traditional money had been debased by mass production. Traditional money had ceased to be about an exchange of humiliation for food and shelter. Traditional money had become the equivalent of a fantasy world in which different hunks of vampiric plastic made emphatic arguments about why they should cross the threshold of your home. There was nothing left to buy. Fame was everything because traditional money had failed. Fame was everything because fame was the world’s last valid currency. Beyoncé and Rihanna were part of a popular entertainment industry which deluged people with images of grotesque success. The unspoken ideology of popular entertainment was that its customers could end up as famous as the performers. They only needed to try hard enough and believe in their dreams. Like all pop stars, Beyoncé and Rihanna existed off the illusion that their fame was a shared experience with their fans. Their fans weren’t consumers. Their fans were fellow travelers on a journey through life. In 2013, this connection between the famous and their fans was fostered on Twitter. Beyoncé and Rihanna were tweeting. Their millions of fans were tweeting back. They too could achieve their dreams. Of course, neither Beyoncé nor Rihanna used Twitter. They had assistants and handlers who packaged their tweets for maximum profit and exposure. Fame could purchase the illusion of being an Internet user without the purchaser ever touching a mobile phone or a computer. That was a difference between the rich and the poor. The poor were doomed to the Internet, which was a wonderful resource for watching shitty television, experiencing angst about other people’s salaries, and casting doubt on key tenets of Mormonism and Scientology. If Beyoncé or Rihanna were asked about how to be like them and gave an honest answer, it would have sounded like this: “You can’t. You won’t. You are nothing like me. I am a powerful mixture of untamed ambition, early childhood trauma and genetic mystery. I am a portal in the vacuum of space. The formula for my creation is impossible to replicate. The One True God made me and will never make the like again. You are nothing like me.

...a long-term reputation is only at risk when companies engage in vocal launch activities such as PR and building hype. When a product fails to live up to those pronouncements, real long-term damage can happen to a corporate brand. But startups have the advantage of being obscure, having a pathetically small number of customers and not having much exposure. Rather than lamenting them, use these advantages to experiment under the radar and then do a public marketing launch once the product has proved itself with real customers.

Security is mostly a superstition," Kaden quotes. "It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Because interiority focuses on the inside-outside aspect of hygge, it introduces the important theme of contrast. When we hygger there is a sense of distance between us and the outside world, a contrast between the feeling that we are at the still axis of a moment of pleasure and our awareness of ever-moving life around us. Our experience of contrast is heightened by spatial, temporal and social conditions - inside versus outside, shelter versus exposure, warm versus cold, day versus night, light versus shadow, stillness versus activity, indulgence versus restraint, relaxation versus work, independence versus society, equality versus hierarchy, peace versus conflict.

As the years go by and I grow older, I feel compelled to record my experiences in wartime Germany. It is important that my children, grandchildren and future generations know about the difficult times we all endured and of the horrors that existed in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Due to my advanced age and present condition, I am aware of the urgency to document my memories. If I fail in this, I will fail those who follow me, for they will never know!” Adeline Perry This book had its origin many years ago when Adeline Perry tried to recount her experiences and found that she would become overcome by her emotions every time she tried. The horrors and trials that she had experienced, plus the responsibility of raising her two daughters proved to be overwhelming. It was not until the twilight of her life when her daughters gently persuaded her to try again so that future generations might hear and perhaps learn from her experiences. In fact a good portion of these manuscripts were written while she was in the care of Hospice and only now survive because of immense personal strength and devotion to her family and the desire that what had happened to her would never happen again. Her daughter, and my wife, Ursula can take a great deal of pride in the effort it took to make these manuscripts a reality. After Adeline’s passing I had the privilege to develop the book Suppressed I Rise. Staying true to her story I gave her the authorship of the first edition of this book, which adhered to, and did not exceed what she had left in her original manuscripts. This book which was printed in limited numbers became an instant success and deserved more exposure. Readers also felt that there were questions that went unanswered requiring a follow-up. How did Adeline justify going to Germany prior to World War II? What happened to her marriage to Richard and how did she resume her own life, as a single mother, when she returned to South Africa! With additional reflections by her daughters Brigitte Grigsby and Ursula Bracker, and travel to the areas discussed in Suppressed I Rise, I expanded the book to include the prewar years. I also corrected minor contradictions and factual discrepancies that were inadvertently caused by the passage of time. Talking to people in Germany I confirmed some of what had happened including the hanging of the Russian prisoner of war. The book has now become a powerful example of not only personal courage but also of human tragedy. It is a book that I am proud to have written and share in the concept that it was a story that had to be told.

When we identify with thoughts and emotions, they seem real. But thoughts about reality are not reality. Only mental imagery. A vague sense of probability. Direct experience is direct perception before belief and before thoughts. Explanation of experience pulls us out of experience and into thought. Reality cannot be experienced with the intellect, because the intellect can only think thoughts about reality. Thoughts and emotions replace reality with illusion. But they are subject to exposure by truth. Direct experience is seeing things as they are rather than as we imagine them to be.

The Basis of Temptation Because Adam sinned, every person is born into this world physically alive and spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1). Since from birth we had neither the presence of God nor the knowledge of His ways, we learned to live our lives independent of God. Rather than having our needs met through a living relationship with our loving heavenly Father, we sought to meet our own needs. We developed patterns of thought and habits of behavior which centered our interests on ourselves. When we were born again we became spiritually alive, but our self-centered flesh patterns and mental strongholds remained opposed to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Consequently we are still tempted to look to the world, the flesh, and the devil to meet our basic needs and carnal desires instead of looking to Christ, who promises to meet all our needs according to His riches in glory (Philippians 4:19). Every temptation is an enticement to live independently of God. The power of temptation is directly related to the strength of the mental strongholds and the carnal desires which were developed when we learned to live independently of God. For example, if you were raised in a Christian home where dirty magazines and television programs of questionable moral value were not allowed, the power of sexual temptations in your life will not be as great as for someone who grew up exposed to pornographic materials. The person who was raised in an environment of immorality and sexual permissiveness will experience a greater struggle with sexual temptation after becoming a Christian simply because these mental strongholds were well-established before he was born again. You are less likely be tempted to commit some gross immorality if your legitimate needs to be loved and accepted were met by caring parents who also protected you from exposure to the values of this fallen world.

human, all perfect, all divine. I am the founder of Positive Exposure, an organization that celebrates the beauty of human diversity through the visual arts and narrative. Our shared synergies, our interconnectivities, facilitate incredible moments when our paths intersect. Each experience encourages, empowers me to focus sharper, broaden my vision as an artist and to see with every cell of my being.  I have had amazing opportunities to collaborate with several individuals whose lives have changed because of Dr. D.’s embrace. Their families have healed, their communities empowered, as one family states, “without medicine” but with love, humility

Action Steps 1. Audit your current skill set. You have more areas of competence than you think. Throughout your life, you have amassed knowledge and specialized skills in a wide range of disciplines. That knowledge and those skills can prove useful to you in future endeavors. For example, I have a degree in Finance and Investments. Upon graduating from college, I accepted an accounting position with one of the top automakers. I then became a stockbroker. Then, I moved into a career in IT. For the past 20 years, I’ve been a writer in numerous capacities. Along the way, I learned about server management, Wordpress development and search engine optimization. All of these ventures imbued me with skills I use every day - in my business and personal life. Your experience has likewise instilled within you a raft of specialized skills. Many of them will help you to tackle unfamiliar tasks and projects, even if they seem unrelated to your current and previous jobs. 2. Focus on your desired outcomes rather than the things that might go wrong along the way. One of our survival instincts is to plan for things that might go wrong. In some circumstances, that’s a valuable quality that protects us from harm. It prevents us from strolling down dark alleys in unpopulated locales. It discourages us from petting strange dogs. In other circumstances, however, it can hold us back. The instinct prevents us from pursuing opportunities that can lead to improved aptitude as well as personal and professional growth. By focusing on your desire outcomes, you’ll find it easier to ignore your inborn fear of the unknown. You’ll be able to dismiss the voice in your head constantly whispering “What if XYZ happens?” 3. Look for opportunities to learn new skills. The self-confidence you’ll gain will make you less fearful of tackling unfamiliar tasks. Achieving a high level of competency in any discipline requires repeated exposure and application. There’s no other way to attain proficiency. The problem is a lack of courage. It’s normal to feel hesitant, or even intimidated, when we’re given a new responsibility.

Regardless of how we approach systemic vulnerability, once we try to strip uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure from the relational experience, we bankrupt courage by definition. Again, we know that courage is four skill sets with vulnerability at the center. So the bad news is that there’s no app for it, and regardless of what you do and where you work, you’re called to be brave in vulnerability even if your job is engineering the vulnerability out of systems. The good news is that if we can successfully develop the four courage-building skills, starting with how to rumble with vulnerability, we will have the capacity for something deeply human, invaluable to leadership, and unattainable by machines. Myth #5: Trust comes before vulnerability. We sometimes do an exercise with groups where we give people sentence stems and they fill out the answers on a Post-it note. An example:

​In short, it is my experience (and the experience of many other polyglots) that the brain will keep a language active if you are studying or using a related language, even if you have no exposure to the first language. Indeed, sometimes you can improve and consolidate your knowledge of the first language with no dedicated effort simply by studying a related language.

in a difficult market environment, profits will be smaller than normal and losses will be larger; downside gaps will be more common, and you will likely experience greater slippage. The smart way to handle this is to do the following: Tighten up stop-losses. If you normally cut losses at 7 to 8 percent, cut them at 5 to 6 percent. Settle for smaller profits. If you normally take profits of 15 to 20 percent on average, take profits at 10 to 12 percent. If you’re trading with the use of leverage, get off margin immediately. Reduce your exposure with regard to your position sizes as well as your overall capital commitment. Once you see your batting average and reward/risk profile improve, you can start to extend your parameters gradually back to normal levels.

2. SPIRITUAL NURTURANCE: Seeing and reflecting back to the child his or her essential worth, basic goodness and loving nature. Engendering experiences of joy, fun, and love to maintain the child’s innate sense that life is a gift. Spiritual or philosophical guidance to help the child integrate painful aspects of life. Nurturing the child’s creative self-expression. Frequent exposure to nature.

The dorsomedial striatum, a subregion of the basal ganglia, seems to be critical to goal-directed behavior. If it is damaged, the rat’s behavior will quickly become habitual even after limited exposure to a new task. Conversely, damage to the neighboring dorsolateral striatum will lead the rat to be more goal-directed and it will never lapse into habit, even after prolonged training.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. —Helen Keller, from The Open Door (1957)