Fabrication Related Quotes

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is—marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

people who may not be in the blood-related “family” bucket but don’t fit into the “friends” bucket. They’re those important people who are woven into the fabric of our daily lives, and their absence would surely leave holes should they disappear.

Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows." Essay on the Biological Sciences, in: Good Reading (1958)

I think life becomes a fabric of choices, interwoven, all related... I split my life into these two things, thief and lady

Thucydides and, maybe, Machiavelli’s prince are most closely related to me by their unconditional will to fabricate nothing and to see reason in reality—not in “reason,” and still less in “morality” . . .

I hate gossips. I really do. I often wonder where they get the time and effort they put into either digging or fabricating so called *facts* about others. But these ridiculous creatures are a prime example of how the self-communal can try to injure and diminish the self-that-is. Now you know where the home of the self esteem is. It is not merely within the self. It is within the self-that-is. It is not within the self in relation. This can never hold true. Any sense of self estimation you get from the communal can never hold essentially true.

I don’t think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

A loud, purposeful knock on the front door froze him in place with his fist over the fabric. “Hey, dude, it’s me. I brought you all four Bloodsport movies. Open up!” Jason’s voice filtered past the front door, and he and Violet flew apart like teenagers at a party raid. No way. This wasn’t happening. He had not just gotten cock-blocked by his best friend and partner, AKA the only living relative of the woman he’d very nearly stripped naked in his front hallway.

State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation,’ to be achieved by ‘deriving everything from an original principle’ (truth), by ‘relating everything to an ideal’ (justice), and by ‘unifying this principle and this ideal to a single Idea’ (the State). The end product would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’ – each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ] Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes—or aspires to become—a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factory, it is with the notion of being freed from it one day or another by a fame as sudden as it is inconceivable. * Equally tragic is the case of the poet. Walled up in his own language, he writes for his friends—for ten, for twenty persons at the most. His longing to be read is no less imperious than that of the impoverished novelist. At least he has the advantage over the latter of being able to get his verses published in the little émigré reviews which appear at the cost of almost indecent sacrifices and renunciations. Let us say such a man becomes—transforms himself—into an editor of such a review; to keep his publication alive he risks hunger, abstains from women, buries himself in a windowless room, imposes privations which confound and appall. Tuberculosis and masturbation, that is his fate. No matter how scanty the number of émigrés, they form groups, not to protect their interests but to get up subscriptions, to bleed each other white in order to publish their regrets, their cries, their echoless appeals. One cannot conceive of a more heart rending form of the gratuitous. That they are as good poets as they are bad prose writers is to be accounted for readily enough. Consider the literary production of any "minor" nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic. Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center. Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbarous genius and a formless language. To create a literature is to create a prose.

And 'the holy' will be, in Dr. Otto's language, a complex category of the 'numinous' and the 'moral', or, in one of his favourite metaphors, a fabric in which we have the non-rational numinous experience as the woof and the rational and ethical as the warp.

...The spiritual Oriental teachers say a person has three forms of mind,'' Beatrice was explaining to him once, while they were on break between one lesson and another at university, ''which are the dense mind, the subtle level and the ultra-subtle mind. Primary Consciousness, or the dense mind, is that existential, Sartrean mind which is related to our senses and so it is guided directly by human primitive instincts; in Sanskrit, this is referred to as ālaya-vijñāna which is directly tied to the brain. The subtle mind comes into effect when we begin to be aware of our true nature or that which in Sanskrit is called Ātman or self-existent essence that eventually leads us to the spiritual dimension. Ultimately there is the Consciousness-Only or the Vijñapti-Mātra, an ultra-subtle mind which goes beyond what the other two levels of mind can fabricate, precisely because this particular mind is not a by-product of the human brain but a part of the Cosmic Consciousness of the Absolute, known in Sanskrit as Tathāgatagarbha, and it is at this profound level of Consciousness that we are able to achieve access to the Divine Wisdom and become one with it in an Enlightened State.'' ''This spiritual subject really fascinates me,'' the Professor would declare, amazed at the extraordinary knowledge that Beatrice possessed.'' ''In other words, a human being recognises itself from its eternal essence and not from its existence,'' Beatrice replied, smiling, as she gently touched the tip of his nose with the tip of her finger, as if she was making a symbolic gesture like when children are corrected by their teachers. ''See, here,'' she had said once, pulling at the sleeve of his t-shirt to make him look at her book. ''For example, in the Preface to the 1960 Notes on Dhamma, the Buddhist philosopher from the University of Cambridge, Ñāṇavīra Thera, maintains those that have understood Buddhist teachings have gone way beyond Existential Thought. And on this same theme, the German scholar of Buddhist texts, Edward Conze, said that the possible similarity that exists between Buddhist and Existential Thought lies only on the preliminary level. He said that in terms of the Four Noble Truths, or in Sanskrit Catvāri Āryasatyāni, the Existentialists have only the first, which teaches everything is ill. Of the second - which assigns the origin of ill to craving - they have a very imperfect grasp. As for the third and fourth, which consist of letting go of craving, and the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to liberation from the cycle of rebirth in the form of Nirvāṇa - these are unheard of. Knowing no way out, the Existentialists are manufacturers of their own woes...

With his special theory of relativity, Einstein had shown that space and time did not have independent existences, but instead formed a fabric of spacetime.

The curving and rippling fabric of spacetime explained gravity, its equivalence to acceleration, and, Einstein asserted, the general relativity of all forms of motion.

FLESH I drop my wedding ring in holy water. I hope it repels; the years of hate and hope, so I can finally relate to the son we made.

In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered.

All our differences and similarities are vast and rich - their interplay is the fabric of all relating. It's hard to invent rules out of such complexity; we improvise as we learn about each other.

The whole thing starts with a single knot and needles. A word and pen. Tie a loop in nothing. Look at it. Cast on, repeat the procedure till you have a line that you can work with. It’s a pattern made of relation alone, my patience, my rhythm, till empty bights create a fabric that can be worn, if you’re lucky and practised. It’s never too late to pick up dropped stitches... (from "How to Knit a Poem")

The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of Leibnitz in the 'Protogaea' and of Buffon in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of Hutton, in the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the ancient theory of evolution.

We fail to take responsibility, to act productively in the interest of ourselves and others. And in our attempts at a better life, we are often severely limited or thwarted by the immature and socially inept behavior of ourselves and others. There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect. Nasty whirlwinds of feedback cycles blow through this great multidimensional web, pulsating with hurt and degradation. My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds. They will follow you all of your life—I will be your daughter’s abusive boyfriend, your belligerent neighbor from hell. And you will never grow wings because there will always be mean bosses, misunderstanding families and envious friends. And you will tell yourself that is how life must be. But it is not how life has to be. Once you begin to be able to see the social-psychological fabric of everyday life, it becomes increasingly apparent that the fabric is relatively easy to change, to develop. Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically; a byproduct of which is a sense of meaning in life and lasting happiness; a byproduct of which is kindness and an increased ability to cooperate with others; a byproduct of which is deeper freedom and better concrete results in the lives of everyone; a byproduct of which is a society less likely to collapse into a heap of atrocities.

No peace can be lasting unless the humans become wise enough to need no borders, which can happen only if you all stop feeling threatened by your own kind and start fostering a sense of genuine trust for each other. I would rather be killed by you, the human, my own kind, than be killed by a disease. There is bliss in being killed by your own people. Once you recognize this simple revelation in your heart, then only can there be peace in the world. This doesn't mean that you are giving permission to your fellow human to kill you for no reason, rather you are showing in practice the absurd extent of your trust upon that person. Then it becomes extremely hard for the other person to see you as an enemy.

(What counts as that which is is the present, the actual, to which the necessary and the possible are at first merely related—the usual example from the history of the first beginning.) The sheltering is itself carried out in and as Da-sein. That happens, and gains and loses history, in the steadfast care-taking which in advance pertains to the event though scarcely has knowledge of the event. This care-taking, conceived not on the basis of everydayness but from the selfhood of Dasein, abides in various mutually requisite modes: the fabrication of implements, the instituting of machinations (technology), the creation of works, the acts that form states, and thoughtful sacrifice. In all of these, in each one differently, a pre-forming and co-forming of cognition and of essential knowledge as the grounding of truth. “Science” only a remote scion of a determinate permeation of implement-production, etc.; nothing autonomous and never to be brought into connection with the essential knowledge of the inventive thinking of being (philosophy).

My hope is that, factual or fabricated, every line in Tsarina leads to a single truth: that when you forget that those you disagree with are people, not just your faceless opposition, you don't end up proving who is right and who is wrong. You end up with a body count.

I have long stressed the Hegelian procedure at work in this reversal of positions of the beautiful soul in relation to the reality he accuses. The point is not to adapt him to it, but to show him that he is only too well adapted to it, since he assists in its very fabrication.

Once upon a time, Aristophanes relates, there were gods in the heavens and humans down on earth. But we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms—a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. We came in three different possible gender or sexual variations: male/female meldings, male/male meldings, and female/female meldings, depending on what suited each creature the best. Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy. Thus, all of us double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented creatures moved across the earth much the same way that the planets travel through the heavens—dreamily, orderly, smoothly. We lacked for nothing; we had no unmet needs; we wanted nobody.

It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning—it will cease to have any relation to ethics. I suppose that, so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions. The science of the present day is as full of this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience of ignorant ages. The difference is that the philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality. So, it may be, that the majority of mankind may find the practice of morality made easier by the use of theological symbols. And unless these are converted from symbols into idols, I do not see that science has anything to say to the practice, except to give an occasional warning of its dangers. But, when such symbols are dealt with as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of science is to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater value than the fabrications of men's hands, the stocks and the stones, which they have replaced.

How do fields express their principles? Physicists use terms like photons, electrons, quarks, quantum wave functions, relativity, and energy conservation. Astronomers use terms like planets, stars, galaxies, Hubble shift, and black holes. Thermodynamicists use terms like entropy, first law, second law, and Carnot cycle. Biologists use terms like phylogeny, ontology, DNA, and enzymes. Each of these terms can be considered to be the thread of a story. The principles of a field are actually a set of interwoven stories about the structure and behavior of field elements, the fabric of the multiverse.

Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it

Fabric" and "fabricate "share a common Latin root: fabrica "something skillfully produced". Text and textile are similarly related, from the verb texere, "to weave", which in turn derives...from the Indo-European word *teḱs̱  , meaning "to weave".  "Order" comes from the Latin word for setting the warp threads, [ordinare], as does the French word for computer, ordinateur. The French word metier, meaning "trade" or "craft" is also the word for "loom".   Such associations aren't uniquely European.  In the K'iche' Mayan language, the terms for weaving designs and writing hieroglyphics both use the root tz'ibia.  The Sanskrit word sutra, which now refers to a literary aphorism or religious scripture, originally denoted "string" or "thread". The word tantra which refers to a Hindu or Buddhist religious text, is from the Sanskrit tantrum, meaning "warp" or "loom".  The Chinese word Zǔzhī” 组织 meaning "organization" or "arrange" is also the word for "weave", while Chéngjiù 成就 meaning "achievement" or "result" originally meant "twisting fibers together".  

In the month of his inauguration, 63 percent of African Americans held a favorable view of race relations in America. By July 2013, that figure had fallen to 38 percent. Among whites, the proportion had declined from 79 percent to 52 percent. Obama, alas, has failed in the one area in which even the opposition hoped he would succeed: bridging the racial divide.

All the best and worse things in us are bound up in the legacy of our family. As children we ardently trust in the stability or, in some cases, the instability we were born into. No matter which...we embraced what was decent while simultaneously suppressing what was deficient yet both traits weaved roots of faithfulness and consternation into the very fabric of who we've become. This now plays significantly into how we nurture our own families and how we relate to others. Our love, our fears, our insecurities, and our loyalties all draw from how we were raised as well as our inherent desire to shift its paradigm to optimistically better the life of not just our children...but our children's children. That's the gift and or the curse of a legacy. Which will you leave behind?

The dead did not call to me from the underworlds, but spoke to me from the rustling pine needles. They did not gaze down upon me from the skyworlds, but smiled up at me from a bead of dew trembling precariously upon a blade of grass. They told me I have never been alone. Not for one instant. Every soul is a thread in the fabric of the world. All I must do to see my relatives is gaze into the shining water that sleeps,

The sphere to end all spheres—the largest and most perfect of them all—is the entire observable universe. In every direction we look, galaxies recede from us at speeds proportional to their distance. As we saw in the first few chapters, this is the famous signature of an expanding universe, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929. When you combine Einstein’s relativity and the velocity of light and the expanding universe and the spatial dilution of mass and energy as a consequence of that expansion, there is a distance in every direction from us where the recession velocity for a galaxy equals the speed of light. At this distance and beyond, light from all luminous objects loses all its energy before reaching us. The universe beyond this spherical “edge” is thus rendered invisible and, as far as we know, unknowable. There’s a variation of the ever-popular multiverse idea in which the multiple universes that comprise it are not separate universes entirely, but isolated, non-interacting pockets of space within one continuous fabric of space-time—like multiple ships at sea, far enough away from one another so that their circular horizons do not intersect. As far as any one ship is concerned (without further data), it’s the only ship on the ocean, yet they all share the same body of water.

Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.

All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is—marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which . . . is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

Ever since the Enlightenment era in the 17th and 18th Centuries—which, among other things, gave birth to the U.S. Constitution and the de facto motto E Pluribus Unum (out of the many, one)—interfaith tolerance has been sown into the fabric of Western society. The rules of one religion are not made into law for all citizens because of a simple social agreement. For you to believe what you want, you must allow me to do the same, even if we disagree.

All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

is turning all life into a unified flow experience. If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony, and the separate parts of life will fit together—and each activity will “make sense” in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one’s entire life. But isn’t it incredibly naive to expect life to have a coherent overall meaning? After all, at least since Nietzsche concluded that God was dead, philosophers and social scientists have been busy demonstrating that existence has no purpose, that chance and impersonal forces rule our fate, and that all values are relative and hence arbitrary. It is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into the fabric of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. But it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning. Much of what we call culture and civilization consists in efforts people have made, generally against overwhelming odds, to create a sense of purpose for themselves and their descendants. It is one thing to recognize that life is, by itself, meaningless. It is another thing entirely to accept this with resignation. The first fact does not entail the second any more than the fact that we lack wings prevents us from flying. From the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is—provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy. The challenge might involve the desire to have the best beer-bottle collection in the neighborhood, the resolution to find a cure for cancer, or simply the biological imperative to have children who will survive and prosper. As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life. In the past few years I have come to be quite well acquainted with several Muslim professionals—electronics engineers, pilots, businessmen, and teachers, mostly from Saudi Arabia and from the other Gulf states. In talking to them, I was struck with how relaxed most of them seemed to be even under strong pressure. “There is nothing to it,” those I asked about it told me, in different words, but with the same message: “We don’t get upset because we believe that our life is in God’s hands, and whatever He decides will be fine with us.” Such implicit faith used to be widespread in our culture as well, but it is not easy to find it now. Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.

These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes. And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

The Undivided Wholeness of All Things Most mind-boggling of all are Bohm's fully developed ideas about wholeness. Because everything in the cosmos is made out of the seamless holographic fabric of the implicate order, he believes it is as meaningless to view the universe as composed of "parts, " as it is to view the different geysers in a fountain as separate from the water out of which they flow. An electron is not an "elementary particle. " It is just a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement. Dividing reality up into parts and then naming those parts is always arbitrary, a product of convention, because subatomic particles, and everything else in the universe, are no more separate from one another than different patterns in an ornate carpet. This is a profound suggestion. In his general theory of relativity Einstein astounded the world when he said that space and time are not separate entities, but are smoothly linked and part of a larger whole he called the space-time continuum. Bohm takes this idea a giant step further. He says that everything in the universe is part of a continuum. Despite the apparent separateness of things at the explicate level, everything is a seamless extension of everything else, and ultimately even the implicate and explicate orders blend into each other. Take a moment to consider this. Look at your hand. Now look at the light streaming from the lamp beside you. And at the dog resting at your feet. You are not merely made of the same things. You are the same thing. One thing. Unbroken. One enormous something that has extended its uncountable arms and appendages into all the apparent objects, atoms, restless oceans, and twinkling stars in the cosmos. Bohm cautions that this does not mean the universe is a giant undifferentiated mass. Things can be part of an undivided whole and still possess their own unique qualities. To illustrate what he means he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that often form in a river. At a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and possess many individual characteristics such as size, rate, and direction of rotation, et cetera. But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible to determine where any given whirlpool ends and the river begins. Thus, Bohm is not suggesting that the differences between "things" is meaningless. He merely wants us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the holomovement into "things" is always an abstraction, a way of making those aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking. In attempts to correct this, instead of calling different aspects of the holomovement "things, " he prefers to call them "relatively independent subtotalities. "10 Indeed, Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn't work, but may even lead to our extinction.

In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich occasionally rattled, remained class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume, and connect. The companies that provide these and related services are quickly becoming the Disneys of the digital world—monoliths hungry for quarterly profits, answerable to their shareholders not us, their users, and more influential, more ubiquitous, and more insinuated into the fabric of our everyday lives than Mickey Mouse ever was. As such they pose a whole new set of challenges to the health of our culture.

That which stirs within, slows or quickens, goes deep or dies out. When I speak of spirit, I am not speaking of something related to or given by a force outside ourselves. I am speaking of the force that is ourselves. The experience of living in this world, bound by a body, space, and time, woven into the fabric of human history, human connection and human life. This is the force that feels, and thinks and gives us consciousness at all. It is the deepest, most elemental, most integral part of who we are; it is who we are.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

Ionizing radiation takes three principal forms: alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays. Alpha particles are relatively large, heavy, and slow moving and cannot penetrate the skin; even a sheet of paper could block their path. But if they do manage to find their way inside the body by other means—if swallowed or inhaled—alpha particles can cause massive chromosomal damage and death. Radon 222, which gathers as a gas in unventilated basements, releases alpha particles into the lungs, where it causes cancer. Polonium 210, a powerful alpha emitter, is one of the carcinogens in cigarette smoke. It was also the poison slipped into the cup of tea that killed former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Beta particles are smaller and faster moving than alpha particles and can penetrate more deeply into living tissue, causing visible burns on the skin and lasting genetic damage. A piece of paper won’t provide protection from beta particles, but aluminum foil—or separation by sufficient distance—will. Beyond a range of ten feet, beta particles can cause little damage, but they prove dangerous if ingested in any way. Mistaken by the body for essential elements, beta-emitting radioisotopes can become fatally concentrated in specific organs: strontium 90, a member of the same chemical family as calcium, is retained in the bones; ruthenium is absorbed by the intestine; iodine 131 lodges particularly in the thyroid of children, where it can cause cancer. Gamma rays—high-frequency electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light—are the most energetic of all. They can traverse large distances, penetrate anything short of thick pieces of concrete or lead, and destroy electronics. Gamma rays pass straight through a human being without slowing down, smashing through cells like a fusillade of microscopic bullets. Severe exposure to all ionizing radiation results in acute radiation syndrome (ARS), in which the fabric of the human body is unpicked, rearranged, and destroyed at the most minute levels. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, hemorrhaging, and hair loss, followed by a collapse of the immune system, exhaustion of bone marrow, disintegration of internal organs, and, finally, death.

Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures. There would be something great and noble about initiating such a movement referring not to Humanity but to the exultant divergence of humanities. Thought of self and thought of other here become obsolete in their duality…. What is here is open, as much as this there. I would be incapable of projecting from one to the other. This-here is the weave and it weaves no boundaries.

The first chapter of Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the third chapter of Luke there is also given a genealogy of Jesus Christ. Did these two agree, it would not prove the genealogy to be true, because it might nevertheless be a fabrication; but as they contradict each other in every particular, it proves falsehood absolutely. If Matthew speaks truth, Luke speaks falsehood; and if Luke speaks truth, Matthew speaks falsehood: and as there is no authority for believing one more than the other, there is no authority for believing either; and if they cannot be believed even in the very first thing they say, and set out to prove, they are not entitled to be believed in any thing they say afterwards. Truth is an uniform thing; and as to inspiration and revelation, were we to admit it, it is impossible to suppose it can be contradictory. Either then the men called apostles were imposters, or the books ascribed to them have been written by other persons, and fathered upon them, as is the case in the Old Testament. Now, if these men, Matthew and Luke, set out with a falsehood between them (as these two accounts show they do) in the very commencement of their history of Jesus Christ, and of who, and of what he was, what authority (as I have before asked) is there left for believing the strange things they tell us afterwards? If they cannot be believed in their account of his natural genealogy, how are we to believe them when they tell us he was the son of God, begotten by a ghost; and that an angel announced this in secret to his mother? If they lied in one genealogy, why are we to believe them in the other? If his natural genealogy be manufactured, which it certainly is, why are we not to suppose that his celestial genealogy is manufactured also, and that the whole is fabulous? Can any man of serious reflection hazard his future happiness upon the belief of a story naturally impossible, repugnant to every idea of decency, and related by persons already detected of falsehood?

Sometimes war may become the only resort available, but never try to justify it, by saying that it's the right thing to do, because war is never the right thing to do, no matter how right you feel. When you fire that first shot, you have no idea how many lives are going to be destroyed, no matter how right you feel. Once you fire that first shot you have no idea how many children will be orphaned. Once you fire that first shot you have no idea how many homes will be burnt to ashes. So why not make an effort to break that savage habit of retaliation, and sit down together in order to understand each other beyond the petty little differences born of instinctual tribalism!

When a language treats inanimate objects in the same way as it treats women and men, with the same grammatical forms or with the same “he” and “she” pronouns, the habits of grammar can spill over to habits of mind beyond grammar. The grammatical nexus between object and gender is imposed on children from the earliest age and reinforced many thousands of times throughout their lives. This constant drilling affects the associations that speakers develop about inanimate objects and can clothe their notions of such objects in womanly or manly traits. The evidence suggests that sex-related associations are not only fabricated on demand but present even when they are not actively solicited.

displacement is perhaps the most traumatic experience that humans can undergo, with invisible consequences that can last for generations, from physical and mental problems to difficulty maintaining the social fabric of a community. Fullilove identifies the symptoms of displacement as “root shock,” which, she explains, “undermines trust, increases anxiety about letting loved ones out of one’s sight, destabilizes relationships, destroys social, emotional, and financial resources, and increases the risk of every kind of stress-related disease, from depression to heart attack. Root shock leaves people chronically cranky, barking a distinctive croaky complaint that their world was abruptly taken away.”49

Returning to my yarn stash, I select a pair of ebony needles and a lustrous ball of handspun alpaca. Then I quickly cast on to create a light, resilient fabric. We don’t have much time before the students get back, which means the gauge has to be right the first time around. When you’re weaving or knitting enchanted fabrics, gauge is critical. Gauge—the relative density of the fabric—determines the degree to which a magical object can utilize or redirect fields of energy. But magic often requires a mix of skill and sacrifice. It’s not enough to knit a pattern without making a mistake: you also have to give up something of yourself. A heart shroud is a complex spell, filled with twisty cables mimicking the structure of the human heart.

The color is yet another variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attracts it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées. A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world—less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility. Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose.† These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes. And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among “the most powerful corporations on the planet” — hence the state’s relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other. The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny—namely, the domestic aspects of the “War on Terror.” Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state’s bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained—short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government’s reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely — an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. At the same time, law enforcement was also obsessively pursuing — and sometimes fabricating—cases against environmentalists, animal rights activists, and anarchists while ignoring or obscuring racist violence against people of color. What that shows, I think, is that the left/right imbalance persists, but sometimes other biases matter more.

In other words, if an observer looks at another frame of reference (like a moving train), he or she will still see that the speed of light is the same even though that frame of reference is moving relative to it. It is because of this symmetry that our standard theory of light, or electromagnetism, cannot accommodate a varying speed of light in empty space. But when a wave of light moves in a different medium, such as glass, Lorentz symmetry is no longer preserved, and light can change speed relative to empty space. This was the essence of Joao's contention. It could be that there is a quantum effect on space-time that fundamentally violates Einstein's cherished Lorentz symmetry, resulting in a variation of the speed of light in the early universe. As it turns out, the shape of extra dimensions in string theory can indeed cause certain constants, including the speed of light, to vary throughout the space-time fabric.

The actions that accompany the four truths describe the trajectory of dharma practice: understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path. These are not four separate activities but four phases within the process of awakening itself. Understanding matures into letting go; letting go culminates in realization; realization impels cultivation. This trajectory is no linear sequence of "stages" through which we "progress." We do not leave behind an earlier stage in order to advance to the next rung of some hierarchy. All four activities are part of a single continuum of action. Dharma practice cannot be reduced to any one of them; it is configured from them all. As soon as understanding is isolated from letting go, it degrades into mere intellectuality. As soon as letting go is isolated from understanding, it declines into spiritual posturing. The fabric of dharma practice is woven from the threads of these interrelated activities, each of which is defined through its relation to the others.

Here we must ask a critical question: what does it mean when American media outlets deliberately censor and silence anything related to Palestine, the voices of war atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria, while at the same time glorifying the Ukraine war or presumably covering Black Lives Matter or police brutality against black people? Can we believe that such media has good intentions? Can we believe that they really care about Black people, or are they more interested in deepening the divide in the society? I personally find this suspicious and ill intentioned. I believe the purpose here is not to support any Black causes or push for meaningful changes, but rather, exploiting the already existing and strong structural racism and white supremacy weaved into the fabric of the entire society to make people even more alienated from each other. Mistaken are those who think that “divide and conquer” is only practiced in remote places and in so-called “third world” countries. There are many ways to divide and conquer, but we need to have the right critical tools to detect and fight against them, as is the case here. [From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]

If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principles of its existence, which is the thing itself. It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge. This single reflection will show that the doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay; and as this pecuniary idea corresponds again with the system of second redemptions, obtained through the means of money given to the church for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated both the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth, there is no such thing as redemption; that it is fabulous; and that man stands in the same relative condition with his Maker he ever did stand, since man existed; and that it is his greatest consolation to think so. Let him believe this, and he will live more consistently and morally, than by any other system. It is by his being taught to contemplate himself as an out-law, as an out-cast, as a beggar, as a mumper, as one thrown as it were on a dunghill, at an immense distance from his Creator, and who must make his approaches by creeping, and cringing to intermediate beings, that he conceives either a contemptuous disregard for everything under the name of religion, or becomes indifferent, or turns what he calls devout. In the latter case, he consumes his life in grief, or the affection of it. His prayers are reproaches. His humility is ingratitude. He calls himself a worm, and the fertile earth a dunghill; and all the blessings of life by the thankless name of vanities. He despises the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON; and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason, as if man could give reason to himself. Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility, and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions. He finds fault with everything. His selfishness is never satisfied; his ingratitude is never at an end. He takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the government of the universe. He prays dictatorially. When it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine. He follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers, but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say - thou knowest not so well as I.

The sacred site thus created is a space that nurtures the sense of the continuum in which we are immersed. Many indigenous cultures still have this sacred relational sense of the world that is nurtured by ceremonies; and many of a variety of cultures in these times of great change seek such a relational sense – and who may identify as being in “recovery from Western civilization” . I have been engaged for decades now, in re-turning to my indigenous religious heritage of Western Europe, re-creating, and re-inventing a ceremonial practice that celebrates the sacred journey around Sun: it has been an intuitive, organic process synthesizing bits that I have learned from good teachers and scholars, and bits that have just shown up within dreams and imagination, as well as academic research. It has been a shamanic journey: that is, I have relied on my direct lived experience for an understanding of the sacred, as opposed to relying on an external authority, external imposed symbol, story or image. It has not been a pre-scriptive journey: I have scripted it myself, self-scribed it, and in cahoots with the many who participated in the storytelling circles, rituals and classes over decades. The pathway was and is made in the walking. It is part of a new fabric of understanding – created by new texts and contexts, both personal and communal - that have been emerging in recent decades, and continue so, at awesome speed in our times.

From another perspective, free will is not illusory at all. So long as we have relatively undamaged brains and relatively normal upbringings, each of us has a very real capacity to execute and to inhibit voluntary action, thanks to our brain’s ability to control our many degrees of freedom. This kind of freedom is both a freedom from and a freedom to. It is a freedom from immediate causes in the world or in the body, and from coercion by authorities, hypnotists and mesmerists, or social-media pushers. It is not, however, freedom from the laws of nature or from the causal fabric of the universe. It is a freedom to act according to our beliefs, values, and goals, to do as we wish to do, and to make choices according to who we are. The reality of this kind of free will is underlined by the fact that it cannot be taken for granted. Brain injuries, or unlucky draws from the lotteries of our genes and our environments, can undermine our ability to exercise voluntary behaviour. People with anarchic hand syndrome make voluntary actions which they do not experience as being theirs, while those with akinetic mutism are unable to make any voluntary actions at all. An awkwardly located brain tumour can transform an engineering student into a mass school shooter, as happened in the case of Charles Whitman, the ‘Texas Tower Sniper’, or engender in a previously blameless teacher a rampant paedophilia – a tendency which disappeared when the tumour was removed, and returned when it grew back.

On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial "otherness" is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools. Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless. But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living — in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.

Newton had bequeathed to Einstein a universe in which time had an absolute existence that tick-tocked along independent of objects and observers, and in which space likewise had an absolute existence. Gravity was thought to be a force that masses exerted on one another rather mysteriously across empty space. Within this framework, objects obeyed mechanical laws that had proved remarkably accurate—almost perfect—in explaining everything from the orbits of the planets, to the diffusion of gases, to the jiggling of molecules, to the propagation of sound (though not light) waves. With his special theory of relativity, Einstein had shown that space and time did not have independent existences, but instead formed a fabric of spacetime. Now, with his general version of the theory, this fabric of spacetime became not merely a container for objects and events. Instead, it had its own dynamics that were determined by, and in turn helped to determine, the motion of objects within it—just as the fabric of a trampoline will curve and ripple as a bowling ball and some billiard balls roll across it, and in turn the dynamic curving and rippling of the trampoline fabric will determine the path of the rolling balls and cause the billiard balls to move toward the bowling ball. The curving and rippling fabric of spacetime explained gravity, its equivalence to acceleration, and, Einstein asserted, the general relativity of all forms of motion.92 In the opinion of Paul Dirac, the Nobel laureate pioneer of quantum mechanics, it was “probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made.” Another of the great giants of twentieth-century physics, Max Born, called it “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition and mathematical skill.

Do you know Einstein’s theory of relativity?” Connor just stares at me. “Let’s assume I don’t.” “Yeah, I didn’t either, until . . . well.” I shake my head to clear that line of thought. “Basically, space and time are really one thing, a kind of giant film stretched across the universe called space-time. Dense objects warp the fabric of space-time, like the way a trampoline dips when someone stands on it. If you’ve got something heavy enough, like insanely heavy, it can punch a hole right through.” “Okay, I get that.” “Well, in the future the government develops this massive particle collider called Cassandra. When they slam the right subatomic particles into one another under the right conditions, the particles hypercondense on impact and become heavy enough to punch a tiny hole in space-time. We came through that hole.” “Why?” “Because the future needs to be changed. We need to destroy Cassandra before it’s ever built, or it’s going to end the world. People weren’t meant to travel in time.” “But . . .” Connor presses his fingers into his temples. “If you destroy the machine before it gets built—” “Then it will never have existed for us to travel back in time to destroy it?” Finn says. “Right.” I nod. “It’s a paradox. But the thing about time is that it’s not actually linear, the way we think of it. This person I once knew, he had this theory about time, that it had a kind of consciousness. It cleans things up and keeps itself from being torn apart by paradoxes by freezing certain events and keeping them from being changed. Action—like us doing something to stop Cassandra being built—sticks, while passivity—us never coming back to stop the machine because we couldn’t make the trip—doesn’t. When we . . . do what we have to do to destroy Cassandra, it should become a frozen event, safe from paradoxes.” “How do you get back to your time?” Connor asks. Finn glances at me before answering. “We don’t.” “Oh.

In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23 The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die. Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.” Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war.

Simon laughs when I audibly exhale. “Relieved she’s not here yet?” I roll my suitcase into one of the barren bedrooms and then plunk down on the rock-hard, hideous orange sofa in the lounge. Simon takes a swivel chair from my room and slides it in front of me, where he then plants himself. “Why are you so worried?” I cross my arms and look around the concrete room. “I’m not worried at all. She’s probably very nice. I’m sure we’ll become soul mates, and she’ll braid my hair, and we’ll have pillow fights while scantily clad and fall into a deep lesbian love affair.” I squint my eyes at a cobweb and assume there are spider eggs preparing to hatch and invade the room. “Allison?” Simon waits until I look at him. “You can’t do that. You can’t become a lesbian.” “Why not?” “Because then everyone will say that your adoptive gay father magically made you gay, and it’ll be a big thing, and we’ll have to hear about nature versus nurture, and it’ll be soooooo boring.” “You have a point.” I wait for spider eggs to fall from the sky. “Then I’ll go with assuming she’s just a really sweet, normal person with whom I do not want to engage in sexual relations.” “Better,” he concedes. “I’m sure she’ll be nice. This kind of strong liberal arts college attracts quality students. There’re good people here.” He’s trying to reassure me, but it’s not working. “Totally,” I say. My fingers run across the nubby burned-orange fabric covering the couch, which is clearly composed of rock slabs. “Simon?” “Yes, Allison?” I sigh and take a few breaths while I play with the hideous couch threads. “She probably has horns.” He shrugged. “I think that’s unlikely.” Simon pauses. “Although . . .” “Although what?” I ask with horror. There’s a long silence that makes me nervous. Finally, he says very slowly, “She might have one horn.” I jerk my head and stare at him. Simon claps his hands together and tries to coax a smile out of me. “Like a unicorn! Ohmigod! Your roommate might be a unicorn!” “Or a rhinoceros,” I point out. “A beastly, murderous rhino.” “There is that,” he concedes. I sigh. “In good news, if I ever need a back scratcher, I have this entire couch.” I slump back against the rough fabric and hold out my hands before he can protest. “I know. I’m a beacon of positivity.” “That’s not news to me.

Anyone want to help me start PAPA, Parents for Alternatives to Punishment Association? (There is already a group in England called ‘EPPOCH’ for end physical punishment of children.) In Kohn’s other great book Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, he explains how all punishments, even the sneaky, repackaged, “nice” punishments called logical or natural consequences, destroy any respectful, loving relationship between adult and child and impede the process of ethical development. (Need I mention Enron, Martha Stewart, the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal or certain car repairmen?) Any type of coercion, whether it is the seduction of rewards or the humiliation of punishment, creates a tear in the fabric of relational connection between adults and children. Then adults become simply dispensers of goodies and authoritarian dispensers of controlling punishments. The atmosphere of fear and scarcity grows as the sense of connectedness that fosters true and generous cooperation, giving from the heart, withers. Using punishments and rewards is like drinking salt water. It does create a short-term relief, but long-term it makes matters worse. This desert of emotional connectedness is fertile ground for acting-out to get attention. Punishment is a use of force, in the negative sense of that word, not an expression of true power or strength. David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. author of the book Power v. Force writes “force is the universal substitute for truth. The need to control others stems from lack of power, just as vanity stems from lack of self-esteem. Punishment is a form of violence, an ineffective substitute for power. Sadly though parents are afraid not to hit and punish their children for fear they will turn out to be bank robbers. But the truth may well be the opposite. Research shows that virtually all felony offenders were harshly punished as children. Besides children learn thru modeling. Punishment models the tactic of deliberately creating pain for another to get something you want to happen. Punishment does not teach children to care about how their actions might create pain for another, it teaches them it is ok to create pain for another if you have the power to get away with it. Basically might makes right. Punishment gets children to focus on themselves and what is happening to them instead of developing empathy for how their behavior affects another. Creating

Raphael pulled out a paperback and handed it to me. The cover, done back in the time when computer-aided imagine manipulation had risen to the level of art, featured an impossibly handsome man, leaning forward, one foot in a huge black boot resting on the carcass of some monstrous sea creature. His hair flowed down to his shoulders in a mane of white gold, in stark contrast to his tanned skin and the rakish black patch hiding his left eye. His white, translucent shirt hung open, revealing abs of steel and a massive, perfectly carved chest graced by erect nipples. His muscled thighs strained the fabric of his pants, which were unbuttoned and sat loosely on his narrow hips, a touch of a strategically positioned shadow hinting at the world’s biggest boner. The cover proclaimed in loud golden letters: The Privateer’s Virgin Mistress, by Lorna Sterling. “Novel number four for Andrea’s collection?” I guessed. Raphael nodded and took the book from my hands. “I’ve got the other one Andrea wanted, too. Can you explain something to me?” Oh boy. “I can try.” He tapped the book on his leather-covered knee. “The pirate actually holds this chick’s brother for ransom, so she’ll sleep with him. These men, they aren’t real men. They’re pseudo-bad guys just waiting for the love of a ‘good’ woman.” “You actually read the books?” He gave me a chiding glance. “Of course I read the books. It’s all pirates and the women they steal, apparently so they can enjoy lots of sex and have somebody to run their lives.” Wow. He must’ve had to hide under his blanket with a flashlight so nobody would question his manliness. Either he really was in love with Andrea or he had a terminal case of lust. “These guys, they’re all bad and aggressive as shit, and everybody wets themselves when they walk by, and then they meet some girl and suddenly they’re not uber-alphas; they are just misunderstood little boys who want to talk about their feelings.” “Is there a point to this dissertation?” He faced me. “I can’t be that. If that’s what she wants, then I shouldn’t even bother.” I sighed. “Do you have a costume kink? French maid, nurse . . .” “Catholic school girl.” Bingo. “You wouldn’t mind Andrea wearing a Catholic school uniform, would you?” “No, I wouldn’t.” His eyes glazed over and he slipped off to some faraway place. I snapped my fingers. “Raphael! Focus.” He blinked at me. “I’m guessing—and this is just a wild stab in the dark—that Andrea might not mind if once in a while you dressed up as a pirate. But I wouldn’t advise holding her relatives for ransom nookie. She might shoot you in the head. Several times. With silver bullets.

children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married. You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or relatively sane. All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference. Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more like a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture; you must trust that you being a very good you matters somehow. That trying to be an honest and tender parent will echo for centuries through your tribe. That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will somehow matter in the social fabric, save a thread or two from unraveling. And you must do all of this with the sure and certain knowledge that you will never get proper credit for it, at all, one bit, and in fact the vast majority of the things you do right will go utterly unremarked; except, perhaps, in ways we will never know or understand, by the Arab Jew who once shouted about his cloak, and may have been somehow also the One who invented and infuses this universe and probably a million others—not to put a hard number on it or anything. Humility, the final frontier, as my late brother Kevin used to say. When we are young we build a self, a persona, a story in which to reside, or several selves in succession, or several at once, sometimes; when we are older we take on other roles and personas, other masks and duties; and you and I both know men and women who become trapped in the selves they worked so hard to build, so desperately imprisoned that sometimes they smash their lives simply to escape who they no longer wish to be; but finally, I think, if we are lucky, if we read the book of pain and loss with humility, we realize that we are all broken and small and brief, that none among us is actually rich or famous or more beautiful than another; and then, perhaps, we begin to understand something deep and true finally about humility. This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that there is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love. That could be. I wouldn’t know; I am a muddle and a conundrum, shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is, trying to leave shreds and shards of ego along the road like wisps of litter and chaff.

Tell me, Princess Olivia... why do you have to stay in your tower?" The soft entreaty made Livia feel as if she were melting inside. She laughed unsteadily, wishing for a moment that she dared to trust him. But the habit of independence was too strong. Shaking her head, Livia approached him, expecting him to back away from the doorway. He retreated half a step, his hands still grasping the edges of the doorway, so that she couldn't help but walk into an open-armed embrace. The bonnet ribbons slipped from her fingers. "Mr. Shaw-" she began, making the mistake of looking up at him. "Gideon," he whispered. "I want to know your secrets, Olivia." A bitter half smile touched her lips. "You'll hear them sooner or later from other people." "I want to hear them from you." As Livia began to retreat into the glasshouse, Shaw deftly caught the little cloth belt of her walking dress. His long fingers hooked beneath the reinforced fabric. Unable to back away from him, Livia clamped her hand over his, while a hectic blush flooded her face. She knew that he was toying with her, and that she once might have been able to manage this situation with relative ease. But not now. When she spoke, her voice was husky. "I can't do this, Mr. Shaw." To her amazement, he seemed to understand exactly what she meant. "You don't have to do anything," he said softly. "Just let me come closer... and stay right there..." His head bent, and he found her mouth easily. The coaxing pressure of his lips made Livia sway dizzily, and he caught her firmly against him. She was being kissed by Gideon Shaw, the self-indulgent, debauched scoundrel her brother had warned her about. And oh, he was good at it. She had thought nothing would ever be as pleasurable as Amberley's kisses... but this man's mouth was warm and patient, and there was something wickedly erotic about his complete lack of urgency. He teased her gently, nudging her lips apart, the tip of his tongue barely brushing hers before it withdrew. Wanting more of those silken strokes, Livia began to strain against him, her breath quickening. He nurtured her excitement with such subtle skill that she was utterly helpless to defend against it. To her astonishment, she found herself winding her arms around his neck and pressing her breasts against the hard plane of his chest. His hand slid behind her neck, tilting her head back to expose her throat more fully. Still gentle and controlled, he kissed the fragile skin, working his way down to the hollow at the base of her throat. She felt his tongue swirl in the warm depression, and a moan of pleasure escaped her. Shaw lifted his head to nuzzle the side of her cheek, while his hand smoothed over her back. Their breaths mingled in swift puffs of heat, his hard chest moving against hers in an erratic rhythm.

he importance and influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can scarcely be exaggerated. A century after Darwin’s death, the great evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote, ‘The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of some of the most basic beliefs of his age.’1 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s biographers, contend, ‘Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker—even Freud or Marx—this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.’2 In the words of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is… Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.’3 Dennett goes on to add, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’4 The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin begin their introduction by stating, ‘Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life—including the evolutionary origin of humans—have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice.’5 Among the fundamental questions raised by Darwin’s work, which are still being debated by philosophers (and others) are these: ‘Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards—competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones?’6 As the editors of the volume point out, virtually the entire corpus of the foundational works of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel, has had to be re-examined in the light of Darwin’s work. Darwin continues to be read, discussed, interpreted, used, abused—and misused—to this day. As the philosopher and historian of science, Jean Gayon, puts it, ‘[T]his persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science.

Motion in space can proceed in any direction and back again. Motion in time only proceeds in one direction in the everyday world, whatever seems to be going on at the particle level. It’s hard to visualize the four dimensions of spacetime, each at right angles to the other, but we can leave out one dimension and imagine what this strict rule would mean if it applied to one of the three dimensions we are used to. It’s as if we were allowed to move either up or down, either forward or back, but that sideways motion was restricted to shuffling to the left, say. Movement to the right is forbidden. If we made this the central rule in a children’s game, and then told a child to find a way of reaching a prize off to the right-hand side (“backward in time”) it wouldn’t take too long for the child to find a way out of the trap. Simply turn around to face the other way, swapping left for right, and then reach the prize by moving to the left. Alternatively, lie down on the floor so that the prize is in the “up” direction with reference to your head. Now you can move both “up” to grasp the prize and “down” to your original position, before standing up again and returning your personal space orientation to that of the bystanders.* The technique for time travel allowed by relativity theory is very similar. It involves distorting the fabric of space-time so that in a local region of space-time the time axis points in a direction equivalent to one of the three space directions in the undistorted region of space-time. One of the other space directions takes on the role of time, and by swapping space for time such a device would make true time travel, there and back again, possible. American mathematician Frank Tipler has made the calculations that prove such a trick is theoretically possible. Space-time can be distorted by strong gravitational fields,and Tipler’s imaginary time machine is a very massive cylinder, containing as much matter as our sun packed into a volume 100 km long and 10 km in radius, as dense as the nucleus of an atom, rotating twice every millisecond and dragging the fabric of space-time around with it. The surface of the cylinder would be moving at half the speed of light. This isn’t the sort of thing even the maddest of mad inventors is likely to build in his backyard, but the point is that it is allowed by all the laws of physics that we know. There is even an object in the universe that has the mass of our sun, the density of an atomic nucleus, and spins once every 1.5 milliseconds, only three times slower than Tipler’s time machine. This is the so-called “millisecond pulsar,” discovered in 1982. It is highly unlikely that this object is cylindrical—such extreme rotation has surely flattened it into a pancake shape. Even so, there must be some very peculiar distortions of space-time in its vicinity. “Real” time travel may not be impossible, just extremely difficult and very, very unlikely. That thin end of what might be a very large wedge may, however, make the normality of time travel at the quantum level seem a little more acceptable. Both quantum theory and relativity theory permit time travel, of one kind or another. And anything that is acceptable to both those theories, no matter how paradoxical that something may seem, has to be taken seriously. Time travel, indeed, is an integral part of some of the stranger features of the particle world, where you can even get something for nothing, if you are quick about it.

Every dinner, every elbow touch, every impromptu seminar on politics and history adds up to build a relational narrative: You are part of this group. This group is special. I believe you can reach those standards. In other words, Popovich’s yelling works, in part, because it is not just yelling. It is delivered along with a suite of other cues that affirm and strengthen the fabric of the relationships.

If the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body (and no doubt the distinction between noesis and noema as well?), it is also blurred in the thing, which is the pole of my body's operations, the terminus its exploration ends up in, and which is thus woven into the same intentional fabric as my body. When we say that the perceived thing is grasped 'in person' or 'in the flesh' (leibhaft}, this is to be taken literally: the flesh of what is perceived, this compact particle which stops exploration, and this optimum which terminates it аll reflect my own incarnation and are its counterpart. Here we have a type of being, a universe with its unparalleled 'subject' and 'object,' the articulation each in terms of the other, and the definitive definition of an 'irrelative' of all the 'relativities' of perceptual experience, which is the 'legal basis' for all the constructions of understanding. All understanding and objective thought owe their life to the in augural fact that with this color (or wit h whatever the sensible element in question may be ) I have perceived, I have had, a singular existence which suddenly stopped my glance yet promised it an indefinite series of experiences, which was a concretion of possibles real here and now in the hidden sides of the thing , which was a lapse of duration given all at once. The intentionality that ties together the stages of my exploration, the aspects of the thing , and the two series to each other is neither the mental subject's connecting activity nor the ideal connections of the object. It is the transition that as carnal subject I effect from one phase of movement to another, a transition which as a matter of principle is always possible for me because I am that animal of perceptions and movements called a body.

The thought of thoughts, the cogito, the pure appearance of something to someone--and first of all of myself to myself--cannot be taken literally and as the testimony of a being whose whole essence is to know itself, that is to say, of a consciousness. It is always through the thickness of a field of existence that my presentation to myself takes place. The mind is always thinking, not because it is always in the process of constituting ideas but because it is always directly or indirectly tuned in on the world and in cycle with history. Like perceived things, my tasks are presented to me, not as objects or ends, but as reliefs and configurations, that is to say, in the landscape of praxis. And just as, when I bring an object closer or move it further away, when I turn it in my hands, I do not need to relate its appearances to a single scale to understand what I observe, in the same way action inhabits its field so fully that anything that appears there is immediately meaningful for it, without analysis or transposition, and calls for its response. If one takes into account a consciousness thus engaged, which is joined again with itself only across its historical and worldly field, which does not touch itself or coincide with itself but rather is divined and glimpsed in the present experience, of which it is the invisible steward, the relationships between consciousnesses take on a completely new aspect. For if the subject is not the sun from which the world radiates or the demiurge of my pure objects, if its signifying activity is rather the perception of a difference between two or several meanings--inconceivable, then, without the dimensions, levels, and perspectives which the world and history establish around me--then its action and all actions are possible only as they follow the course of the world, just as I can change the spectacle of the perceived world only by taking as my observation post one of the places revealed to me by perception. There is perception only because I am part of this world through my body, and I give a meaning to history only because I occupy a certain vantage point in it, because other possible vantage points have already been indicated to me by the historical landscape, and because all these perspectives already depend on a truth in which they would be integrated. At the very heart of my perspective, I realize that my private world is already being used, that there is ''behavior" that concerns it, and that the other's place in it is already prepared, because I find other historical situations to be occupiable by me. A consciousness that is truly engaged in a world and a history on which it has a hold but which go beyond it is not insular. Already in the thickness of the sensible and historical fabric it feels other presences moving, just as the group of men who dig a tunnel hear the work of another group coming toward them. Unlike the Sartrean consciousness, it is not visible only for the other: consciousness can see him, at least out of the corner of its eye. Between its perspective and that of the other there is a link and an established way of crossing over, and this for the single reason that each perspective claims to envelop the others. Neither in private nor in public history is the formula of these relationships "either him or me," the alternative of solipsism or pure abnegation, because these relationships are no longer the encounter of two For-Itselfs but are the meshing of two experiences which, without ever coinciding, belong to a single world.

Time can’t be stopped. It is a part of the fabric of the universe. And it is relative. Even if time could stop for one person, it wouldn’t for everyone else.” “But that wouldn’t change the buildup of dark matter.

Two of the most important relationships in modern physics are Schrodinger's wave equation and Einstein's equation of general relativity. Strikingly, their domains are very different. While Schrodinger's equation describes the distribution and behavior of matter and energy throughout space and time, Einstein's equation shows how the fabric of space and time is itself molded by the distribution of matter and energy.

General relativity provides the choreography for an entwined cosmic dance of space, time, matter, and energy.

Government can shuffle resources from rich to poor, from productive to unproductive, but this does not strengthen the moral fabric. There are, nevertheless, obstacles that blacks face in America because of race. Most have little to do with the common notion of racism—that is, efforts by whites to hold them down. The two most important obstacles are both internal. The first is the conviction that whites, not blacks, are responsible for what happens to them. The second is the belief that blacks need and deserve special treatment to succeed. To the extent that any black of whatever class believes these things, he is a prisoner of his own illusions.

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

Burroughs and Gysin had now extended cut-ups beyond tapes and collage and into the realm of personal relations. Burroughs now suspected that the entire fabric of reality was illusory and that someone, or something, was running the universe like a soundstage, with banks of tape recorders and film projectors. He was determined to find where the control words and images were coined. He was using cut-ups in an attempt to backtrack the word lines to find out where and when the conditioning had taken place, and more importantly, who was responsible. Suspicion fell on Time magazine’s enormous newspaper clipping morgue and the files of the FBI and the CIA. But they were more likely to be the source material for control, not the masters of it. However, with the aid of a great deal of majoun, Bill had finally determined that everybody was in fact an agent for a giant trust of insects from another galaxy, though, as usual with Burroughs, it is hard to tell how literally he meant this. However, he was certainly convinced that everyone was an agent for control and that the only way to find out who they really were was to cut them up.

Although some animals are considered to be solitary rather than group-living, they can also be considered to engage in collective behavior. Even the state of aloneness is itself a relation with others. We know this from our own behavior. People who are alone are not removed from the social fabric; avoidance is a form of relation, and the use of language, even in solitude, is a social activity.

The Iranian and Jewish people have ancient bonds dating back to Cyrus the Great and Queen Esther. As the children of Cyrus, the Iranian people aspire to have a government that honors his legacy of upholding human rights and respecting religious and cultural diversity, including through the restoration of peaceful and friendly relations with Israel and Iran’s other neighbors in the region, Millions of my compatriots still recall living alongside their Jewish-Iranian friends and neighbors before the Islamic Revolution tore apart the fabric of our society. They reject the regime’s genocidal anti-Israel and anti-Semitic policies and yearn for cultural, scientific and economic exchange with Israel. A democratic Iran will seek to re-establish ties with Israel and our Arab neighbors—perhaps as part of a future Cyrus Accords. In my view, that day is closer than ever.

The Pentagram, a symbol of five points, stands as an eternal testament to the profound interconnection of all things. Each point signifies the fundamental elements of existence - earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. It is a cosmic diagram reminding us that as humans, we are not separate entities in an indifferent universe, but rather integral parts of a grand, interconnected cosmic dance. The element of earth represents the physical realm, our bodies, and the tangible world around us. It reminds us of our mortal nature, our connection to the mother Earth, and the grounding force that allows us to grow and prosper. Air, the breath of life, signifies the realm of intellect, communication, and thought. It is the invisible force that fuels our creative and innovative abilities, allowing us to soar towards our highest aspirations. Fire symbolizes passion, energy, and transformation. It is the spark of life within us, the burning desire to grow, evolve, and reach beyond the realms of the possible. Yet, it also serves as a reminder of the transformative power of trials and tribulations, refining us like gold in a crucible. Water relates to emotions, intuition, and the depths of the subconscious. It is the wellspring of our feelings, our dreams, our hopes, and our fears. Water teaches us the power of adaptability, the beauty of depth, and the strength in gentleness. Finally, the fifth point, spirit, represents the divine essence that permeates all things. It is the invisible thread that weaves together the fabric of the universe, the divine spark within each of us, connecting us to each other and to the cosmos. The Pentagram, therefore, is not merely a symbol. It is a philosophical compass, a map of our spiritual journey. It reminds us to remain grounded, yet to let our thoughts soar; to burn with passion, yet to cool with compassion; to dive deep within ourselves, yet to connect to the divine within all. It is a reminder that we are born of the cosmos, and to the cosmos, we shall return - a testament to the spiritual cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. In this dance of existence, we are not solitary dancers, but part of a divine choreography, intricately woven into the fabric of the universe.

Simone de Beauvoir gave us the insight that woman has been fabricated by man as “the other, ” the relative being—relative to himself as the norm. So it should not be surprising that men, who have literally and figuratively, constructed women for centuries, are now “perfecting” the man-made women out of their own flesh.

There is a special problem in communications theory. We call it ‘narrative collapse’. When a planet is very connected, a time inevitably arrives when it becomes difficult to work out what is actually going on. Video and audio can be faked. Testimony isn’t reliable. All truths fall into a relative flatness. This is more dangerous than any doomsday weapon. You have a king and, if you don’t mind me saying so, not a very nice one. But at least his population knows when he’s being deceitful or harsh. On my world and the sister world we’ve lost even that. Many still don’t even believe Morae really exists. They claim it’s a fabrication by Al’Hazaad.

As we approach parts with curiosity and compassion, they may spontaneously release burdens and polarities, returning to the wholeness of the Self, no longer believing in separateness. The conceptual framework surrounding parts may dissolve, and the very label "part" may become superfluous. This aligns with Schwartz’s belief that in a healthy, integrated, or never-burdened system, you "hardly notice your parts." As inner harmony is achieved through this work, the practices themselves may naturally fade away, including any mindfulness or self-inquiry techniques, as our direct knowing of the unified Self stabilizes. What remains is unmediated experiencing—perception without an internal judge or narrator imposing layers of meaning. Like a bird feeling the fresh raindrop, we awaken to the pure isness of the present moment. We recognize that diversity was never truly separate—all parts reside within the vastness of the Self and feel its illuminating presence infusing life with wholeness. Self-realization does not conflict with the experience of inner multiplicity. Rather, it provides the foundation for embracing our diverse parts with love and understanding. Just as clouds naturally arise within the vast expanse of the sky, the many facets of our psyche emerge from the same unitary source of consciousness. By recognizing our fundamental oneness, we can openly accept all inner voices and perspectives as inseparable expressions of our true nature. Parts work therapies like Jungian analysis, psychosynthesis, and IFS rest on the realization that our multiplicity arises from and returns to an underlying unity. Healing separation unveils the intrinsic connectedness shining through our diversity. The many are seen to be expressions of the one infinite consciousness from which we all emerge. Awakening to our true nature does not erase our finite human form but allows us to live as embodiments of the infinite while navigating the relative world. We can embrace relationships, experiences, and inner parts as manifestations of the vast depths of being itself. Our very capacity for a richly textured existence arises from the fecundity of the source—celebrating the unlimited creativity that gives rise to all multiplicities within its all-encompassing embrace. When we unravel the tendency to view parts as separate from Self, ourselves as separate from the collective, and the collective as separate from the universe, we find interconnected wholeness underneath it all, like pieces of the same puzzle fitting perfectly together. Though each piece may seem distinct, together they form a complete picture. Just as a puzzle is not whole without all its pieces, so too are we fragments without our connections to others and the greater whole. All pieces big and small fit together to create the fullness of life. From the vantage point of the infinite, life appears as a seamless whole. Yet seen through the finite lens of the mind, it fragments into countless shapes and forms. To insist that only oneness or multiplicity is real leads to a fragmented perspective, caught between mutually exclusive extremes. With curiosity and compassion, we can integrate these views into a unified vision. Like the beads in a kaleidoscope, Self appears in endless configurations—now as particle, now as wave. Though the patterns change, the beads remain the same. All possibilities are held safely within the kaleidoscope's luminous field. The essence lies in remembering that no bead stands alone. Parts require the presence of an overarching whole that encompasses them. The individual Self necessitates the existence of a vaster, universal SELF. The love that binds all parts infuses the inside and outside alike. This unifying love can be likened to the Tao, the very fabric from which life is woven.

Right after church, my great Aunt Theresa comes to visit. She drives one of those long white Cadillacs which is so old that I can hear the muffler long before I spot the car. Whenever it sounds like a log truck is tearing down our drive, nine times out of ten it’s my great Aunt Theresa. Out of all of Grandpa’s sisters, she is the only one I can remember. Not because she always stores a pinch of snuff between her cheek and gum and not because a puff of brown dust escapes her mouth every time she speaks. It’s because my great Aunt Theresa is a twiddler. She’s constantly twiddling with something—a strand of hair, her nails, an earlobe, a sock, the bottom of her shoe. But in the past five years, she’s developed a new twiddling habit—trailing her fingers up and down pillowcase fabric. In fact, she stores pillowcases everywhere, like in the trunk of her car or in the oversized purse always swinging from her hip. Where most people can’t go five minutes without their phone, Aunt Theresa can’t go five minutes without her pillowcase.

A static and unyielding divinity is truly incommensurate with the very fabric of existence and is not in fact supported by many biblical stories that indicate a relational God who weeps over a beloved people, a beloved earth, who anguishes and builds, who argues and responds, who watches over creation (like a mother eagle), and who is as steadfast as a rock.

A human being rarely feels more threatened than when the firm fabric of his existence begins to unravel - when all order collapses and he finds himself utterly exposed to the unexpected and unpredictable. Even relatively harmless signs of such impending dissolution fill us with dread.

The silhouette of my old self was still perceptible, but my insides were muting into a ghostly palimpsest.""Grief is a ghost that visits without warnings. It comes in with the night and rips you from your sleep.""There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact." and most of all, I can relate to "To witness your child's death is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language. Words simply collapse.

If knowledge is to continue its open-ended growth, and if we are nevertheless heading towards a state in which one person could understand everything that is understood, then the depth of our theories must continue to grow fast enough to make this possible. That can happen only if the fabric of reality is itself highly unified, so that more and more of it can become understood as our knowledge grows. If that happens, then eventually our theories will become so general, deep and integrated with one another that they will effectively become a single theory of a unified fabric of reality. This theory will still not explain every aspect of reality: that is unattainable. But it will encompass all known explanations, and will apply to the whole fabric of reality in so far as it is understood. Whereas all previous theories related to particular subjects, this will be a theory of all subjects: a Theory of Everything. It will not, of course, be the last such theory, only the first. In science we take it for granted that even our best theories are bound to be imperfect and problematic in some ways, and we expect them to be superseded in due course by deeper, more accurate theories. Such progress is not brought to a halt when we discover a universal theory.

Whether or not you discover a more realistic meaning or fabricate your own, what matters is that changing the meaning of the behavior changes how you feel about it. (210) While meanings make sense of a moment, beliefs are generalized to make sense of related moments forever, and they are applied to every future moment with a similar context.

The roots of war are to be sought in politics and history, those of earthquakes in geophysics, of forest fires in patterns of weather and in the natural ecology, and those of market crashes in the principles of finance, economics, and the psychology of human behavior. Beyond the labels “disaster” and “upheaval,” each of these events erupted from the soil of its own peculiar setting. Still, there is an intriguing similarity. In each case, it seems, the organization of the system—the web of international relations, the fabric of the forests or of the Earth’s crust, or the network of linked expectations and trading perspectives of investors—made it possible for a small shock to trigger a response out of all proportion to itself. It is as if these systems had been poised on some knife-edge of instability, merely waiting to be “set off.

relational fabric and all things, having no clear boundaries. Powers act not from remote distance but with present, highly tangible agency. Any event can be a manifestation of such forces. Winds, lands, waters, plants, animals—all are sacred, and all aspects of existence are bound by spiritual threads into a tight weave of power. Nature is a “watchful and possessive” second society of physical and spirit forces in which people live. No wilderness is desolate, because nowhere are you ever alone. Indigenous people move in landscapes whose creatures, plants, and weather continually decide what to do.

Composing a poem and creating a fabric—whether weaving or knitting--actually have a surprising amount in common, not least a lot of terms—take the word “text” itself for example. Line? Related to linen. We spin yarns in our narrative poems. Poets spend a lot of time wool-gathering.

Special relativity declares a similar law for all motion: the combined speed of any object’s motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light.

River Rafting in Rishikesh is one of the most thrilling water based adventure sports that gives you an up close splatter of untamed nature in a world where the royal river is what you are up adjacent to. Aboard a raft, when the water wave hits your face for the first time; you be familiar with that it will take a little more than a few ounces of bravery to tame the river beast and indeed this duel next to mother nature will enrich your life forever, even if tried only once in a life time…The modern raft is a boat that is inflated comprising of a very durable and thick coated rubberized or vinyl fabric and also has a number of air chambers. The chief apparatus required for rafting are a life jacket ,Safety helmet, Safety Helmet, Paddles, River guide and a Self-Bailing Raft, etc. It is a very daring activity and it may appear a very perilous sport, but once you knowledge it, you will certainly realize the actual thrill of rafting. The best time for water river rafting is spiral summer to February to May and in winter September to November. You probably think that there is completely no way to extreme sports such as rafting can be fun at all. This is false, because all you need for a great sport like this is fun to be an expert to take manages of all rafting. It is a fun place to take part in all the summer sports, when it's nice and warm and all you need is a movement related to the water to take temperatures down. It is also a thrilling sport that many people can participate at the same time. Friends and family can get together and everybody can have a brilliant day of fun. As you begin your boat journey, you will encounter a number of rapids, which you will be necessary to sail over. Uttarakhand adventure is well known rafting company in Rishikesh. This excursion will roughly be two hours long, and will make you use all your power and skill to keep the boat under control. Water will stay splash all over you, and will keep you invigorated and bouncing if you start feeling tired due to the corporeal work that you will do. As an extreme sport, rafting certainly has its drawbacks, but not all make games? The best way to take safety measures so that you can avoid fatal accidents is to acquire a knowledgeable scout who is qualified for the chore and the best gear for rafting. For example, you should always have a life jacket on the obverse rafting, in the unfortunate event that the boat capsize; you'll be able to stay afloat and hope to swim to defense. Also, if you are unsure of your rafting skills, rapids and waterfalls stay away from very high.

Our sense of self, formulated in large part by the untold number of cross-related connections that we make with our physical, social, and family environments, is reliant upon fitting into our social fabric. The educational environment, family relationships, peer groups, books, television, films, music, along with an assortment of other cultural events shape our emergent persona. Our successes and failures interacting in the world leave their collective imprint upon the wet clay of our forming brains. We are sentimental creatures who cling to past memories. We are inquisitive critters who venture forth from our protective dens to explore new territory. We are perceptive organisms equipped with five basic senses. We are sentient beings who can consciously organize our sense impressions into guiding ideas and useful principles. Our survival responses form a central cord of our emotions. We are receptive, compassionate beings that respond with both body and mind to global stimuli.

To do so, we first have to learn to see it for what it is—by cutting through all of the buzzwords, the marketing hype, the pseudoscientific shibboleths and mumbo-jumbo. Then we have to learn to evaluate it: if it is efficient, then by what measure, and who stands to benefit from its efficiency? Efficiency as a euphemism for corporate profitability shouldn’t fool us. Efficiency is a measure that relates productivity (output) to labor and resource inputs; it is meaningless unless we understand all the implications of these inputs and outputs. For a solar panel, does it simply input solar radiation and output electric current? No, its input is all the energy—mainly from fossil fuels—that went into mining, refining, fabricating, finance, design, research, sales, shipping, installation, tech support, maintenance and disposal. Its output is, yes, a modest amount of electricity. It could well turn out that your solar panel is a way to convert a lot of fossil fuel energy into a bit of electricity with the help of sunlight. How efficient is that? Perhaps it would be more efficient to use less electricity—or to not use electricity at all.

Banishing zero also solves the infinity problems in general relativity. If you imagine a black hole as a string, no longer do objects fall through a rip in the fabric of space-time. Instead, a particle loop approaching a black-hole loop stretches out and touches the black hole. The two loops tremble, tear, and form one loop: a slightly more massive black hole. (Some theorists believe that the act of merging a particle to a black hole creates bizarre particles such as tachyons: particles with imaginary mass that travel backward in time and move faster than light. Such particles might be admissable in certain versions of string theory.)

Modern culture has disenchanted the world by disenchanting numbers. For us, numbers are about quantity and control, not quality and contemplation. After Bacon, knowledge of numbers is a key to manipulation, not meditation. Numbers are only meaningful (like all raw materials that comprise the natural world) when we can do something with them. When we read of twelve tribes and twelve apostles and twelve gates and twelve angels, we typically perceive something spreadsheet-able. By contrast, in one of Caldecott’s most radical claims, he insists, “It is not simply that numbers can be used as symbols. Numbers have meaning—they are symbols. The symbolism is not always merely projected onto them by us; much of it is inherent in their nature” (p. 75). Numbers convey to well-ordered imaginations something of (in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s metaphor) the inner design of the fabric of creation. The fact that the words “God said” appear ten times in the account of creation and that there are ten “words” in the Decalogue is not a random coincidence. The beautiful meaningfulness of a numberly world is most evident in the perception of harmony, whether in music, architecture, or physics. Called into being by a three-personed God, creation’s essential relationality is often evident in complex patterns that can be described mathematically. Sadly, as Caldecott laments, “our present education tends to eliminate the contemplative or qualitative dimension of mathematics altogether” (p. 55). The sense of transcendence that many (including mathematicians and musicians) experience when encountering beauty is often explained away by materialists as an illusion. Caldecott offers an explanation rooted in Christology. Since the Logos is love, and since all things are created through him and for him and are held together in him, we should expect the logic, the rationality, the intelligibility of the world to usher in the delight that beauty bestows. One

Part of this is related to the vast apparatus created to administer the criminal-justice system; part is related to the new laws that mandate longer sentences and keep the prisons full of older inmates for longer periods; part is due to the rules governing release and reentry—parole policies that lower the threshold for violations and ensure recidivism; and part is the result of lasting damage done to the families and the social fabric of the communities from which most prisoners are drawn.

So small changes in the ambient temperature over relatively short periods of time that are not sufficiently long for adaptive processes to develop can lead to huge ecological and climatological effects. Some of these may be positive, but many will be catastrophic. Regardless, however, of the sign of the effect, significant changes are upon us, and we desperately need to understand their origins and consequences and forge strategies for adaptation and mitigation. The crucial question is not whether these effects are anthropogenic in origin because they almost certainly are, but rather to what extent they can be minimized without leading to rapid discontinuous changes in our physical and economic environment and ultimately to the potential collapse of the global socioeconomic fabric. Hence my bewilderment at those in the general public including political and corporate leaders who reject the cautionary exhortations of scientists, environmentalists, and others, and why I am continually baffled by their lack of action. Yes, we should all delight in and promote the huge successes and fruits of the free market system and of the role of human ingenuity and innovation, but we should also recognize the critical roles of energy and entropy and together act strategically to find

Not so. You have been doing that quite frequently now. Rest easy. Later the whole of quantum mechanics will be placed in the context of the ten-dimensional manifold of manifolds, and there reconciled to gravity and to general relativity. Then, if you go that far, you will feel better about how it is that these equations can work, or be descriptive of a real world.” “But the results are impossible!” “Not at all. There are other dimensions folded into the ones our senses perceive, as I told you.” “How can you be sure, if we can never perceive them?” “It’s a matter of tests pursued, just as you do it in your work. We have found ways to interrogate the qualities of these dimensions as they influence our sensorium. We see then that there must be other kinds of dimensions. For instance, when very small particles decay into two photons, these photons have a quantum property we call spin. The clockwise spin of one is matched by a counterclockwise spin of the same magnitude in the other one, so that when the spin values are added, they equal zero. Spin is a conserved quantity in this universe, like energy and momentum. Experiments show that before a spin is measured, there is an equal potential for it to be clockwise or counterclockwise, but as soon as the spin is measured it becomes one or the other. At that moment of measurement, the complementary photon, no matter how far away, must have the opposite spin. The act of measurement of one thus determines the spin of both, even if the other photon is many light-years away. It changes faster than news of the measurement could have reached it moving at the speed of light, which is as fast as information moves in the dimensions we see. So how does the far photon know what to become? It only happens, and faster than light. This phenomenon was demonstrated in experiments on Earth, long ago. And yet nothing moves faster than the speed of light. Einstein was the one who called this seemingly faster-than-light effect ‘spooky action at a distance,’ but it is not that; rather, the distance we perceive is irrelevant to this quality we call spin, which is a feature of the universe that is nonlocal. Nonlocality means things happening together across distance as if the distance were not there, and we have found nonlocality to be fundamental and ubiquitous. In some dimensions, nonlocal entanglement is simply everywhere and everything, the main feature of that fabric of reality. The way space has distance and time has duration, other manifolds have entanglement.

Physical space is the fabric resulting from the ceaseless swarming of this web of relations. The lines themselves are nowhere-they are not in a place but rather create places through their interactions. Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.

If lying and fabrication are psychologically harmful even in ordinary relations with other men (a sphere where a certain amount of falsification is not uncommon) all falsity is disastrous in any relation with the ground of our own being

am deeply burdened by observing churches lessen their value of prayer in all their meetings. We need prayer that is relational and fellowship oriented. This kind of prayer in a leaders’ meeting goes beyond a quick invitation to God for his help in decision making. This is the kind of prayer that at the opening of the worship team practice leads the team to a deep level of communion with God. This is the kind of prayer that connects us to a living God and draws us into his heart’s desires. The church that has prayer woven into the fabric of its entire ministry will be absorbed with the presence of God. If

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace. As

As a leader, remember that one of the most significant strategies for building the qualities of solid relationships into the relational fabric of the team is for you, the team leader, to model them. Let team members see them in practice.

For the fabrication of a long-span FDP, an alloy with a relatively high modulus of elasticity to reduce the amount of bending deflection under loading is preferred, because excessive flexure can cause fracture of the brittle porcelain

Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing. In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced. I have no wish to overstress the negative side of this great exploration. If I seem to do so here it is because both the older romantic exponents of a new life lived in accordance with Nature, or the later exponents of a new life framed in conformity to the Machine, overlooked the appalling losses and wastages, under the delusion either that the primeval abundance was inexhaustible or else that the losses did not matter, since modern man through science and invention would soon fabricate an artificial world infinitely more wonderful than that nature had provided-an even grosser delusion. Both views have long been rife in the United States where the two phases of the New World dream came together; and they are still prevalent.

There is already a publication entitled Suicide: A User’s Guide: it catalogues rather quick techniques for stopping your heart or blowing your brains out. Alas, with the resurrection we cannot claim such efficiency. Although it is relatively easy to put an end to one’s own life, it is on the other hand much harder to get it to start again. You do not pull yourself up from six feet under the way you throw yourself out of a sixth-story window. I am capable of removing myself from the company of the living; not of raising myself from the dead.

Ireland’s social fabric was by now such a patchwork quilt that practically everyone had relatives on the adversaries’ side. Sigtrygg had Irish blood from his mother, a princess named Gormflaith, who had been married many times, once to Brian Boru, which made Brian one of Sigtrygg’s stepfathers. Sigtrygg, in turn, had married one of Brian’s daughters by another Irish wife, which made him a son-in-law of Brian’s. To top it off, the rebellious Maelmordha of Leinster was Gormflaith’s brother, which made him Brian’s brother-in-law and Sigtrygg’s uncle.

The problem is that we're all full of desire; it is the very hallmark of our emotional existence, and it can lead to our downfall - and to the downfall of others. [...] Once upon a time, Aristophanes relates, there were gods in the heavens and humans down on earth. But we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms - a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. We came in three different possible gender or sexual variations: male/female meldings, male/male meldings, and female/female meldings, depending on what suited each creature the best. Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy. Thus, all of us double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented creatures moved across the earth much the same way that the planets travel through the heavens - dreamily, orderly, smoothly. We lacked for nothing; we had no unmet needs; we wanted nobody. There was no strife and no chaos. We were whole.

FEELING IT It’s useful to think about how emotional feelings emerge in consciousness by way of analogy with the way the flavor of a soup is the product of its ingredients.92 For example, salt, pepper, garlic, and water are common ingredients that go into a chicken soup. The amount of salt and pepper added can intensify the taste of the soup without radically changing its nature. You can add other ingredients, like celery, green peppers, and parsley, and have a variant of a chicken soup. Add roux and it becomes gumbo, whereas curry paste pushes it in a different direction. Substitute shrimp for chicken, and the character again changes. None of these individual items are soup ingredients per se: They are things that exist independent of soup and that would exist if a soup had never been made. The idea that emotions are psychologically constructed states is related to Claude Levi-Strauss’s notion of “bricolage.”93 This is the French word referring to something put together (constructed) from items that happen to be available. Levi-Strauss emphasized the importance of the individual, the “bricoleur,” and his social context, in the construction process. Building on this idea, Shirley Prendergast and Simon Forrest note that “maybe persons, objects, contexts, the sequence and fabric of everyday life are the medium through which emotions come into being, day to day, a kind of emotional bricolage.”94 In the brain, working memory can be thought of as the “bricoleur,” and the content of emotional consciousness resulting from the construction process as the bricolage. Similarly, fear, anxiety, and other emotions arise from intrinsically nonemotional ingredients, things that exist in the brain for other reasons but that create feelings when they coalesce in consciousness. The pot in which the ingredients of conscious feelings are cooked is working memory (Figure 8.9). Different ingredients, or varying amounts of the same ingredients, account for differences between fear and anxiety, and for variations within each category. Although my soup analogy is new, I’ve been promoting the basic idea that conscious feelings are assembled from nonemotional ingredients for quite some time.95

Today’s widespread social disharmony in relation to gender is not inevitable for human society, although it is the inevitable product of thousands of years of systemic gender injustice across the globe. Because we have never known anything else, it is difficult impossible for us to imagine what life would be like if we had grown up in a society that was truly integrated and healthy in relation to gender and sexuality. The entire fabric of human society would be vastly different from what we know today.

the demon of fear of events, with its fur bristling in anticipation of a caress; the demon of worldly piety, which lifts itself up by creeping like ivy; the demon of proud science, hiding its horns beneath a university mortarboard; the demon of quick-tempered strength that is incapable of enduring the least vexation; the demon of bad counsel, that tells you all the tricks by which to climb the rungs of hell; the demon of artificial intelligence, that believes that thought is perfected not in praise but in calculation; the demon of the wisdom of spirituality websites, which provide you with “well-being, interior freedom, harmony, and serenity in everyday life” by assuring you that you are the reincarnation of an empress and that your boss is only an illusion. Our Mary, who is neither a saint nor a virgin, had all it would take to succeed in high society. No such luck, or perhaps by the grace of God, whichever you prefer: there she was, deprived of the seven keys to success and commanded by the Risen Lord to relate an impossible story to a bunch of dullards. To

The above comments are intended to justify the emphasis in our discussion on the ways in which scientists produce order. This necessarily involves an examination of the methodical way in which observations and experiences are organised so that sense can be made of them. As already noted, we have every reason to believe that the accomplishment of this kind of task is no mean feat, as is clear from a consideration of the corresponding task faced by the observer when confronted by his field notes. The observer’s task is to transform notes of the kind presented at the beginning of this chapter into an ordered account. But exactly how and where should the observer begin this transformation? It is clear that when seen through the eyes of a total newcomer, the daily comings and goings of the laboratory take on an alien quality. The observer initially encounters a mysterious and apparently unconnected sequence of events. In order to make sense of his observations, the observer normally adopts some kind of theme by which he hopes to be able to construct a pattern. If he can successfully use a theme to convince others of the existence of a pattern, he can be said, at least according to relatively weak criteria, to have “explained’’ his observations. Of course, the selection and adoption of “themes” is highly problematic. For example, the way in which the theme is selected can be held to bear upon the validity of his explanation; the observer’s selection of a theme constitutes his method for which he is accountable. It is not enough simply to fabricate order out of an initially chaotic collection of observations; the observer needs to be able to demonstrate that this fabrication has been done correctly, or, in short, that his method is valid.

As far as language is concerned, it is the lateral relation of one sign to another which makes each of them significant, so that meaning appears only at the intersection of and as it were in the intervals between words...Speech always comes into play against a background of speech; it is always only a fold in the immense fabric of language. Tounderstand it, we do not have to consult some inner lexicon which gives us the pure thoughts covered up by the words or forms we are perceiving; we only have to lend ourselves to its life, to its movement of differentiation and articulation, and to its eloquent gestures. There is thus an opaqueness of language. Nowhere does it stop and leave a place for pure meaning; it is always limited only by more language, and meaning appears wlthin it only set in a context of words. Like a charade, language is understood only through the interaction of signs, each of which, taken separately, is equivocal or banal, and makes sense only by being combined with others.

Any middle-class household in eighteenth-century Amsterdam or Grenoble would have been likely to have on its shelves at the very least a copy of the Jesuit Relations of New France (as France’s North American colonies were then known), and one or two accounts written by voyagers to faraway lands. Such books were appreciated largely because they contained surprising and unprecedented ideas.10 Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously. It’s all just supposed to be some kind of misunderstanding, fabrication, or at best a naive projection of pre-existing European ideas.

Sewing is an enjoyable hobby that allows you to be creative and make a variety of items for yourself and others. At Clothingus.com, we offer a range of resources to help you learn how to sew, including easy projects and information about different sewing tools and their uses. Here are some interesting facts about sewing and related materials that may inspire you to try this useful craft: Cotton fabric can last for up to 100 years with proper care. In fact, cotton fabric has been found in many archaeological sites, indicating its longevity. Women's buttons are typically sewn onto the left side of a garment due to historical reasons. In the past, buttons were expensive, and only wealthy women with domestic help could afford them. To make it easier for the help to button up the garments, they were placed on the left side. Zippers were invented in 1893 and were initially used only on shoes and boots to make them easier to put on. Over time, they gained popularity and were used on other garments as well. The term "calico" refers to a type of cotton print that originated in the city of Calcutta, India. These hand-woven printed fabrics were made in the late 18th century and were named after the city. Buttons on sleeves were introduced by Napoleon Bonaparte. He wanted to prevent his soldiers from wiping their noses on their sleeves, so he ordered buttons to be sewn onto the ends of the sleeves. Sewing is believed to be one of the first skills that Homo sapiens learned. Archaeologists have found evidence of people sewing together fur, hide, skin, and bark for clothing dating back to 25,000 years ago. Early sewing needles were made of bone and ivory, with metal needles being developed later in human history. By the 20th century, more than 4000 different types of sewing machines had been invented. However, only those that made sewing simple, fun, and easy survived over time. If you're interested in learning more about sewing, visit Clothingus.com for lessons and projects that can help you build a solid foundation in this skill. Whether you're a beginner or have some experience, we have something for you. Visit Clothingus.com now.

could not be forthright when Margaret hurt her feelings, Margaret never knew of Odile’s resentment, and Margaret herself never had the opportunity to change how she thought and spoke. This situation in the book is very specific, but speaks to a general trend. These conversations, where we must tell people when we are uncomfortable or upset, are challenging. Many people today would rather cut off relatives and friends completely than express how they actually feel. We tend to bottle our feelings and then come to a breaking point. And then the fabric of community tears more. I hope this book will help us mend it.

Because Odile could not be forthright when Margaret hurt her feelings, Margaret never knew of Odile’s resentment, and Margaret herself never had the opportunity to change how she thought and spoke. This situation in the book is very specific, but speaks to a general trend. These conversations, where we must tell people when we are uncomfortable or upset, are challenging. Many people today would rather cut off relatives and friends completely than express how they actually feel. We tend to bottle our feelings and then come to a breaking point. And then the fabric of community tears more. I hope this book will help us mend it.

[Work] is rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish. This pattern is found in all kinds of work. Farming takes the physical material of soil and seed and produces food. Music takes the physics of sound and rearranges it into something beautiful and thrilling that brings meaning to life. When we take fabric and make a piece of clothing, when we push a broom and clean up a room, when we use technology to harness the forces of electricity, when we take an unformed, naive human mind and teach it a subject, when we teach a couple how to resolve their relational disputes, when we take simple materials and turn them into a poignant work of art—we are continuing God’s work of forming, filling, and subduing. Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and “unfold” creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural development.

Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 10 Nationality is not the trouble, real trouble is nationalism, And nationalism is the super weapon in a politician's arsenal. When nothing works, peddling nationalism works every time, For insecure citizenry can't tell nationality from nationalism. So in practice, all the wars of the world are caused by citizens, But it feels good to blame the bad things on politicians. Once the citizens grow up to not be swayed by nationalism, No authoritarian nincompoop can make them dance. Nationality is a tool, what it is not is a badge of supremacy, Just like culture is a tool, and not a badge of authority. If we must dance, let us dance to life, not to baseless fright, If we must take a step, let's take a step towards humanity. Borders exist to aid the functioning of the fabric of society. They are not some olympian designation of your identity.

Daphne didn’t have kids. Of course she didn’t. She didn’t even have a real marriage. All of it was fabricated for financial gain. Being a mom not only opened new doors, it kept her relevant and relatable. OH. MY. GOD. This woman was nuts. She was a complete fucking sociopath and I’d let her commandeer my life.

Even at the cutting edge of modern physics, partial differential equations still provide the mathematical infrastructure. Consider Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It reimagines gravity as a manifestation of curvature in the four-dimensional fabric of space-time. The standard metaphor invites us to picture space-time as a stretchy, deformable fabric, like the surface of a trampoline. Normally the fabric is pulled taut, but it can curve under the weight of something heavy placed on it, say a massive bowling ball sitting at its center. In much the same way, a massive celestial body like the sun can curve the fabric of space-time around it. Now imagine something much smaller, say a tiny marble (which represents a planet), rolling on the trampoline’s curved surface. Because the surface sags under the bowling ball’s weight, it deflects the marble’s trajectory. Instead of traveling in a straight line, the marble follows the contours of the curved surface and orbits around the bowling ball repeatedly. That, says Einstein, is why the planets go around the sun. They’re not feeling a force; they’re just following the paths of least resistance in the curved fabric of space-time.

In the initial stages, this usually involved evaluating how you were relating to the breath, and detecting more subtle levels of breath energy in the body that would provide a basis for deeper levels of stillness. Once the breath was perfectly still, and the sense of the body started dissolving into a formless mist, this process would involve detecting the perceptions of "space," "knowing," "oneness," etc., that would appear in place of the body and could be peeled away like the layers of an onion in the mind. In either case, the basic pattern was the same: detecting the level of perception or mental fabrication that was causing the unnecessary stress, and dropping it for a more subtle level of perception or fabrication until there was nothing left to drop. -Jhana Not By the Numbers

from television, newspapers, magazines, and the like. If you do, you’ll often miss the truth. Being under constant media scrutiny myself, I know firsthand how many mistakes the press in general makes by jumping in quickly without proper investigation. I have many friends who are celebrities and many who are scientific researchers, and the horror stories they’ve related to me about misrepresentation, misreporting of facts, and downright lies are mind-boggling. This entire journalism profession has one big problem that they try to push under the rug, but can’t—and that’s that they’re in their business for profit. This results in stories being released quickly in order to “scoop” the competition, which then leads to falsehoods and poor research. It also culminates in stories being fabricated, pictures being falsified, quotes being misrepresented or made up, and a general

The small surplus of matter over antimatter was only one of the asymmetries. Equally profound, engendering structure out of the matter that remained, was gravitational energy that broke out of the unified energy field at the beginning of the universe we inhabit. Following inflation, gravity amplified its effects throughout space in response to the stretched quantum fluctuations that first set the patterns into which structure would evolve. Matter began to concentrate in some regions, leaving other areas relatively less dense. The distribution of galaxies would later correlate with this initial pattern of lumpiness. In other ways, the early shaping of our universe may have progressed through discontinuities emerging out of symmetrical force fields that then took particular forms within the wrinkled "quantum fabric" of spacetime. One seminal example that led out of physics to chemistry and, ultimately, biology was a unified particle symmetry that concerned an electron-neutrino unity. These particles assume a smooth, uniform identity-virtually pure energy at an extremely high temperature-but, upon cooling to a certain threshold, suddenly break into unique entities, with the electron assuming much more of its energy as mass and the potential to build the emergent complexity of chemistry around elemental matter. Thus, the early breaking of symmetries led to various subsequent processes to shape the universe on all scales with an inexorable potential for the emergence of everything.

I would concede now that all these things were fabrications based on stories I’d heard. Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

Rather she speaks about “teaching love and learning freedom” as deeply relational, respectful endeavors that must be threaded into the fabric of a humanistic education.

The unvarnished truth of the Grail myth is that the evil wrought of bad decisions recurs and recrudesces: it is not obliterated. Small errors become larger ones as time wears on, and the fabric of the worlds falls apart as the communion of the Faery Accord is forgotten or violated. Like many mythic narratives that polarize the creative and destructive powers against each other, The Elucidation relates the consequences of self-serving actions that forget to listen to the “voices of the wells,” which continually are singing the vision of a world where our gifts of innate intelligence and common sense are bound by a love and compassion of all who are alive.

Conflict resolution. The team discovers the principles and process of managing conflict in a healthy, productive manner. In organizational settings, we tend to live on one of two ends of a continuum. We either have mismanaged agreement (conflict avoidance), or we tear the relational fabric between people to shreds. Conflict is the door to creativity, consensus, and commitment. If the team doesn't learn how to talk straight and be tough on issues without blowing one another out of the water, they will probably never experience the creative synergy needed to achieve exceptional results.

Of the rise of this singular people few authentic records appear to exist. It is, however, probable that they represent a later wave of that race, whether true Sudras, or a later wave of immigrants from Central Asia, which is found farther south as Mahratta; and perhaps they had, in remote times, a Scythian origin like the earlier and nobler Rajputs. They affect Rajput ways, although the Rajputs would disdain their kinship; and they give to their chiefs the Rajput title of "Thakur," a name common to the Deity and to great earthly lords, and now often used to still lower persons. So much has this practice indeed extended, that some tribes use the term generically, and speak of themselves as of the "Thakur" race. These, however, are chiefly pure Rajputs. It is stated, by an excellent authority, that even now the Jats "can scarcely be called pure Hindus, for they have many observances, both domestic and religious, not consonant with Hindu precepts. There is a disposition also to reject the fables of the Puranic Mythology, and to acknowledge the unity of the Godhead." (Elliot's Glossary, in voce "Jat.") Wherever they are found, they are stout yeomen; able to cultivate their fields, or to protect them, and with strong administrative habits of a somewhat republican cast. Within half a century, they have four times tried conclusions with the might of Britain. The Jats of Bhartpur fought Lord Lake with success, and Lord Combermere with credit; and their "Sikh" brethren in the Panjab shook the whole fabric of British India on the Satlaj, in 1845, and three years later on the field of Chillianwala. The Sikh kingdom has been broken up, but the Jat principality of Bhartpur still exists, though with contracted limits, and in a state of complete dependence on the British Government. There is also a thriving little principality — that of Dholpur — between Agra and Gwalior, under a descendant of the Jat Rana of Gohad, so often met with in the history of the times we are now reviewing (v. inf. p. 128.) It is interesting to note further, that some ethnologists have regarded this fine people as of kin to the ancient Get¾, and to the Goths of Europe, by whom not only Jutland, but parts of the south-east of England and Spain were overrun, and to some extent peopled. It is, therefore, possible that the yeomen of Kent and Hampshire have blood relations in the natives of Bhartpur and the Panjab. The area of the Bhartpur State is at present 2,000 square miles, and consists of a basin some 700 feet above sea level, crossed by a belt of red sandstone rocks. It is hot and dry; but in the skilful hands that till it, not unfertile; and the population has been estimated at near three-quarters of a million. At the time at which our history has arrived, the territory swayed by the chiefs of the Jats was much more extensive, and had undergone the fate of many another military republic, by falling into the hands of the most prudent and daring of a number of competent leaders. It has already been shown (in Part I.) how Suraj Mal, as Raja of the Bhartpur Jats, joined the Mahrattas in their resistance to the great Musalman combination of 1760. Had his prudent counsels been followed, it is possible that this resistance would have been more successful, and the whole history of Hindustan far otherwise than what it has since been. But the haughty leader of the Hindus, Sheodasheo Rao Bhao, regarded Suraj Mal as a petty landed chief not accustomed to affairs on a grand scale, and so went headlong on his fate.

where am I going? This society? The whole human race?” These are questions which many of us today are asking urgently, deeply troubled about what we see happening in our world Our concerns may be quite personal ones, centered around our own particular life situation. They may be general ones, related to the state of things as a whole or both. For this is a strange and difficult time, a time when all the old values and traditions seem to have been cut out from under us without anything clear and definitive having been substituted for them. From every direction and every possible source, we’re being bombarded by the newfangled ideas, values and behaviors of the New Age in which we live. The New Age is an age with many interesting features. One of these is confusion. Great numbers of us no longer seem to have a clear sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Under the impact of too much personal freedom and the flood of new ideas and values, we’re falling apart, frightened, uncertain, lost. After all, how is it possible to have certainty about anything when even the most basic, time-honored values are being called into question? In comparison to earlier times, everything around us today seems upside-down and backwards. A great deal of what was previously considered right is now looked upon as outmoded, irrelevant or just plain dumb. At the same time, much of what used to be considered wrong is now accepted as right, normal and okay. Members of the older generation, like myself, still maintain our vision of what things were like in an earlier, simpler, less perplexing period. But when our generation goes, apart from people of strong religious faith, who will be left that still retains a clear vision of a saner, more stable society? That vision will have gone with the winds of change. This turn-about in basic human values and morals has led to a steady unraveling of civilized standards and behavior, not only in the country but worldwide. Brutality, lust and all manner of other evils flourish around the globe; violence, vice and exploitation seem to have become the new order of the day. And fear hangs over the whole world. Those of us who are even slightly sensitive to the currents and energies around us realize that something is wrong-deeply, awfully wrong. And we carry the collective burden of humanity’s pain and turmoil deep within our hearts. Day by day the fear and uneasiness increases. Often we sense that we’re at the edge of a terrible and dangerous abyss, surrounded by intense darkness. As the end of this millennium approaches, predictions of a worldwide Armageddon-like catastrophe haunt our minds. And how can it be otherwise when we sense deep within ourselves that things have gone so wrong that such a crisis is due? For each day, new and deeper holes appear in the social and moral fabric of mankind, and it seem obvious that when the holes become more than the fabric itself, it’s past repair.” source: Suzanne Haneef, Islam: The Path of God, pages 11-12 (PDF Version) Written by an American Muslim, this work presents a brief yet comprehensive survey of the basic teachings on the significance of Islam's central concept, faith in and submission to God. It introduces the reader to how Muslims feel about various aspects of life, how they worship, and how Muslims living in the West practice their religion. Perhaps you have been hearing a lot about Islam and Muslims in the news and are interested in knowing, justifiably, just what this religion is all about. This is the classic English-language book for introducing Islam to non-Muslims in the West. It is a well-balanced book that does an excellent job of covering the basics of belief, practice, and culture, without overwhelming the reader in minutia. This is generally the first book that I recommend to people who are interested in learning about Islam. read her other book: What Everyone Should Know About Islam and Muslims

Do try it on,” Cassandra urged. Despite Kathleen’s refusal, the girls insisted on draping it over her shoulders, just to see how it looked. “How beautiful,” Helen said, beaming. It was the most luxurious fabric she had ever felt, the fleece soft and cushiony. Kathleen ran her hand across the rich hues, and sighed. “I suppose I can’t ruin it with aniline dye,” she muttered. “But I’m going to tell him that I did.” “You’re going to lie?” Cassandra asked, her eyes wide. “That’s not setting a very good example for us.” “He must be discouraged from sending unsuitable gifts,” Kathleen said. “It’s not his fault if he doesn’t know any better,” Pandora pointed out. “He knows the rules,” Kathleen said darkly. “And he enjoys breaking them.” My Lord, It was very kind of you to send the lovely gift which is very useful now that the weather has turned. I am pleased to relate that the cashmere absorbed an application of black dye quite evenly so that it is now appropriate for mourning. Thank you for your thoughtfulness. Lady Trenear “You dyed it?” Devon asked aloud, setting the note on his desk with mixture of amusement and irritation. Reaching for a silver penholder, he inserted a fresh nib and pulled a sheet of writing paper from a nearby stack. That morning he had already written a half-dozen missives to lawyers, his banker, and contractors, and had hired an outside agent to analyze the estate’s finances. He grimaced at the sight of his ink-stained fingers. The lemon-and-salt paste his valet had given him wouldn’t entirely remove the smudges. He was tired of writing, and even more so of numbers, and Kathleen’s letter was a welcome distraction. The challenge could not go unanswered.

As a trampoline will stretch and warp if you put a bowling ball on it, so, according to Einstein's theory, a heavy mass such as the sun will warp the fabric of spacetime. If the bowling ball gets dense enough and heavy enough, it will puncture a hole in the trampoline, and this, says general relativity, is what happens when a star gets dense enough - it punctures a hole in spacetime. What the equations seemed to be saying

If certain simplicity conditions are imposed, only one theory out of the general family meets this condition. It is general relativity. It is this deeper unity that creates the criss-cross fabric of space-time and the great dilemma in the creation of quantum gravity. As we shall see, quantum mechanics needs to deal with three-dimensional things. The dynamical structure of general relativity suggests - and sufficiently strongly for Dirac to have made his 'counter-revolutionary' remark-that this may be possible. Yet general relativity sends ambivalent signals. Its dynamical structure says 'Pull me apart', but the four-dimensional symmetry revealed by Minkowski says 'Leave me intact." Only a mighty supervening force can shatter space-time.

Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people. What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

One argument that I shall make in this book is that the very notion that a rational agent in full possession of his or her faculties could, in any meaningful sense, freely reject God absolutely and forever is a logically incoherent one. Another is that, for this and other reasons, a final state of eternal torment could be neither a just sentence pronounced upon nor a just fate suffered by a finite being, no matter how depraved that being might have become. Still another is that, even if that fate were in some purely abstract sense “just,” the God who would permit it to become anyone’s actual fate could never be perfectly good—or, rather, as Christian metaphysical tradition obliges us to phrase it, could never be absolute Goodness as such—but could be at most only a relative calculable good in relation to other relative calculable goods. And yet another is that the traditional doctrine of hell’s perpetuity renders other aspects of the tradition, such as orthodox Christology or the eschatological claims of the Apostle Paul, ultimately meaningless. If all of this seems obscure, which at this point it should, I hope it will have become clear by the end of the book. I cannot be certain that it will have done so, however, because Christians have been trained at a very deep level of their thinking to believe that the idea of an eternal hell is a clear and unambiguous element of their faith, and that therefore the idea must make perfect moral sense. They are in error on both counts, as it happens, but a sufficiently thorough conditioning can make an otherwise sound mind perceive even the most ostentatiously absurd proposition to be the very epitome of rational good sense. In fact, where the absurdity proves only slight, the mind that has been trained most thoroughly will, as often as not, fabricate further and more extravagant absurdities, in order to secure the initial offense against reason within a more encompassing and intoxicating atmosphere of corroborating nonsense. Sooner or later, it will all seem to make sense, simply through ceaseless repetition and restatement and rhetorical reinforcement. The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime. In the end, with sufficient practice, one really can, like the White Queen, learn to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained un-breached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

Another Mystery That time I tagged along with my dad to the dry cleaners — What’d I know then about Death? Dad comes out carrying a black suit in a plastic bag. Hangs it up behind the back seat of the old coupe and says, “This is the suit your grandpa is going to leave the world in.” What on earth could he be talking about? I wondered. I touched the plastic, the slippery lapel of that coat that was going away, along with my grandpa. Those days it was just another mystery. Then there was a long interval, a time in which relatives departed this way and that, left and right. Then it was my dad’s turn. I sat and watched him rise up in his own smoke. He didn’t own a suit. So they dressed him gruesomely in a cheap sports coat and tie, for the occasion. Wired his lips into a smile as if he wanted to reassure us, Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it looks. But we knew better. He was dead, wasn’t he? What else could go wrong? (His eyelids were sewn closed, too, so he wouldn’t have to witness the frightful exhibit.) I touched his hand. Cold. The cheek where a little stubble had broken through along the jaw. Cold. Today I reeled this clutter up from the depths. Just an hour or so ago when I picked up my own suit from the dry cleaners and hung it carefully behind the back seat. I drove it home, opened the car door and lifted it out into sunlight. I stood there a minute in the road, my fingers crimped on the wire hanger. Then tore a hole through the plastic to the other side. Took one of the empty sleeves between my fingers and held it — the rough, palpable fabric. I reached through to the other side.

The resources invested in protecting the borders if put to use to uplift humanity then we could give all humans of the world all the happiness they require.

Only so far as man, ek-sisting into the truth of Being, belongs to Being can there come from Being itself the assignment of those directives that must become law and rule for man. In Greek, to assign is nemein. Nomos is not only law but more originally the assignment contained in the dispensation of Being. Only the assignment is capable of dispatching man into Being. Only such dispatching is capable of supporting and obligating. Otherwise all law remains merely something fabricated by human reason. More essential than instituting rules is that man find the way to his abode in the truth of Being. This abode first yields the experience of something we can hold on to. The truth of Being offers a hold for all conduct. "Hold" in our language means protective heed. Being is the protective heed that holds man in his ek-sistent essence to the truth of such protective heed-in such a way that it houses eksistence in language. Thus language is at once the house of Being and the home of human beings. Only because language is the home of the essence of man can historical mankind and human beings not be at home in their language, so that for them language becomes a mere container for their sundry preoccupations. But now in what relation does the thinking of Being stand to theoretical and practical behavior? It exceeds all contemplation because it cares for the light in which a seeing, as theoria, can first live and move. Thinking attends to the clearing of Being in that it puts its saying of Being into language as the home of ek-sistence. Thus thinking is a deed. But a deed that also surpasses all praxis. Thinking towers above action and production, not through the grandeur of its achievement and not as a consequence of its effect, but through the humbleness of its inconsequential accomplishment

Next they showed that strong activation in the amygdala, a relatively more primitive part of the brain associated with emotional memory, was associated with lower likelihood of participants changing their minds back to the truth even when they were informed that the answers provided by their “peers” were fabricated. Strong amygdala activation correlated with strong activation of the hippocampus, an adjacent brain structure that stores memories but was inversely correlated with activity in the PFC.

In the mid-1950s, Governor Luther Hodges cited Aycock’s “march of progress” in his defense of Jim Crow as a system that both ensured political tranquility and enabled racial uplift. His successor in the state house, Terry Sanford, noted that Aycock famously proclaimed “as a white man, I am afraid of but one thing for my race and that is we shall become afraid to give the Negro a fair chance. The white man in the South can never attain to his fullest growth until he does absolute justice to the Negro race.” This framing enabled Hodges, Sanford, and, later, Governor Dan Moore to define the “North Carolina way” in sharp contrast with the racially charged massive resistance rhetoric that defined the approaches of Alabama under George Wallace and Mississippi under Ross Barnett. This moderate course caused early observers like V. O. Key to view the state as “an inspiring exception to southern racism.” Crucially, it operated hand-in-hand with North Carolina’s anti-labor stance to advance the state’s economic interests. Hodges, Sanford, and Moore approached racial policy by emphasizing tranquility, and thus an intolerance for political contention. These officials placed a high value on law and order, condemning as “extremists” those who threatened North Carolina’s “harmonious” race relations by advocating either civil rights or staunch segregation. While racial distinctions could not be elided in the Jim Crow South, where the social fabric was shot through with racial disparity, an Aycock-style progressivist stance emphasized the maintenance of racial separation alongside white elites’ moral and civic interest in the well-being of black residents. This interest generally took the form of a pronounced paternalism, which typically enabled powerful white residents to serve as benefactors to their black neighbors, in a sort of patron-client relationship. “It was white people doing something for blacks—not with them,” explained Charlotte-based Reverend Colemon William Kerry Jr. While often framed as gestures of beneficence and closeness, such acts reproduced inequity and distance. More broadly, this racial order served dominant economic and political interests, as it preserved segregation with a progressive sheen that favored industrial expansion.12

And remembering that these relatively new, often problematic and sometimes difficult to love fabrics can also, at their best, be beautiful.

All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is—marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity. —JOSEPH CONRAD, AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE SHADOW-LINE

Many people today would rather cut off relatives and friends completely than express how they actually feel. We tend to bottle our feelings and then come to a breaking point. And then the fabric of community tears more. I hope this book will help us mend it.

Since the immaterial Being envelopes the Nothing, this nothing, in “cooperation” with the Universal Being (Mind), becomes space as we experience and describe it. The “fabric” of this created space, with the help of nothingness, is curved. But all this is the product of the transformation of the Being into its different forms, modes, and interdependent qualities of reality. The “material” world is only a symphony of “materialized” qualities of the Universal Being,” not matter per se because matter per se does not exist. What we see as space is a “materialized” program of the Universal Mind. What appears to us as dimensions is the underlying nothingness holding the illusion of Reality, making it appear material. The Primordial Primary Quality is the Primary Ultimate Force, or Source, that powers all we see, experience, and measure. Everything is related to Everything else and is affected and conditioned by Everything else. Everything within the Universe is a message, information, and code to everything else. Energy and matter are the messages of the Universal Mind sent into nothingness to fertilize it. Relationships and communication among the myriad beings are the life of one organism. All the features of matter we experience are real in the sense that we experience the spacetime continuum, but all that is the result of programming and conditioning rather than energy and matter as physical realities per se. Everything was One and became a multitude, yet Everything stayed One on the most basic level. The story of One is the story of All. Every sense, every pain, and everything we feel are the messages of existence, messages of the Universal Mind in action, interconnecting the Web of the Universe into One Family. Absolute is the Ultimate uniting force of Everything. To be one and only is death. That’s why creating is needed. Without creating, there is no life. The Universe is the life of the Absolute. Something and Nothing are the Father and the Mother of the World. From One Absolute, there is an almost endless family dispersed through space in search of life and meaning, which is what we call existence.

Quoted lead times do not drive decision-making. Instead, materials are fabricated, manufactured, assembled, and delivered when needed, but not so early that preservation related to storage (versus postinstallation) is required.

In a matter of days, I confirmed a number of interviewees, all of whom were amiable and eager to participate, a symptom, to my mind, of an urge to perform the novelistic as a kind of abstract moral value (an urge I found relatable). During the phone calls, it occurred to me that so few of us are given permission to theorize about our lives, so many are bound to the register of everyday chitchat. It made me wonder: If there isn’t time or space to account for or to avow with bewilderment and frustration and joy the emotional fabric of one’s life, to assert one’s enmeshment in a narrative of humanness that continues to unfold, where does that language go, where does it pile up? Inside us, as routinized as oxygen? Or is it like dust, a porous, vulnerable, almost unperceivable film covering everything? In one’s mouth, would it taste like the earth?

**Exploring the Rich Wisdom of kannada gadegalu books ** The Kannada language, known for its lyrical beauty and rich literary heritage, possesses a unique treasure trove of wisdom in the form of "Gadegalu" or proverbs. These time-honored sayings encapsulate the essence of Kannada culture, tradition, and the daily lives of its people. For those wishing to delve deep into the cultural fabric of Karnataka, kannada gadegalu books offer an enlightening journey through words that reflect age-old wisdom and insights. Gadegalu serve as a compass for navigating life's complexities, imparting lessons that have been passed down through generations. They present a blend of humor, pragmatism, and philosophical musings, making them a mirror of the societal values cherished by Kannada speakers. Each proverb tells a story, conveys an emotion, or illustrates a moral lesson, allowing readers to connect with the community's rich heritage. For anyone intrigued by the depth of human experience, , kannada gadegalu books are invaluable. These collections often feature proverbs categorized by themes, making it easier for readers to find relevant sayings applicable to specific situations. Whether it is for personal reflection, enhancing one's understanding of the culture, or sharing wisdom with others, these books open a window to the timeless truths that guide everyday interactions. The beauty of Kannada Gadegalu lies not just in their meanings but also in their contextual use. Each proverb is steeped in history, revealing insights into the lives of the people who coined them, the challenges they faced, and the values they upheld. For instance, a saying about patience may originate from agricultural traditions, where farmers waited for the right season to sow seeds, symbolizing the importance of timing and perseverance. In a society increasingly influenced by technology and rapid change, they hark back to simpler times, encouraging readers to appreciate the present moment and the wisdom of past generations. Each proverb makes one ponder over age-old principles that are still relevant today, enabling a meaningful dialogue between the past and the present. For educators and parents, Kannada Gadegalu books can be a delightful resource for teaching children about their cultural roots. The succinctness of proverbs makes them easy to remember, and they often spark curiosity and discussion. By incorporating these sayings into family conversations, children can learn valuable life lessons seamlessly interwoven into their everyday experiences. Moreover, for writers and storytellers, these proverbs are vast reservoirs of inspiration, providing material that can enrich narratives with cultural authenticity. They lend a voice to everyday wisdom, infusing stories with relatable themes and age-old truths that resonate with audiences. In conclusion, exploring Kannada Gadegalu books is an enriching experience that nurtures cultural appreciation, personal growth, and insightful reflections on life. These collections are more than just compilations of proverbs; they embody the spirit and wisdom of Kannada-speaking communities. Whether you are a native speaker, a learner of the language, or simply an admirer of poetic expressions, the world of Kannada Gadegalu awaits, offering profound insights into the human condition and the timeless teachings that bind us all.

Of all of society's institutions, education has brought us to the current state of poor relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; but if it is education that created this mess, it will be education that will get us out of it. We know that making things better will not happen overnight. It will take generations. That's how the damage was created and that's how the damage will be fixed. But if we agree on the objective of reconciliation, and agree to work together, the work we do today will immeasurably strengthen the social fabric of Canada tomorrow.