Forcing Communication Quotes

What exactly did you find in Atlanta?” Frank unzipped his backpack and started bringing out souvenirs. “Some peach preserves. A couple of T-shirts. A snow globe. And, um, these not-really-Chinese handcuffs.” Annabeth forced herself to stay calm. “How about you start from the top—of the story, not the backpack.

I tried all kinds of approaches: sexy, friendly, intimidating—nothing worked. I’m starting to think there’s an invisible force field that prevents honest communication between X and Y chromosomes.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Here though, there are no oppressors. No one's forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen! Searching for strangers in... Dubai!

Before the first streaks of light at dawn on December 7, 275 miles north of Oahu, the six (Japanese) carriers of the Striking Force turned into the southeast wind. Pounding into heavy swells at high speed, the carriers pitched severely with thunderous impact. The wind, surging seas, and roar of warming aircraft engines made communications possible only by hand signals and handheld signal lamps. Salt spray reached the high flight decks, and Commander Fuchida, the group leader, was very concerned about the conditions for launching planes. If this had been a training exercise the launch might have been delayed until conditions improved. However, this was not an exercise, and there would be no delay.

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation. Now, it's long been understood very well that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited: that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage-can. At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community-interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others; or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole and, by now, that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass-communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely, to impose necessary illusions, manipulate and deceive the stupid majority, and remove them from the public arena. The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.

We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war, terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century.

Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.

As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas. This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training. So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems. The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam. Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists. The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done. The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s. On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.

A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities.

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

Every human being has both sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother’s uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self.

I'm a simple-minded fuck who can't read your mind, and even if I could, I would be so lost in the sheer volume of thoughts and feelings it wouldn't do me any good. I need you NOT to shut me out. To explain yourself. To help me understand you. To be your authentic self with me. But with concise communication.

Want to play hangman? asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball-and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition.

Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling. The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns. It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors

Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers learn that the huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language.

We don't worship Satan, we worship ourselves using the metaphorical representation of the qualities of Satan. Satan is the name used by Judeo-Christians for that force of individuality and pride within us. But the force itself has been called by many names.We embrace Christian myths of Satan and Lucifer, along with Satanic renderings in Greek, Roman, Islamic, Sumerian, Syrian, Phrygian, Egyptian, Chinese or Hindu mythologies, to name but a few. We are not limited to one deity, but encompass all the expressions of the accuser or the one who advocates free thought and rational alternatives by whatever name he is called in a particular time and land. It so happens that we are living in a culture that is predominantly Judeo-Christian, so we emphasize Satan. If we were living in Roman times, the central figure, perhaps the title of our religion, would be different. But the name would be expressing and communicating the same thing. It's all context.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa. And the most dangerous delusion of all is that there is only one reality.

The Couple Overfloweth We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That’s the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement’s novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what’s the point? . . . That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying. It’s the same in mathematics: Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless; He didn’t say they were wrong – that wouldn’t have been so bad. (Negotiations)

And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout form the heart—perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example—but authentically always and absolutely carries a a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you. Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don’t want to upset others because you don’t want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity. Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain. You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must. And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity. The fact that you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might be right in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter, as Kierkegaard so rudely reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking your vision with passion, can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world. If you are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion that will force either to be discovered. It is your duty to promote that discovery—either way—and therefore it is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage you can find in your heart. You must shout, in whatever way you can.

Two Questions That Reveal the Limitations of Punishment Two questions help us see why we are unlikely to get what we want by using punishment to change people’s behavior. The first question is: What do I want this person to do that’s different from what he or she is currently doing? If we ask only this first question, punishment may seem effective, because the threat or exercise of punitive force may well influence someone’s behavior. However, with the second question, it becomes evident that punishment isn’t likely to work: What do I want this person’s reasons to be for doing what I’m asking?

The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government. Most of the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than our society does. In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organised police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.

Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.

This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few.

Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth. Anger is the demand of accountability, It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It's a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It's a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope. How much anger is too much? Certainly not the anger that, for many of us, is a remembering of a self we learned to hide and quiet. It is willful and disobedient. It is survival, liberation, creativity, urgency, and vibrancy. It is a statement of need. An insistence of acknowledgment. Anger is a boundary. Anger is boundless. An opportunity for contemplation and self-awareness. It is commitment. Empathy. Self-love. Social responsibility. If it is poison, it is also the antidote. The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination. Angry women burn brighter than the sun. In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure. Women, especially, will be told to set our anger aside in favor of a kinder, gentler approach to change. This is a false juxtaposition. Reenvisioned, anger can be the most feminine of virtues: compassionate, fierce, wise, and powerful. The women I admire most—those who have looked to themselves and the limitations and adversities that come with our bodies and the expectations that come with them—have all found ways to transform their anger into meaningful change. In them, anger has moved from debilitation to liberation. Your anger is a gift you give to yourself and the world that is yours. In anger, I have lived more fully, freely, intensely, sensitively, and politically. If ever there was a time not to silence yourself, to channel your anger into healthy places and choices, this is it.

The loneliness of the place had entered our very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church, or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard.

Transparency is critical in public health and epidemics; laypeople become either effective force-multipliers or stubborn walls.

The revolution in global communications thus forces all nations to reconsider traditional ways of thinking about national sovereignty.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

Tell the other person what you want to say in as calm and nonjudgmental a way as you can, and don’t try to control the outcome. Explicitly say what you feel or want and enjoy that act of self-expression, but release any need for the other person to hear you or change. You can’t force others to empathize or understand. The point is to feel good about yourself for engaging in what I call clear, intimate communication. Others may or may not respond how you want them to, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you expressed your true thoughts and feelings in a calm, clear way. That goal is achievable and within your control.

Silence comes in two varieties: One that nourishes and comforts; another that chokes, smothers, and isolates. Solitary confinement is the worst kind of imprisonment we can inflict on fellow humans, and if you are forced to keep silent about some dark secret, you live in solitary confinement. Without the bridge of communication connecting you to other human beings, you can’t share your burdens, can’t receive comfort, can’t confirm that you still belong. Silence is the abyss that separates you from hope.

The strangest thing about humans is the way they pair up, males and females. Constantly at war with each other, never content to leave each other alone. They never seem to grasp the idea that males and females are separate species with completely different needs and desires, forced to come together only to reproduce Of course you feel that way. Your mates are nothing but mindless drones, extensions of yourself, without their own identity. We know out lovers with perfect understanding. Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed. That is the tradegy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong, This is the source of their misery. And some of their strength, I think. Your people and mine, each for their own evolutionary reasons, mate with vastly unequal partners. Our mates are always, hopelessly, our intellectual inferiors. Humans mate with beings who challenge their supremcy. They have conflicts between mates, not because their communication is inferior to ours, but because they commune with each other at all.

A fundamental approach to life transformation is using social media for therapy; it forces you to have an opinion, provides intellectual stimulation, increases awareness, boosts self-confidence, and offers the possibility of hope.

Life did not impress me and I did not impress life. We were two companions who’d been forced together, and we tried to get a long or coexist but communication failed and I was misunderstood, and misunderstood life; until I found art. Or art found me, which it rather feels like because I never sought it, never wished for it, it just showed up one night when I needed it the most and it communicated in a way I finally understood. It spoke to me, sang to me, danced for me, and for the first time I understood and could make myself understood, and that’s when it all changed.

All you have to do is wait. Sit tight and wait for the right moment. Not try to change anything by force, just watch the drift of things. Make an effort to cast a fair eye on everything. If you do that, you just naturally know what to do. But everyone's always too busy. They're too talented, their schedules are too full. They're too interested in themselves to think about what's fair.

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people... There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all the others by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike... The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation it is impossible they should be enslaved. Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable... There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living wth power to endanger public liberty.

New methods of accessing and communicating information unite regions as never before and project events globally—but in a manner that inhibits reflection, demanding of leaders that they register instantaneous reactions in a form expressible in slogans. Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future?

Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealed that, among other things, the destruction of a single, innocuous-looking building in Sunnyvale, California, located “within bazooka range” of Highway 101, could disrupt the operation of Air Force early-warning and communications satellites.

He tries to force the anger down, but it's like an anvil on his chest. He closes his eyes, like Sammy taught him, and forces the anvil up; he softens.

I like the idea of communication tethering you to a single spot," Tenkamenin told Anastasia. "It forces you to give every conversation the attention it deserves.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. [from, Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming]

The pure force of life are in communication with each other, independently of us, and then we cannot hide who we are.

Fierce love speaks to the energy that flows through a relationship. Energy keeps a relationship vital.  Fierce denotes a powerful energetic force that is present in our conversations, during lovemaking, even during a relaxing game of cards. We see our relationship as a living breathing being, a being with a pulse, needs, and a purpose.  Your job is to keep this being fed, energized, and vitally alive.  

I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people—the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic.

The third facilitative aspect of the relationship is empathic understanding. This means that the therapist senses accurately the feelings and personal meanings that the client is experiencing and communicates this understanding to the client. When functioning best, the therapist is so much inside the private world of the other that he or she can clarify not only the meanings of which the client is aware but even those just below the level of awareness. This kind of sensitive, active listening is exceedingly rare in our lives. We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.

Don't seat quiet kids in high interaction areas of the classroom, says communications professor James McCroskey. They won't talk more in those areas; they'll feel more threatened and will have trouble concentrating. Make it easy for introverted kids to participate in class, but don't insist. Forcing highly apprehensive young people to perform orally is harmful. It will increase apprehension and reduce self-esteem.

In reality, of course, no one can *force* anyone to say anything in this country—political correctness does not endanger our freedom of expression at all. The only thing it actually threatens is the notion that we can separate our word choices from our politics—that how we choose to communicate doesn’t say something deeper about who we are.

The Doppler Effect of Communication”: There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. “The Centrifugal Force of Arguments”: The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

The surest sign that you’re on the right track with someone is when both your connection and communication are easy and natural – not forced or purposely delayed.

Why? I mean, if your Infinite is the Creator—the one true God—then why can’t He simply say, ‘Listen, mortals, everyone behave!’ and have them be perfect? Why drag you into this mess?” Ela prayed to the Infinite for words, then spoke carefully. “Because He loves us. And love does not demand enslavement, but . . . love desires a partnership. Our Creator seeks true communication between us and Him. He won’t force anyone to love Him. We decide for ourselves.

I am sick of speaking English like this... I am scared that I have become a person who is always very aware of talking, speaking, and I have become a person without confidence, because I can't be me. I have become so small, so tiny, while the English culture surrounding me becomes enormous. It swallows me... I am dominated by it... Why do we have to force ourselves to communicate with people? Why is the process of communication so troubled and so painful?

- Traveling is not always a question of money, but of courage. You spent a great part of your life going around the world like a hippie: what money did you have then? None. You could hardly afford the tickets, and nevertheless I believe they were some of the best years of your life - eating badly, sleeping at railway stations, unable to communicate because of the language, being forced to depend on others just in order to find some shelter to spend the night.

Don’t lecture. Children, and particularly adolescents, will tune out the moment you start. Take it from a teacher. If your communication style tends toward the lecture, you are going to have to change your style, because you won’t be able to force your child to start listening.

Companies that fail to communicate a sense of WHY force us to make decisions with only empirical evidence. This is why those decisions take more time, feel difficult or leave us uncertain.

Think about it. Politics is just a name for the way we get things done ... without fighting. We dicker and compromise and everybody thinks he has received a raw deal, but somehow after a tedious amount of talk we come up with some jury-rigged way to do it without getting anybody's head bashed in. That's politics. The only other way to settle a dispute is by bashing a few heads in ... and that is what happens when one or both sides is no longer willing to dicker. That's why I say politics is good even when it is bad because the only alternative is force-and somebody gets hurt. -- Senator Tom Fries

It is not worthiness the Narcissist feels when he or she communicates “I deserve.” Narcissistic entitlement has nothing to do with genuine self-esteem, which comes from real accomplishment and being true to one’s own ideals. Individuals who feel entitled to respect without giving it in return, or who expect rewards without effort, or a life free of discomfort, are forfeiting any power they might have to shape their own destiny. They assume an essentially passive role and count on outside forces to make them happy. When what they expect doesn’t happen, they feel impotent. By claiming entitlement, they demand to live in the fantasy world of the one-year-old child. No wonder they’re enraged. Entitlement and the rage that comes with it are tip-offs to the arrest in healthy development that is narcissism.

Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory.

Something new and unexpected, something hitherto unknown and undreamt of, had taken place in him. He did not so much understand with his mind as feel instinctively with the full force of his emotions that he could never again communicate with these people in a great gush of feeling, as he had just now, or in any way whatever.

The idea that language is a game at which some players are more skilled than others has a bearing on the vexed relationship between loneliness and speech. Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.

My mind wandered to all those years of school portraits: the licked palms wrestling cowlicks under the pretense of a loving stroke; letting the boys watch a cartoon while sliding them into handsome, uncomfortable clothes; clumsy efforts to subliminally communicate the value of a “natural” smile. The pictures always came out the same: a forced grin with unparted lips, eyes vacantly gazing into the haze—something from the Diane Arbus scrap pile. But I loved them. I loved the truth they conveyed: that kids aren’t yet able to fake it. Or they aren’t yet able to conceal their disingenuousness. They’re wonderful smilers, the best; but they’re the very worst fake smilers. The inability to fake a smile defines childhood. When Sam thanked me for his room in my new house, he became a man.

With all the latest whiz-bang technology and massive databases and communications pipes at their disposal, there was a constant self-generated pressure to put all the technology to good use, to do something. Unfortunately, that something was the unending creation of timelines, policies, and plans—the embalming fluid of organizational nimbleness.

I've heard youngsters use some of George Lucas' terms––"the Force and "the dark side." So it must be hitting somewhere. It's a good sound teaching, I would say. The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you've got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face. Darth Vader has not developed his humanity. He's a robot. He's a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? . . . The thing to do is to learn to live in your period of history as a human being ...[b]y holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you. Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is in a language that talks to young people, and that's what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity––because that's where the life is, from the heart––or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called "intentional power"? When Ben Knobi says, "May the Force be with you," he's speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions. ... [O]f course the Force moves from within. But the Force of the Empire is based on an intention to overcome and master. Star Wars is not a simple morality play. It has to do with the powers of life as they are either fulfilled or broken and suppressed through the action of man.

The letter is only an aid to philosophical communication, the actual essence of which consists in arousing a particular train of thought. Someone speaking thinks and produces—someone listening reflects—and reproduces. Words are a deceptive medium for what is already though—unreliable vehicles of a particular, specific stimulus. The true teacher is a guide. If the pupil genuinely desires truth it requires only a hint to show him how to find what he is seeking. Accordingly the representation of philosophy consists purely of themes—of initial propositions—principles. It exists only for autonomous lovers of truth. The analytical exposition of the theme is only for those who are sluggish or unpracticed. The latter must learn thereby how to fly and keep themselves moving in a particular direction. Attentiveness is a centripetal force. The effective relation between that which is directed and the object of direction begins with the given direction. If we hold fast to this direction we are apodictically certain of reaching the goal that has been set. True collaboration in philosophy then is a common movement toward a beloved world—whereby we relieve each other in the most advanced outpost, a movement that demands the greatest effort against the resisting element within which we are flying.

Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.

We couldn't trust them. They couldn't trust us. Mutual attempts at destruction are the only logical result. He thought of human dreams - both Old Empire and new - of contacting some extra-terrestrial intelligence such as nobody had ever truly encountered. Why? Why would we ever want to? We'd never be able to communicate, and even if we could, we'd still be those same two prisoners forced to trust - and risk - or to damn the other in trying to save slightly more of our own hides.

When you measure water pressure in trees, you find it is highest shortly before the leaves open up in the spring. At this time of year, water shoots up the trunk with such force that if you place a stethoscope against the tree, you can actually hear it.

Summary of the Science of Getting Rich There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe. A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought. Man can form things in his thought, and by impressing his thought upon formless substance can cause the thing he thinks about to be created. In order to do this, man must pass from the competitive to the creative mind; otherwise he cannot be in harmony with the Formless Intelligence, which is always creative and never competitive in spirit. Man may come into full harmony with the Formless Substance by entertaining a lively and sincere gratitude for the blessings it bestows upon him. Gratitude unifies the mind of man with the intelligence of Substance, so that man’s thoughts are received by the Formless. Man can remain upon the creative plane only by uniting himself with the Formless Intelligence through a deep and continuous feeling of gratitude. Man must form a clear and definite mental image of the things he wishes to have, to do, or to become; and he must hold this mental image in his thoughts, while being deeply grateful to the Supreme that all his desires are granted to him. The man who wishes to get rich must spend his leisure hours in contemplating his Vision, and in earnest thanksgiving that the reality is being given to him. Too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of frequent contemplation of the mental image, coupled with unwavering faith and devout gratitude. This is the process by which the impression is given to the Formless, and the creative forces set in motion. The creative energy works through the established channels of natural growth, and of the industrial and social order. All that is included in his mental image will surely be brought to the man who follows the instructions given above, and whose faith does not waver. What he wants will come to him through the ways of established trade and commerce. In order to receive his own when it shall come to him, man must be active; and this activity can only consist in more than filling his present place. He must keep in mind the Purpose to get rich through the realization of his mental image. And he must do, every day, all that can be done that day, taking care to do each act in a successful manner. He must give to every man a use value in excess of the cash value he receives, so that each transaction makes for more life; and he must so hold the Advancing Thought that the impression of increase will be communicated to all with whom he comes in contact. The men and women who practice the foregoing instructions will certainly get rich; and the riches they receive will be in exact proportion to the definiteness of their vision, the fixity of their purpose, the steadiness of their faith, and the depth of their gratitude.

He opened the first letter, No "Dear Mr. Woods." It was a page full of profanities. There was something oddly refreshing about honest, to-the-point hate mail. No hypocrisy and forced politeness. Too many letters ripped you to shreds, then closed off 'Sincerely yours.

Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good! Assuming you can write clear English (or Norwegian) sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone. To write a poem you have to have a streak of arrogance (…) when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.

The idea of humanity becomes more and more of a power in the civilized world, and, owing to the expansion and increasing speed of means of communication, and also owing to the influence, still more material than moral, of civilization upon barbarous peoples, this idea of humanity begins to take hold even of the minds of uncivilized nations. This idea is the invisible power of our century, with which the present powers — the States — must reckon. They cannot submit to it of their own free will because such submission on their part would be equivalent to suicide, since the triumph of humanity can be realized only through the destruction of the States. But the States can no longer deny this idea nor openly rebel against it, for having now grown too strong, it may finally destroy them. In the face of this fainful alternative there remains only one way out: and that is hypocrisy. The States pay their outward respects to this idea of humanity; they speak and apparently act only in the name of it, but they violate it every day. This, however, should not be held against the States. They cannot act otherwise, their position having become such that they can hold their own only by lying. Diplomacy has no other mission. Therefore what do we see? Every time a State wants to declare war upon another State, it starts off by launching a manifesto addressed not only to its own subjects but to the whole world. In this manifesto it declares that right and justice are on its side, and it endeavors to prove that it is actuated only by love of peace and humanity and that, imbued with generous and peaceful sentiments, it suffered for a long time in silence until the mounting iniquity of its enemy forced it to bare its sword. At the same time it vows that, disdainful of all material conquest and not seeking any increase in territory, it will put and end to this war as soon as justice is reestablished. And its antagonist answers with a similar manifesto, in which naturally right, justice, humanity, and all the generous sentiments are to be found respectively on its side. Those mutually opposed manifestos are written with the same eloquence, they breathe the same virtuous indignation, and one is just as sincere as the other; that is to say both of them are equally brazen in their lies, and it is only fools who are deceived by them. Sensible persons, all those who have had some political experience, do not even take the trouble of reading such manifestos. On the contrary, they seek ways to uncover the interests driving both adversaries into this war, and to weigh the respective power of each of them in order to guess the outcome of the struggle. Which only goes to prove that moral issues are not at stake in such wars.

A child's (or an adult's) nervous system may detect danger or a threat to life when the child enters a new environment or meets a strange person. Cognitively, there is no reason for them to be frightened. But often, even if they understand this, their bodies betray them. Sometimes this betrayal is private; only they are aware that their hearts are beating fast and contracting with such force that they start to sway. For others, the responses are more overt. They may tremble. Their faces may flush, or perspiration may pour from their hands and forehead. Still others may become pale and dizzy and feel precipitously faint.

It is important for a woman to first, understand her man and his emotional limits. She must then not force him to communicate in a level that is foreign to him but rather in a way that brings meaning to the relationship. This means slowly building on a foundation while slowly increasing communication lines. The more a woman pushes the more a man will pull. Knowing a man’s emotional limits will allow a woman to intentionally assert her communication needs, gracefully.

once, someone told me that the music had been created by God and that rapid movement was necessary for people to get in touch with themselves. For years, i felt that this was true, and now I 'm being forced to do the most difficult thing in the world - slow down. Why is patience so important?" "Because it makes us pay attention." "Isn't the soul more important?" "of course it is, but if your soul could communicate with your brain, you would be able to change even more things

In this sense, the crisis of the Union was a crisis of communication. Northerners were waging war against the South with dangerous words; Southerners were trying to stifle those words with force, and the cross-fire was cutting off conversation, particularly in Congress, an institution grounded on open debate and free speech.

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

A unified team is a force to be reckoned with. When teams pull together to serve a higher purpose, the synergy builds momentum and helps everyone head in the right direction. When people reunite, pull together, have each other’s backs, and strive to achieve a clearly defined purpose, the culture is empowered to produce extraordinary outcomes.

The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of time wore out. The mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force. All verse should have two obligations: to communicate a precise instance and to touch us physically, as the presence of the sea does.

Shall I?” I said briefly; and I looked at his features, beautiful in their harmony, but strangely formidable in their still severity; at his brow, commanding, but not open; at his eyes, bright and deep and searching, but never soft; at his tall imposing figure; and fancied myself in idea his wife. Oh! it would never do! As his curate, his comrade, all would be right: I would cross oceans with him in that capacity; toil under Eastern suns, in Asian deserts with him in that office; admire and emulate his courage and devotion and vigour: accommodate quietly to his masterhood; smile undisturbed at his ineradicable ambition. . . . I should suffer often, no doubt, attached to him only in this capacity: my body would be under a rather stringent yoke, but my heart and mind would be free. I should still have my unblighted self to turn to: my natural unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in moments of loneliness. There would be recesses in my mind which would be only mine, to which he never came; and sentiments growing there, fresh and sheltered, which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down: but as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital—this would be unendurable.

I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying. In news articles the relation of the words to the subject is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is weak. (Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way). When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves: The relation of the word to the subject must weaken – the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength. This is probably the hardest thing about writing poems In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse 40 years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t. RICHARD HUGO Public versus private poets: With public poets the intellectual and emotional contents of the words are the same for the reader as for the writer. With the private poet, the words, at least certain key words, mean something to the poet they don’t mean to the reader. A sensitive reader perceives this relation of poet to word and in a way that relation – the strange way the poet emotionally possesses his vocabulary – is one of the mysteries and preservative forces of the art. If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over. (Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost’s statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn’t be).

Touted as unifying forces, new technologies of communication are being used as weapons.

In most cases, the louder that you’re talking the less that you’re saying.

Any comment that forces you to look in another module for the meaning of that comment has failed to communicate to you and is not worth the bits it consumes.

Steer clear of negativity and set boundaries so that when people bring it on, you can engage your force-field to deflect their distracting energy.

Fiction writing is a kind of magic. If I communicate the magic spell . . . it loses its force for me.

Intercultural business contexts force us to be more self-aware and to rely on words more than we do in our native cultures.

It is as if the eye forces forms to communicate.

The glue that holds together institutions and processes as they undergo massive decentering is cheap, ubiquitous communication.

If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line—forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.

Clearly, peace is a great force, as is sobriety, as are material power, communication, education, honesty, and the ideals of many dreamers.

He was now in command of the Northwest African Strategic Air Forces, so was responsible for the relentless attacks on Axis lines of communication in Italy,

The SET-UP system evolved as a structured framework of communication with the borderline in crisis. During such times, communication with the borderline is hindered by his impenetrable, chaotic internal force field, characterized by three major feeling states: terrifying aloneness, feeling misunderstood, and overwhelming helplessness. As a result, concerned individuals are often unable to reason calmly with the borderline and instead are forced to confront outbursts of rage, impulsive destructiveness, self-harming threats or gestures, and unreasonable demands for caretaking. SET-UP responses can serve to address the underlying fears, dilute the borderline conflagration, and prevent a “meltdown” into greater conflict.

The Great Course is unproclaimed. Great demonstration uses no words. (2:34) Great Humanity is not humane. Great rectitude is not fastidious. Great courage is not invasive. For when the Course becomes explicit, it ceases to be the Course. When words demonstrate by debate, they fail to communicate. When Humanity is constantly sustained, it cannot reach its maturity.21 When rectitude is pure, it cannot extend itself to others. When courage is invasive, it cannot succeed.22 These five are originally round, but they are forced toward squareness.

Hence, it's obvious to see why in AA the community is so important; we are powerless over ourselves. Since we don't have immediate awareness of the Higher Power and how it works, we need to be constantly reminded of our commitment to freedom and liberation. The old patterns are so seductive that as they go off, they set off the association of ideas and the desire to give in to our addiction with an enormous force that we can't handle. The renewal of defeat often leads to despair. At the same time, it's a source of hope for those who have a spiritual view of the process. Because it reminds us that we have to renew once again our total dependence on the Higher Power. This is not just a notional acknowledgment of our need. We feel it from the very depths of our being. Something in us causes our whole being to cry out, “Help!” That's when the steps begin to work. And that, I might add, is when the spiritual journey begins to work. A lot of activities that people in that category regard as spiritual are not communicating to them experientially their profound dependence on the grace of God to go anywhere with their spiritual practices or observances. That's why religious practice can be so ineffective. The real spiritual journey depends on our acknowledging the unmanageability of our lives. The love of God or the Higher Power is what heals us. Nobody becomes a full human being without love. It brings to life people who are most damaged. The steps are really an engagement in an ever-deepening relationship with God. Divine love picks us up when we sincerely believe nobody else will. We then begin to experience freedom, peace, calm, equanimity, and liberation from cravings for what we have come to know are damaging—cravings that cannot bring happiness, but at best only momentary relief that makes the real problem worse.

1 The summer our marriage failed we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car. We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea, talking about which seeds to sow when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt, downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers, and there was a joke, you said, about old florists who were forced to make other arrangements. Delphiniums flared along the back fence. All summer it hurt to look at you. 2 I heard a woman on the bus say, “He and I were going in different directions.” As if it had something to do with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down how love empties itself from a house, how a view changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks, it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings? You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles. 3 On our last trip we drove through rain to a town lit with vacancies. We’d come to watch whales. At the dock we met five other couples—all of us fluorescent, waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency of the motor that would lure these great mammals near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long, creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker: In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it’s warm and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves. Today we’ll see them on their way to Alaska. If we get close enough, observe their eyes—they’re bigger than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it’s my guess they’re all saying, Can you hear me? His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang for a whale’s two-foot penis, I stopped listening. The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates. Again and again you patiently wiped the spray from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good troopers used to disappointment. On the way back you pointed at cormorants riding the waves— you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic, the double-breasted. I only said, I’m sure whales were swimming under us by the dozens. 4 Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument, the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning, washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved sitting with our friends under the plum trees, in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time, how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying to describe the ways sex darkens and dies, how two bodies can lie together, entwined, out of habit. Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire, on an old couch that no longer reassures. The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest and found ourselves in fog so thick our lights were useless. There’s no choice, you said, we must have faith in our blindness. How I believed you. Trying to imagine the road beneath us, we inched forward, honking, gently, again and again.

A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I

When envy lies within a woman's heart it cuts into her soul & gives her a toxic spirit. It is truly something to be disgusted by. I have experienced it so much in my own life that I can sense the energy of envy without any communication from the other person. It lingers in the air to pollute your environment. Envy is a brutal force of bad vibes sucking the love right out of your heart.

It is through the heart that we see, hear and feel most clearly. It is like a radio signal. When it is strong the heart is like a megaphone and I get your message loud and clear. You message echoes throughout the universe when it comes from the heart on the wings of intention and faith. It is the most direct line of communication in existence once you filter out the “interference” of worry and doubt in your head, the thoughts that don’t matter and only serve to block the reception. Your intention is the force, love is the connection and faith is the key that opens the door between you and me.

Technology is a powerful force in our society. Data, software, and communication can be used for bad: to entrench unfair power structures, to undermine human rights, and to protect vested interests. But they can also be used for good: to make underrepresented people’s voices heard, to create opportunities for everyone, and to avert disasters. This book is dedicated to everyone working toward the good.

In 2005 Rick Santorum, a senator from AccuWeather’s home state of Pennsylvania and a recipient of Myers family campaign contributions, introduced a bill that would have written this idea into law. The bill was a little vague, but it appeared to eliminate the National Weather Service’s website or any other means of communication with the public. It allowed the Weather Service to warn people about the weather just before it was about to kill them, but at no other time—and exactly how anyone would be any good at predicting extreme weather if he or she wasn’t predicting all the other weather was left unclear. Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.

Quantum physics findings show that consciousness itself created order - or indeed in some way created the world - this suggested much more capacity in the human being than was currently understood. It also suggested some revolutionary notions about humans in relation to their world and the relation between all living things. What they were asking was how far our bodies extended. Did they end with what we always thought of as our own isolated persona, or ‘extend out’ so that the demarcation between us and our world was less clear-cut? Did living consciousness possess some quantum field like properties, enabling it to extend its influence out into the world? If so, was it possible to do more than simply observe? How strong was our influence? It was only a small step in logic to conclude that in our act of participation as an observer in the quantum world, we might also be an influencer, a creator. Did we not only stop the butterfly at a certain point in its flight, but also influence the path it will take - nudging it in a particular direction? This explains action at a distance, what scientists call non locality. The theory that two subatomic particles once in close proximity seemingly communicate over any distance after they are separated.

There may be wrong actions in the sense of actions contrary to the rules of human communication. But the way you feel towards other people: loving, hating, et cetera, et cetera; there aren’t any wrong feelings. And so, to try and force one’s feelings to be other than what they are is absurd. And furthermore: dishonest. But you see: the idea that there are no wrong feelings is an immensely threatening one to people who are afraid to feel. This is one of the peculiar problems of our culture: we are terrified of our feelings. We think that if we give them any scope and if we don’t immediately beat them down, they will lead us down into all kinds of chaotic and destructive actions. But if, for a change, we would allow our feelings and look upon their comings and goings as something as beautiful and necessary as changes in the weather, the going of night and day and the four seasons, we would be at peace with ourselves.

There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men.

A number of people at NASA referred to the SpaceX engineers as “the guys in the garage” and were cynical about the start-up’s ability to do much of anything, including building this type of machine. But SpaceX produced the communication computer in record time, and it ended up as the first system of its kind to pass NASA’s protocol tests on the first try. NASA officials were forced to say “cuckoo” over and over again during meetings—a small act of defiance SpaceX had planned all along to torture NASA.

We deny responsibility for our actions when we attribute their cause to factors outside ourselves: Vague, impersonal forces—“I cleaned my room because I had to.” Our condition, diagnosis, or personal or psychological history—“I drink because I am an alcoholic.” The actions of others—“I hit my child because he ran into the street.” The dictates of authority—“I lied to the client because the boss told me to.” Group pressure—“I started smoking because all my friends did.” Institutional policies, rules, and regulations—“I have to suspend you for this infraction because it’s the school policy.” Gender roles, social roles, or age roles—”I hate going to work, but I do it because I am a husband and a father.” Uncontrollable impulses—“I was overcome by my urge to eat the candy bar.

Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of communication is hard to discuss, unless both parties have a desire to see it restored. This leaves the lover in a desperate situation. Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it. Desperate to woo the partner back at any cost, the lover might at this point be tempted to turn to romantic terrorism, the product of irredeemable situations, a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempt to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage or otherwise) in front of the loved one. The terroristic partner knows he cannot realistically hope to see his love reciprocated, but the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it. Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.

Furthermore, theory that is based on the assumption that the participants coolly and “rationally” calculate their advantages according to a consistent value system forces us to think more thoroughly about the meaning of “irrationality.” Decision-makers are not simply distributed along a one-dimensional scale that stretches from complete rationality at one end to complete irrationality at the other. Rationality is a collection of attributes, and departures from complete rationality may be in many different directions. Irrationality can imply a disorderly and inconsistent value system, faulty calculation, an inability to receive messages or to communicate efficiently; it can imply random or haphazard influences in the reaching of decisions or the transmission of them, or in the receipt or conveyance of information; and it sometimes merely reflects the collective nature of a decision among individuals who do not have identical value systems and whose organizational arrangements and communication systems do not cause them to act like a single entity.

In the Pavlovian strategy, terrorizing force can finally be replaced by a new organization of the means of communication. Ready made opinions can be distributed day by day through press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern of thought in the brain. Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovlian theoreticians, of a good propaganda technique, and the polls a verification of the temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind.

Afrikaans was the language of the white minority in South Africa, and the forced learning of it created resentment among blacks. Even so, Nelson Mandela made it a point to learn this language in prison in anticipation that it would help him lead the whole of South Africa.

Then there is the life-force, the Prana, that works in our vital being and nervous system. The Upanishad speaks of it as the first or supreme Breath; elsewhere in the sacred writings it is spoken of as the chief Breath or the Breath of the mouth, mukhya, asanya; it is that which carries in it the Word, the creative expression. In the body of man there are said to be five workings of the life-force called the five Pranas. One specially termed Prana moves in the upper part of the body and is pre-eminently the breath of life, because it brings the universal life-force into the physical system and gives it there to be distributed. A second in the lower part of the trunk, termed Apana, is the breath of death; for it gives away the vital force out of the body. A third, the Samana, regulates the interchange of these two forces at their meeting-place, equalises them and is the most important agent in maintaining the equilibrium of the vital forces and their functions. A fourth, the Vyana, pervasive, distributes the vital energies throughout the body. A fifth, the Udana, moves upward from the body to the crown of the head and is a regular channel of communication between the physical life and the greater life of the spirit. None of these are the first or supreme Breath, although the Prana most nearly represents it; the Breath to which so much importance is given in the Upanishads, is the pure life-force itself, - first, because all the others are secondary to it, born from it and only exist as its special functions. It is imaged in the Veda as the Horse; its various energies are the forces that draw the chariots of the Gods.

A gifted wizard, but an unlikely politician, McLaird was an exceptionally taciturn man who preferred to communicate in monosyllables and expressive puffs of smoke that he produced through the end of his wand. Forced from office out of sheer irritation at his eccentricities.

If we think we’re inappropriate to life our communication will reflect this: We will judge others as having all the answers; feel angry, hurt, scared, guilty, needy, and controlled by other people. We will desire to control others, value pleasing others at any cost, and fear disapproval and abandonment. We will hope for everything but believe we deserve and will get nothing unless we force things to happen, and remain committed to being responsible for other people’s feelings and behavior. We’re congested with negative feelings and thoughts. No

While making money was good, having meaningful work and meaningful relationships was far better. To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have with people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me. Think about it: It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want. When thinking about the things you really want, it pays to think of their relative values so you weigh them properly. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money less—as long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs. In thinking about the relative importance of great relationships and money, it was clear that relationships were more important because there is no amount of money I would take in exchange for a meaningful relationship, because there is nothing I could buy with that money that would be more valuable. So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making money was an incidental consequence of that. In the late 1970s, I began sending my observations about the markets to clients via telex. The genesis of these Daily Observations (“ Grains and Oilseeds,” “Livestock and Meats,” “Economy and Financial Markets”) was pretty simple: While our primary business was in managing risk exposures, our clients also called to pick my brain about the markets. Taking those calls became time-consuming, so I decided it would be more efficient to write down my thoughts every day so others could understand my logic and help improve it. It was a good discipline since it forced me to research and reflect every day. It also became a key channel of communication for our business. Today, almost forty years and ten thousand publications later, our Daily Observations are read, reflected on, and argued about by clients and policymakers around the world. I’m still writing them, along with others at Bridgewater, and expect to continue to write them until people don’t care to read them or I die.

He (Kris Medlin) has a communication with a force in pitching that most of us can’t talk to. It’s an awareness; it’s a sixth sense. When he steps in and stares in to that catcher, that little man on his shoulder’s going to take over and tell him what to do. And he’s done it well.

When the cyclical law of repetition suddenly stops its rotating movement, creation, freed from vanity, will not be absorbed into the impersonal Absolute of a Nirvana but will see the beginning of an eternal springtime, in which all the forces of life, triumphant over death, will come to the fulness of their unfolding, since God will be the only principle of life in all things. Then the deified will shine like stars around the only Star, Christ, with whom they will reign in the same glory of the Holy Trinity, communicated to each without measure by the Holy Spirit.

Combat is about time and space and opposing forces. Like a huge four-dimensional diagram. First step is to misinform the enemy. Let him think your diagram is a completely different shape. You assume all communications are penetrated, and then you use them to spread lies and deceit. You buy yourself an advantage.

if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity…. Near the apex of this command system in the brain…. we find ideas. Man over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burst-wise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell. Who

Three days?' Dain fires back, leaning in. 'You couldn't make it three days?' 'It has nothing to do with him.' I interrupt, setting my dragon down with a little more force than necessary. 'That's up to Tairn and Sgaeyl.' 'You never considered that it was you I couldn't stay away from?' I crook my right arm and jab it into Xaden's biceps. He doesn't mean that. Not when he's still adamant that kissing me was a mistake. And if he does... I'm not going there... 'Now, now, you'll give our little communication secret away if you can't keep from being so... violent.' He barely restrains a smile, obviously loving that he gets the last word.

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.

Within each one of us there is a healer. Healing has always been a way and a deep source of joy for me. Healing is basically our own energy, which overflows from our inner being, from the meditative quality within, from the inner silence and emptiness. Healing is pure love in essence. Love is what creates healing. Love is the strongest force there is. The sheer presence of love is, in itself, healing. It is more the absence of love – than the presence of love –, which creates problems. Healing is a quality, which we can freely share without any ownership. Healing is not something that we can claim as our own; healing is to be a medium, a channel, for the whole. Healing is a medium through which we can develop our inner qualities of presence, love, joy, intuition, truth, silence, wisdom, creativity and inner wholeness. Healing comes originally from the silence within, where we are already in contact with the whole, with the divine. Healing is what makes us spread our inner wings of love and silence and soar high on the sky of consciousness and touch the stars. Healing is to be in service of God. People who have a quality of heart and sensitivity are naturally healing. With some people that we meet, we feel naturally uplifted and inspired. With other people that we meet, we become tired and heavy. With people, who can listen without judging and evaluating, it is easy to find the right words to share problems and difficulties. And with other people, it seems almost impossible to find the right words. People, who have a healing presence and quality, can support our own inner source of love, truth and silence through their presence. These people also seem to have an intuitive sensitivity to saying the right words, which lift and inspires us. This is the people whose presence can mirror the inner truth, which we already know deep within ourselves. The human heart is a healer, which heals others and ourselves. It is the hearts quality of love, acceptance and compassion, plus communication through words, that creates healing. A word that comes from the heart creates healing. A silent listening with a quality of presence and an accepting attitude creates space for healing to happen. Without love it is only possible to reach the personality of the other person, to reach the surface and periphery of the other person The gift of healing comes when we see the other person with love and compassion. It is the quality of heart, which creates the love and the genuine caring for the other person. When our words are carried by the quality of heart, you can say almost anything to the other person and he will still be able to be open and receptive. But if our words lack the quality of heart, it also becomes difficult for the other person to continue to be open and receptive. Even if a therapist is very skilful, technically, or has a clear clairvoyant ability, and still lacks the natural roots in the soil of the heart, then his words will not touch the heart of the other person.

The pressures and penalties of existence in the modern capitalist system are intense; and they are penalties not for what is consciously chosen, but for ways of life which are forced like strait-jackets on people. At its superficial level, there is a common feeling of being conned by mass communications, extorted by commerce, lied to by politicians and treated like dirt by bureaucrats.

The trivialization of life is perhaps the strongest anti-mystical force among us. Some people are literally obsessed by the compulsion to trivialize everything . . . For mystical consciousness, it is essential that everything internal become external and be made visible. A dream wants to be told, the "inner light" wants to shine, the vision has to be shared . . . It is so easy to douse the inner light of a human being. And we busily assist in doing just that as we learn to make the world's efficiency our own. We cut ourselves off from our own experiences by looking upon them as irrelevant and not worth talking about or, what is no less cynical, not communicable at all. We are losing dreams, those of the night and those of the day, and increasingly we lose the visions of our life.

After working with that gelding, I made a much bigger effort to look for and find the tries that my horses offered during training or any other time, for that matter. In doing so, I quickly found just how much I had been missing in the simple communication between my horses and myself. For instance, I noticed that my horses often tried to respond to my cues much sooner than I’d ever imagined. Often times they would respond even before I had actually applied the cue, a pretty scary thought in and of itself. The other thing I noticed was that very often the try was so subtle that, had I not been paying attention, I would have missed it altogether. As a result, I was forced to become much more aware of what my horses were doing at all times, not just when I was asking something from them.

Theodore Beza was a younger colleague and successor of John Calvin, the founder of the Reformed branch of Protestantism during the Reformation. In his biography of Calvin, Beza recalled the three great preachers in Geneva during those years—Calvin himself, Guillaume Farel, and Pierre Viret. Farel, said Beza, was the most fiery, passionate, and forceful in his sermonic delivery. Viret was the most eloquent, and audiences hung on his skillful and beautiful words. The time flew by fastest when sitting under his preaching. Calvin was the most profound, his sermons packed full of “the weightiest of insights.” Calvin had the most substance, Viret the most eloquence, and Farel the most vehemence. Beza concluded “that a preacher who was a composite of these three men would have been absolutely perfect.

The subordinate and the commander share a common outlook. They trust each other, and this trust is the glue that holds the apparently formless effort together. Trust emphasizes implicit over explicit communications. Trust is the unifying concept. This gives the subordinate great freedom of action. Trust is an example of a moral force that helps bind groups together in what Boyd called an “organic whole.

Want to be a great communicator? Try writing a screenplay. Even if your story is more hideous than the films Ishtar and Gigli combined, you’ll learn how to capture and hold attention. That’s because a screenplay forces you to make your point through visual description, action, or dialogue. Abstract or theoretical content is not allowed. The activity forces you to discover and develop visual storytelling.

Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade. "She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts." Fejzić, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers. "On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk he came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia." The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci. Two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzić. The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Sebs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzić and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone, in his act lay an ocean of hope.

adolescent who expresses dissident opinion more or less vocally can end up in a place like that. Some of the children arrive there from orphanages. If a child tries to run away from an orphanage, it is considered normal in our country to commit him to a psychiatric facility and treat him with the strongest of sedatives, such as aminazine, used to suppress Soviet dissidents back in the 1970s. This is particularly shocking considering these institutions’ general punitive trend and the absence of psychological help as such. All communication there is based on fear and the children’s forced subjugation. They become exponentially more cruel as a result. Many of the children are illiterate, but no one makes an effort to do anything about that. On the contrary, they do everything to quash the last remnants of any motivation to grow. The children shut down and stop trusting words. I

as efficient as communications’ mechanisms become, they are still, as they have always been, subject to the overwhelming tendency for entropy to increase, for information to leak in transit, unless certain external agents are introduced to control it. I have already referred to an interesting view of language made by a cybernetically-minded philologist—that speech is a joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion.

A U.S. senator, Millard E. Tydings of Maryland, tried to force Roosevelt to speak against Jewish persecution by introducing in the Senate a resolution that would have instructed the president “to communicate to the Government of the German Reich an unequivocal statement of the profound feelings of surprise and pain experienced by the people of the United States upon learning of discriminations and oppressions imposed by the Reich upon its Jewish citizens.

All organisms can make the most basic distinctions--between food and not-food, danger and safety, light and dark, same-species and not-same. But only people can use language to make the highly complex categorizations of, say, animals or physical forces, or however many different kinds of quarks there are now, putting them in separate piles and naming the piles. It's how we proceed; it's how we communicate. Organization into categories is, at bottom, human.

[That] the driving force of the evolution of human intelligence was the coordination of multiple cognitive systems to pursue complex, shared goals [is called] the social brain hypothesis. It attributes the increase in intelligence to the increasing size and complexity of hominid social groups. Living in a group confers advantages, as we have seen with hunting, but it also demands certain cognitive abilities. It requires the ability to communicate in sophisticated ways, to understand and incorporate the perspectives of others, and to share common goals. The social brain hypothesis posits that the cognitive demands and adaptive advantages associated with living in a group created a snowball effect: As groups got larger and developed more complex joint behaviors, individuals developed new capabilities to support those behaviors. These new capabilities in turn allowed groups to get even larger and allowed group behavior to become even more complex.

We must not let her uncle send her into the gloom, which is what he always does.” “Is there a means to stop him?” Alex asked, smiling. Bentner straightened, nodded, and said with dignified force, “I, for one, am in favor of shoving him off London Bridge. Aaron favors poison.” There was anger and frustration in his words, but no real menace, and Alex responded with a conspiratorial smile. “I think I prefer your method, Bentner-it’s tidier.” Alexandra’s remark had been teasing, and Bentner’s reply was a formal bow, but as they looked at each other for a moment they both acknowledged the unspoken communication they’d just exchanged. The butler had informed her that, should the staff’s help be needed in any way in future, the duchess could depend upon their complete, unquestioning loyalty. The duchess’s answer had assured him that, far from resenting his intrusion, she appreciated the information and would keep it in mind should such an occasion occur.

Each time scientists have unraveled a new force, it has changed the course of civilization and altered the destiny of humanity. For example, Newton’s discovery of the laws of motion and gravity laid the groundwork for the machine age and the Industrial Revolution. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell’s explanation of electricity and magnetism paved the way for the illumination of our cities and gave us powerful electric motors and generators as well as instantaneous communication via TV and radio. Einstein’s E = mc2 explained the power of the stars and helped to unravel the nuclear force. When Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and others unlocked the secrets of the quantum theory, they gave us the high-tech revolution of today, with supercomputers, lasers, the internet, and all the fabulous gadgets in our living rooms. Ultimately, all the wonders of modern technology owe their origin to the scientists who gradually discovered the fundamental forces of the world.

What we feel and how we feel is far more important than what we think and how we think. Feeling is the stuff of which our consciousness is made, the atmosphere in which all our thinking and all our conduct is bathed. All the motives which govern and drive our lives are emotional. Love and hate, anger and fear, curiosity and joy are the springs of all that is most noble and most detestable in the history of men and nations. The opening sentence of a sermon is an opportunity. A good introduction arrests me. It handcuffs me and drags me before the sermon, where I stand and hear a Word that makes me both tremble and rejoice. The best sermon introductions also engage the listener immediately. It’s a rare sermon, however, that suffers because of a good introduction. Mysteries beg for answers. People’s natural curiosity will entice them to stay tuned until the puzzle is solved. Any sentence that points out incongruity, contradiction, paradox, or irony will do. Talk about what people care about. Begin writing an introduction by asking, “Will my listeners care about this?” (Not, “Why should they care about this?”) Stepping into the pulpit calmly and scanning the congregation to the count of five can have a remarkable effect on preacher and congregation alike. It is as if you are saying, “I’m about to preach the Word of God. I want all of you settled. I’m not going to begin, in fact, until I have your complete attention.” No sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as crystal. The getting of that sentence is the hardest, most exacting, and most fruitful labor of study. We tend to use generalities for compelling reasons. Specifics often take research and extra thought, precious commodities to a pastor. Generalities are safe. We can’t help but use generalities when we can’t remember details of a story or when we want anonymity for someone. Still, the more specific their language, the better speakers communicate. I used to balk at spending a large amount of time on a story, because I wanted to get to the point. Now I realize the story gets the point across better than my declarative statements. Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. Limits—that is, form—challenge the mind, forcing creativity. Needless words weaken our offense. Listening to some speakers, you have to sift hundreds of gallons of water to get one speck of gold. If the sermon is so complicated that it needs a summary, its problems run deeper than the conclusion. The last sentence of a sermon already has authority; when the last sentence is Scripture, this is even more true. No matter what our tone or approach, we are wise to craft the conclusion carefully. In fact, given the crisis and opportunity that the conclusion presents—remember, it will likely be people’s lasting memory of the message—it’s probably a good practice to write out the conclusion, regardless of how much of the rest of the sermon is written. It is you who preaches Christ. And you will preach Christ a little differently than any other preacher. Not to do so is to deny your God-given uniqueness. Aim for clarity first. Beauty and eloquence should be added to make things even more clear, not more impressive. I’ll have not praise nor time for those who suppose that writing comes by some divine gift, some madness, some overflow of feeling. I’m especially grim on Christians who enter the field blithely unprepared and literarily innocent of any hard work—as though the substance of their message forgives the failure of its form.

After decades of research about how children learn best, here’s what we’ve discovered: Children learn through play. It’s the work of childhood. Children learn through hands-on experiences. Seeing, touching, tasting, smelling are the strongest modes for early learning. Children master communication by having conversations. Children learn by trying to solve real problems. Children find exploration and investigation intrinsically rewarding. The driving force is “What if . . .?” and “I wonder. . . .

Elphaba’s face darkened again. Then she asked, hesitantly, as if afraid of the answer, “So, how do you get the evil life force?” “From innocent people, Elphaba,” Nick spoke so quietly he almost whispered. “I must draw the life force from innocent people. The more innocent they are, the more evil the murder is.” Elphaba jerked as though a shock had struck her in the heart. “Oh, that’s terrible!” “Yes, it is. Terrible. That word doesn’t even do it justice, terrible. There is no Magick more terrible than Magick that cheats death. I have cheated death, and death extracts its price.” Elphaba silently looked at Nick, her expression of revulsion enough to communicate her feelings. “You shouldn’t act so surprised, malyutka,” Nick said softly. “It is who I am. And it’s worked for me for centuries.” Elphaba sat for a moment, trying to calm herself. “Yes, you’re right. I knew that part of you was a monster. Sometimes it’s easy to forget, since you seem to be such a decent guy.” “Lyches are monsters.

Touch was a main channel of communication among the forest people. Among Terrans touch is always likely to imply threat, aggression, and so for them there is often nothing between the formal handshake and the sexual caress. All that blank was filled by the Athsheans with varied customs of touch. Caress as signal and reassurance was as essential to them as it is to mother and child or to lover and lover; but its significance was social, not only maternal and sexual. It was part of their language, it was therefore patterned, codified, yet infinitely modifiable. “They’re always pawing each other,” some of the colonists sneered, unable to see in these touch-exchanges anything but their own eroticism which, forced to concentrate itself exclusively on sex and then repressed and frustrated, invades and poisons every sensual pleasure, every humane response: the victory of a blinded, furtive Cupid over the great brooding mother of all the seas and stars, all the leaves of trees, all the gestures of men...

Today’s Remixed reject authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling, and experiences. They demand to rewrite their own scripts about how the universe, and human beings, operate. Shaped by the twin forces of a creative-communicative Internet and consumer capitalism, today’s Remixed don’t want to receive doctrine, to assent automatically to a creed. They want to choose—and, more often than not, purchase—the spiritual path that feels more authentic, more meaningful, to them.

In a revealing aside, Buffett admitted that years ago he was terrified of public speaking. He got physically ill at the thought. He said he even signed up for a $100 Dale Carnegie course but cancelled the check when he got home. Later, he did a communication course in Omaha. Doing it with others in the same boat helped him to “get outside of himself.” He’s very glad he did it, noting that effective communication is under taught, and recommended that many could benefit by forcing themselves to learn public speaking at an early age.

The system left the Navy captain, Air Force major, or whoever happened to be on duty answering the phone in the Pentagon’s Joint War Room to choose the presidential successor. “A judgment [would] be made by the senior officer on duty in the JWR as to when he has in fact received a communication from the senior non-incapacitated member of the list,” the report explained. “The possibility exists that the man to wield Presidential authority in dire emergency might in fact be selected by a single field grade military officer.” Moreover,

I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our own time, to concentrate on Sartre. His hesitations, retractations, inconsistencies, all proceed from his consciousness of the problems: how do novelistic differ from existential fictions? How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped account of the world? How can one control, and how make profitable, the dissonances between that account and the account given by the mind working independently of the novel? For Sartre it was ultimately, like most or all problems, one of freedom. For Miss Murdoch it is a problem of love, the power by which we apprehend the opacity of persons to the degree that we will not limit them by forcing them into selfish patterns. Both of them are talking, when they speak of freedom and love, about the imagination. The imagination, we recall, is a form-giving power, an esemplastic power; it may require, to use Simone Weil's words, to be preceded by a 'decreative' act, but it is certainly a maker of orders and concords. We apply it to all forces which satisfy the variety of human needs that are met by apparently gratuitous forms. These forms console; if they mitigate our existential anguish it is because we weakly collaborate with them, as we collaborate with language in order to communicate. Whether or no we are predisposed towards acceptance of them, we learn them as we learn a language. On one view they are 'the heroic children whom time breeds / Against the first idea,' but on another they destroy by falsehood the heroic anguish of our present loneliness. If they appear in shapes preposterously false we will reject them; but they change with us, and every act of reading or writing a novel is a tacit acceptance of them. If they ruin our innocence, we have to remember that the innocent eye sees nothing. If they make us guilty, they enable us, in a manner nothing else can duplicate, to submit, as we must, the show of things to the desires of the mind. I shall end by saying a little more about La Nausée, the book I chose because, although it is a novel, it reflects a philosophy it must, in so far as it possesses novel form, belie. Under one aspect it is what Philip Thody calls 'an extensive illustration' of the world's contingency and the absurdity of the human situation. Mr. Thody adds that it is the novelist's task to 'overcome contingency'; so that if the illustration were too extensive the novel would be a bad one. Sartre himself provides a more inclusive formula when he says that 'the final aim of art is to reclaim the world by revealing it as it is, but as if it had its source in human liberty.' This statement does two things. First, it links the fictions of art with those of living and choosing. Secondly, it means that the humanizing of the world's contingency cannot be achieved without a representation of that contingency. This representation must be such that it induces the proper sense of horror at the utter difference, the utter shapelessness, and the utter inhumanity of what must be humanized. And it has to occur simultaneously with the as if, the act of form, of humanization, which assuages the horror. This recognition, that form must not regress into myth, and that contingency must be formalized, makes La Nausée something of a model of the conflicts in the modern theory of the novel. How to do justice to a chaotic, viscously contingent reality, and yet redeem it? How to justify the fictive beginnings, crises, ends; the atavism of character, which we cannot prevent from growing, in Yeats's figure, like ash on a burning stick? The novel will end; a full close may be avoided, but there will be a close: a fake fullstop, an 'exhaustion of aspects,' as Ford calls it, an ironic return to the origin, as in Finnegans Wake and Comment c'est. Perhaps the book will end by saying that it has provided the clues for another, in which contingency will be defeated, ...

Every American should own a Koran. There are no excuses. Every day you can switch on the television or the radio or open a newspaper and hear or read pronouncements about what Islam is and“what the Koran says. Most of it is wrong—very wrong. You owe it to yourself, your family, and all the Americans killed on 9/11 and since to know the truth. Do not take anyone’s word for it. Find out for yourself by reading the actual Koran. One of the most reliable and recognized versions is the The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Once you have a Koran and start to read it, take care to note the enormous differences between the half reportedly communicated to Mohammed in the beginning in Mecca, when he was weak and without followers, and the latter half, allegedly written after he returned from Medina with thousands of followers, the leader of a mighty military force. It is the post-Medina chapters of the Koran that are naturally favored by groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. They are not in fact perverting religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause.

True, my boy. Only Hashem is omniscient, and until He decides we’re worthy of His communication via prophets or the Messiah, we mortals are forced to live in a state of ignorance. I’ve spent my whole life learning, Detective, acquiring knowledge not only from the scriptures of my belief, but from countless other sources—American law, philosophy, psychology, economics, political science: I have studied them all at great length. Yet, a madman can slip under my nose, and I realize I know nothing. I am still a meaningless speck of dust in the scheme of things. A most humbling experience.

...and as he swigged another dose, it just kind of came clear to me that the guy was nothing but sadness, really nothing but that, the weakest link in the Great Chain of Being, and that if when raging he was pathetic then in triumph he was tragic; and it also seemed as if, at some level, the guy knew this, that he also was aware that the whole package he had put together for himself had been misconceived, and that any effort to refashion it would just reconfirm its faultiness; and that the zone he inhabited was one that he himself had built, but as a barrier, of course to prevent the world from getting too close but also to forestall any seepage of self, whose effects on other folks he could too easily foresee; and that the poor loonster had become addicted to the language of communication because he knew that each word showed just how hopeless he was-and that people would sense this, and so would stay even further away ...; the guy, in short, had built himself a quicksand situation, a real no­winner, and I just figured OK: give him what he wants and keep the fuck away; don't only ignore him, but force yourself to forget; acknowledge his desire and leave him to his internal exile...

In long-term relationships, as in families, we often get in the habit of thinking that change isn't possible. We think the other person should change and they won't, so we give up hope. But we need to stop judging and return to our own internal communication. If we wait for our parents or our partner to change, it may take a very long time. If we wait for the other person to change, we may spend all our time waiting. So it's better to change yourself. Don't try to force the other person to change. Even if it takes a long time, you will feel better when you are master of yourself and you are doing your best.

– You better go, Jack. He lets out a sigh and approaches. As if he wanted to wrap me in his arms. I can see, in the way his muscles contract, the impulse to care for me. – Elsie, please. You're not… – Yes, I am. – I start to sob. I want him to touch me, but I can't stand his presence. – You always talk about what I want, Jack. You helped me learn how to communicate what I want. So…– I force myself to look him straight in the eye and show him that I'm serious, even though I'm not sure if I am. There's a burning heat in my chest, scalding, painful. – Right now I don’t want to be with you. I need you to give me some space.

Swifts aren't always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air. That's where they feed and mate and bathe and drink and are. But to find out about the important things that affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm....Not all of us need to make that climb...but as a community, surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday.

Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to explore? A publisher...couldn't understand why women were so loath to help each other.... The notion flitted through my mind that somehow, by helping..., I might be hurting my own chances for something or other -- what I did not know. If there was room for only one woman poet, another space would be filled.... If I still feel I am in competition with other women, how do less well-known women feel? Terrible, I have to assume. I have had to train myself to pay as much attention to women at parties as to men.... I have had to force myself not to be dismissive of other women's creativity. We have been semi-slaves for so long (as Doris Lessing says) that we must cultivate freedom within ourselves. It doesn't come naturally. Not yet. In her writing about the drama of childhood developments, Alice Miller has created, among other things, a theory of freedom. in order to embrace freedom, a child must be sufficiently nurtured, sufficiently loved. Security and abundance are the grounds for freedom. She shows how abusive child-rearing is communicated from one generation to the next and how fascism profits from generations of abused children. Women have been abused for centuries, so it should surprise no one that we are so good at abusing each other. Until we learn how to stop doing that, we cannot make our revolution stick. Many women are damaged in childhood -- unprotected, unrespected, and treated with dishonesty. Is it any wonder that we build up vast defences against other women since the perpetrators of childhood abuse have so often been women? Is it any wonder that we return intimidation with intimidation, or that we reserve our greatest fury for others who remind us of our own weaknesses -- namely other women? Men, on the other hand, however intellectually condescending, clubbish, loutishly lewd, are rarely as calculatingly cruel as women. They tend, rather, to advance us when we are young and cute (and look like darling daughters) and ignore us when we are older and more sure of our opinions (and look like scary mothers), but they don't really know what they're doing. They are too busy bonding with other men, and creating male pecking orders, to pay attention to us. If we were skilled at compromise and alliance-building, we could transform society. The trouble is: we are not yet good at this. We are still quarrelling among ourselves. This is the crisis feminism faces today.

Take the case (to use an easy example) of a river, carrying boats and communicating to them its own velocity, yet limited by their own inertia so that, all the rest being equal, the more heavily loaded will be carried more slowly. Hence it can be stated that the speed of the boats comes from the river, the slowness, from the load; the positive, from the force of the propelling agent, the privative, from the inertia of the propelled. Quite in the same manner it may be said that God contributes to the creatures their perfections, yet is limited by their receptivity. Thus all goods are due to the divine force; the evils, to the torpor of the creature.

Much as is observed in actual natural settings, in the informal process workplace, dominance hierarchies emerge. If you’re brash and disagreeable, or are a favorite of the boss, you can, like the strongest lion in the pride, avoid work you don’t like by staring down those who try to pass it off to you, ignoring their messages, or claiming overload. On the other hand, if you’re more reasonable and agreeable, you’ll end up overloaded with more work than makes sense for one person to handle. These setups are both demoralizing and a staggeringly inefficient deployment of attention capital. But without a countervailing force, these hierarchies are often unavoidable.

I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society." "That puts me on the side of what Harold Bloom calls 'the ecstasy of the privileged moment. Art, all art, as insight, as transformation, as joy. Unlike Harold Bloom, I really believe that human beings can be taught to love what they do not love already and that the privileged moment exists for all of us, if we let it. Letting art is the paradox of active surrender. I have to work for art if I want art to work on me." (...) We know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete, that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science. The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector's item. Art objects. "The cave wall paintings at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the huge truth of a Picasso, the quieter truth of Vanessa Bell, are part of the art that objects to the lie against life, against the spirit, that is pointless and mean. The message colored through time is not lack, but abundance. Not silence but many voices. Art, all art, is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die." "Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and my staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed. If, in the comfortable West, we have chosen to treat such energies with scepticism and contempt, then so much the worse for us. "Art is not a little bit of evolution that late-twentieth-century city dwellers can safely do without. Strictly, art does not belong to our evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring, building, surviving, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we have no time for art. "If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?

Another important slide shows how the Blitzkrieg—or maneuver conflict—is the perfect tactical application of the OODA Loop. Boyd asks: How does a commander harmonize the numerous individual thrusts of a Blitzkrieg attack and maintain the cohesion of his larger effort? The answer is that the Blitzkrieg is far more than the lightning thrusts that most people think of when they hear the term; rather it was all about high operational tempo and the rapid exploitation of opportunity. In a Blitzkrieg situation, the commander is able to maintain a high operational tempo and rapidly exploit opportunity because he makes sure his subordinates know his intent, his Schwerpunkt. They are not micromanaged, that is, they are not told to seize and hold a certain hill; instead they are given “mission orders.” This means that they understand their commander’s overall intent and they know their job is to do whatever is necessary to fulfill that intent. The subordinate and the commander share a common outlook. They trust each other, and this trust is the glue that holds the apparently formless effort together. Trust emphasizes implicit over explicit communications. Trust is the unifying concept. This gives the subordinate great freedom of action. Trust is an example of a moral force that helps bind groups together in what Boyd called an “organic whole.

If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism--the single greatest source of its waning morality--I should without hesitation name advertising. How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose--say the exaltation of the public sector--it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions.

As we read through this small pile of correspondence, a curious duplicity gradually emerges. In their language, the letters are among Kierkegaard’s most outstanding achievements so far as a writer. The pen no longer pauses with the ink bleeding onto the paper; the creaky Latin syntax that once could force Kierkegaard’s language into lackluster constructions is here replaced by a beguiling suppleness that lifts the lines from the page. They steal gently around their subject and draw on well-known Danish writers, such as Johannes Ewald, Jens Baggesen, Adam Oehlenschläger, Christian Winter, and Poul Martin Møller. Far from being ordinary communication, these letters are art. Therein lies the triumph and the tragedy. For the letters, by virtue of their undeniably aesthetic quality, almost cry out to the writer that a husband is not at all what he is to become, but an author. This makes them in effect letters of “farewell that try, with great discretion and an ingenious indirectness, to make the recipient understand that the man who celebrates her up and down the page has long ago vanished from her life because he has lost himself in recollection of her. His love is bound in artifice and imagination, and he has to accept the truth of the situation, that he is in real life unsuited to the married state. From the recollection that gives life to imagination there spreads also the death that parts the lovers.

As long as you allow your intellectual force to pour out into the absolute, it moves in eddies, its power is dissipated, it is exposed to predatory blasts that disorganize it; but as soon as it is brought back by anxiety to your own mind and you direct it to the enigmatic object close at hand, it condenses, intensifies, becomes useful and penetrating, and brings you positive treasures, to wit, truths that are expressed with all the relief that can make them communicable, accessible to others, hence something which transcends your suffering, your very existence, which broadens and consolidates you, which gives you the only reality that man can reasonably hope to conquer by his own powers, reality in others.

Why two (or whole groups) of people can come up with the same story or idea at the same time, even when across the world from each-other: "A field is a region of influence, where a force will influence objects at a distance with nothing in between. We and our universe live in a Quantum sea of light. Scientists have found that the real currency of the universe is an exchange of energy. Life radiates light, even when grown in the dark. Creation takes place amidst a background sea of energy, which metaphysics might call the Force, and scientists call the "Field." (Officially the Zero Point Field) There is no empty space, even the darkest empty space is actually a cauldron of energies. Matter is simply concentrations of this energy (particles are just little knots of energy.) All life is energy (light) interacting. The universe is self-regenreating and eternal, constantly refreshing itself and in touch with every other part of itself instantaneously. Everything in it is giving, exchanging and interacting with energy, coming in and out of existence at every level. The self has a field of influence on the world and visa versa based on this energy. Biology has more and more been determined a quantum process, and consciousness as well, functions at the quantum level (connected to a universe of energy that underlies and connects everything). Scientist Walter Schempp's showed that long and short term memory is stored not in our brain but in this "Field" of energy or light that pervades and creates the universe and world we live in. A number of scientists since him would go on to argue that the brain is simply the retrieval and read-out mechanism of the ultimate storage medium - the Field. Associates from Japan would hypothesize that what we think of as memory is simply a coherent emission of signals from the "Field," and that longer memories are a structured grouping of this wave information. If this were true, it would explain why one tiny association often triggers a riot of sights, sounds and smells. It would also explain why, with long-term memory in particular, recall is instantaneous and doesn't require any scanning mechanism to sift through years and years of memory. If they are correct, our brain is not a storage medium but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of perception. Some scientists went as far as to suggest that all of our higher cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Field. This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity - and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes in fragments but often as a miraculous whole. An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in the Field. The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world. It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality - our very sense of separateness. If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a Field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world began? Where was consciousness-encased inside our bodies or out there in the Field? Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected. In ignoring the effect of the "Field" modern physicists set mankind back, by eliminating the possibility of interconnectedness and obscuring a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles. In re-normalizing their equations (to leave this part out) what they'd been doing was a little like subtracting God.

The prosperity evangelists talk about “decreeing” things into existence by the “force of faith,” just as God created the world by His faith-filled words. But according to scripture, faith is not a power. Faith itself can do absolutely nothing. If faith could save, heal, or bring prosperity, faith would be God. The New Age mystics and prosperity preachers, in attributing to faith the attributes of deity, are propagating idolatry. Faith is like a telephone wire—it cannot create a conversation between two people, but can only be the instrument through which two people communicate. Faith in anyone or anything other than the true God as He has revealed Himself in Christ and the written Word is idolatry, even if it is faith in good, worth-while, and noble things.

POLLARD had known better, but instead of pulling rank and insisting that his officers carry out his proposal to sail for the Society Islands, he embraced a more democratic style of command. Modern survival psychologists have determined that this “social”—as opposed to “authoritarian”—form of leadership is ill suited to the early stages of a disaster, when decisions must be made quickly and firmly. Only later, as the ordeal drags on and it is necessary to maintain morale, do social leadership skills become important. Whalemen in the nineteenth century had a clear understanding of these two approaches. The captain was expected to be the authoritarian, what Nantucketers called a fishy man. A fishy man loved to kill whales and lacked the tendency toward self-doubt and self-examination that could get in the way of making a quick decision. To be called “fishy to the backbone” was the ultimate compliment a Nantucketer could receive and meant that he was destined to become, if he wasn’t already, a captain. Mates, however, were expected to temper their fishiness with a more personal, even outgoing, approach. After breaking in the green hands at the onset of the voyage—when they gained their well-deserved reputations as “spit-fires”—mates worked to instill a sense of cooperation among the men. This required them to remain sensitive to the crew’s changeable moods and to keep the lines of communication open. Nantucketers recognized that the positions of captain and first mate required contrasting personalities. Not all mates had the necessary edge to become captains, and there were many future captains who did not have the patience to be successful mates. There was a saying on the island: “[I]t is a pity to spoil a good mate by making him a master.” Pollard’s behavior, after both the knockdown and the whale attack, indicates that he lacked the resolve to overrule his two younger and less experienced officers. In his deference to others, Pollard was conducting himself less like a captain and more like the veteran mate described by the Nantucketer William H. Macy: “[H]e had no lungs to blow his own trumpet, and sometimes distrusted his own powers, though generally found equal to any emergency after it arose. This want of confidence sometimes led him to hesitate, where a more impulsive or less thoughtful man would act at once. In the course of his career he had seen many ‘fishy’ young men lifted over his head.” Shipowners hoped to combine a fishy, hard-driving captain with an approachable and steady mate. But in the labor-starved frenzy of Nantucket in 1819, the Essex had ended up with a captain who had the instincts and soul of a mate, and a mate who had the ambition and fire of a captain. Instead of giving an order and sticking with it, Pollard indulged his matelike tendency to listen to others. This provided Chase—who had no qualms about speaking up—with the opportunity to impose his own will. For better or worse, the men of the Essex were sailing toward a destiny that would be determined, in large part, not by their unassertive captain but by their forceful and fishy mate.

Facebook’s own North American marketing director, Michelle Klein, who told an audience in 2016 that while the average adult checks his or her phone 30 times a day, the average millennial, she enthusiastically reported, checks more than 157 times daily. Generation Z, we now know, exceeds this pace. Klein described Facebook’s engineering feat: “a sensory experience of communication that helps us connect to others, without having to look away,” noting with satisfaction that this condition is a boon to marketers. She underscored the design characteristics that produce this mesmerizing effect: design is narrative, engrossing, immediate, expressive, immersive, adaptive, and dynamic.11 If you are over the age of thirty, you know that Klein is not describing your adolescence, or that of your parents, and certainly not that of your grandparents. Adolescence and emerging adulthood in the hive are a human first, meticulously crafted by the science of behavioral engineering; institutionalized in the vast and complex architectures of computer-mediated means of behavior modification; overseen by Big Other; directed toward economies of scale, scope, and action in the capture of behavioral surplus; and funded by the surveillance capital that accrues from unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power. Our children endeavor to come of age in a hive that is owned and operated by the applied utopianists of surveillance capitalism and is continuously monitored and shaped by the gathering force of instrumentarian power. Is this the life that we want for the most open, pliable, eager, self-conscious, and promising members of our society?

Communication is often described in overly intellectual terms that take its role as information exchange a bit too seriously. On such views, to have one’s offer of public information unfairly rejected is to be harmed in some special, epistemic way as a knower. The systems of injustice that show up in our communicative interactions are then frequently treated as a special ideological kind of injustice, rooted in a belief system that stands apart from or even behind other systems of injustice. But another possibility is that communication is simply a kind of action, and thus that the way we act in conversation is largely governed by the exact same forces, norms, and incentives that explain everything else we do. Elites capture our conversations, then for largely the same reasons and in the same ways, they capture everything else.

He considered accordingly that he was not able to conquer it by any means other than if he should mutilate himself and desert to their side. So, counting himself little, he maltreated his own body in a manner which could not be cured; for he cut off his nose and his ears, and shaved his hair round in an unseemly way, and scourged himself, and so entered the presence of Darius. And Darius was distraught when he saw the man of most repute with him thus maltreated; and leaping up from his seat he cried aloud and asked him who was the person who had mutilated him, and for what deed. He replied: “That man does not exist, except you, who has so great power as to bring me into this condition; and not any stranger, 0 king, has done this, but I myself to myself, accounting it a very grievous thing that the Assyrians should mock the Persians.” He replied: “You most reckless of men, you set the fairest name to the foulest deed when you said that on account of those who are besieged you did bring yourself into a condition which cannot be cured. How, 0 senseless one, will the enemy surrender to “us more quickly, because you have mutilated yourself? Surely you were out of your mind in thus destroying yourself.” And he said, “If I had communicated to you that which I was about to do, you would not have permitted me to do it; but as it was, I did it on my own account. Now therefore, unless something is wanting on your part, we shall conquer Babylon: for I shall go straightway as a deserter to the wall; and I shall say to them that I suffered this treatment at your hands: and I think that when I have convinced them that this is so, I shall obtain the command of a part of their forces.

Having taken proper notice of the complexity of the machine [...] the infinity of ropes and cords, the sails, the varying forces that act upon them, and the skill required to manage the whole, directing the vessel in the desired direction [...] what pity it is that an art so important, so difficult, and so intimately concerned with the invariable laws of mechanical nature, should be so held by its possessors that it cannot improve but must die with each individual. Having no advantages of previous education, they cannot arrange their thoughts; they can scarcely be said to think. They can far less express or communicate to others the intuitive knowledge which they possess; and their art, acquired by habit alone, is little different from an instinct. We are as little entitled to expect improvement here as in the architecture of the bee or the beaver. The species cannot improve.

If we start to think about trust as a public good (like clean air and water), we see that we can all benefit from higher levels of trust in terms of communicating with others, making financial transitions smoother, simplifying contracts, and many other business and social activities. Without constant suspicion, we can get more out of our exchanges with others while spending less time making sure that others will fulfill their promises to us. Yet as the tragedy of commons exemplifies, in the short term it is beneficial for each individual to violate and take advantage of the established trust. I suspect that most people and companies miss or ignore the fact that trust is an important public resource and that losing it can have long-term negative consequences for everyone involved. It doesn't take much to violate trust. Just a few bad players in the market can spoil it for everyone else.

The Sorceress is the 'madwoman' linked chronologically to the transition of menopause: she is highly introspective yet surging with energy. The Priestess yields to the Mystery, but the Sorceress takes command as medicine woman or shamaness, wielding power rather than seeking it.  One of the Sorceress's best-known goddess representatives is Medusa, considered crazed, and fearsome for her power to turn men to stone. Yet Medusa's head teems with the serpents of wisdom; she is revered in ancient traditions as 'mother of all gods, whom she bore before childbirth existed.' She represents the Sorceress's ability to tap the forces of creation in her communications and actions. Far from being wild or out of control, she is highly directed and serious about her work. Her pathway narrows, her choices become limited. When we see with the eyes of the Sorceress we are in synch with the Mystery; we know exactly what to do in any given situation.

Contrary to the preaching of dour labourists, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a bit of laziness. Great philosophers through the ages have argued in its favour. Aristotle explicitly recognized the necessity of aergia, laziness, for contemplative thought. Bertrand Russell wrote a celebrated essay, In Praise of Idleness. Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, authored a subversive book entitled The Right to be Lazy that communists detested because it made the case against forcing everybody to labour more intensively. Today, however, the words ‘idleness’ and ‘lazy’ are used pejoratively to convey indolence, time wasting and drift. What is wrong with idleness? In modern society, more than ever, we need to slow down and recall the wisdom of Cato when he said, ‘Never is a man more active than when he does nothing.’ We are in danger of losing the capacity to reflect, to deliberate, to ponder, even to communicate and to learn in the true sense of that term.

I am well aware that certain exercises, tasks setup by the facilitator, can practically force the group to more of a here-and-now communication or more of a feeling level. There are leaders who do these very skillfully, and with good effect at the time. However, I am enough of a scientist-clinician to make many casual follow-up inquiries, and I know that frequently the lasting result of such procedures is not nearly as satisfying as the immediate effect. At it's best it may lead to discipleship (which I happen not to like): "What a marvelous leader he is to have made me open up when I had no intention of doing it!" It can also lead to a rejection of the whole experience. "Why did I do those silly things he asked me to?" At worst, it can make the person feel that his private self has been in some way violated, and he will be careful never to expose himself to a group again. From my experience I know that if I attempt to push a group to a deeper level it is not, in the long run, going to work.

A higher form of communication, verbal language, is also unavailable or inadequate to describe the intensity of a cutter's inner state. As kids, by and large, self-injurers were not allowed to have or express their own feelings—especially anger. Instead they were forced to carry the feelings of their parents and grew up feeling responsible for their parents' anger, frustration, and unhappiness. They were expected to fill their parents' need for love and gratification, rather than the parents satisfying their children's needs. When a child's feelings and perceptions are actively denied or minimized by her parents, the child's ability to develop a language of feelings is stunted, and she is left with a mute hopelessness about the possibility of communicating in a way that will help her to get critical needs met. Words then seem to take on terrifying proportions; they are both too powerful and completely useless. Emotions are so damned up that sadness seems annihilating, rage often feels murderous.

...moderate social deviance or class non-conformism I have imputed to the first generation of pedestrians. Improved roads, after all, were one of the principal means by which the country was building a national communications network that would underpin the huge commercial and industrial expansion of the nineteenth century; changing the landscape of the country to produce the arterial interconnection of the modern state in place of a geography of more or less self-enclosed local communities; consolidating the administrative structures of the state and facilitating political hegemony over a rapidly growing and potentially unstable population; and promulgating a 'national' culture in the face of regional diversity and independence. With the main roads such powerful instruments of change, the walker's decision to exploit his freedom to resist the imperative of destination and explore instead by lanes, by-roads and fieldpaths, could well be interpreted as an act of denial, flight or dissent vis-a-vis the forces that were ineradicably transforming British society.

Behind these practical studies lay powerful, intertwined, and potentially contradictory beliefs: that language provides a key to the rational, scientific understanding of the world and that language is more than human speech, that it claims a divine origin and is the means by which God created the cosmos and Adam named the beasts. As we will see, both ideas strongly influenced the Inklings, whose leading members wrote many words about the meaning of words. For Owen Barfield, language is the fossil record of the history and evolution of human consciousness; for C. S. Lewis, it is a mundane tool that "exists to communicate whatever it can communicate" but also, as in That Hideous Strength, an essential part of our metaphysical makeup for good or ill; for Charles Williams, language is power, a field of force for the magician, a vehicle of prayer for the believing Christian; for Tolkien, language is a fallen human instrument and a precious divine gift ("O felix peccatum Babel!" he exclaimed in his essay "English and Welsh"), a supreme art, and, as "Word", a name for God.

Imagine the following. Three groups of ten individuals are in a park at lunchtime with a rainstorm threatening. In the first group, someone says: “Get up and follow me.” When he starts walking and only a few others join in, he yells to those still seated: “Up, I said, and now!” In the second group, someone says: “We’re going to have to move. Here’s the plan. Each of us stands up and marches in the direction of the apple tree. Please stay at least two feet away from other group members and do not run. Do not leave any personal belongings on the ground here and be sure to stop at the base of the tree. When we are all there . . .” In the third group, someone tells the others: “It’s going to rain in a few minutes. Why don’t we go over there and sit under that huge apple tree. We’ll stay dry, and we can have fresh apples for lunch.” I am sometimes amazed at how many people try to transform organizations using methods that look like the first two scenarios: authoritarian decree and micromanagement. Both approaches have been applied widely in enterprises over the last century, but mostly for maintaining existing systems, not transforming those systems into something better. When the goal is behavior change, unless the boss is extremely powerful, authoritarian decree often works poorly even in simple situations, like the apple tree case. Increasingly, in complex organizations, this approach doesn’t work at all. Without the power of kings and queens behind it, authoritarianism is unlikely to break through all the forces of resistance. People will ignore you or pretend to cooperate while doing everything possible to undermine your efforts. Micromanagement tries to get around this problem by specifying what employees should do in detail and then monitoring compliance. This tactic can break through some of the barriers to change, but in an increasingly unacceptable amount of time. Because the creation and communication of detailed plans is deadly slow, the change produced this way tends to be highly incremental. Only the approach used in the third scenario above has the potential to break through all the forces that support the status quo and to encourage the kind of dramatic shifts found in successful transformations. (See figure 5–1.) This approach is based on vision—a central component of all great leadership.

No one but she had realized that the ballroom bore a rather startling resemblance to the gardens at Charise Dumont’s country house, and that the arbor at the side, with its trellised entrance, was a virtual replica of the place where she and Ian had first waltzed that long-ago night. Across the room, the vicar was standing with Jake Wiley, Lucinda, and the Duke of Stanhope, and he raised his glass to her. Elizabeth smiled and nodded back. Jake Wiley watched the silent communication and beamed upon his little group of companions. “Exquisite bride, isn’t she?” he pronounced, not for the first time. For the past half-hour, the three men had been merrily congratulating themselves on their individual roles in bringing this marriage about, and the consumption of spirits was beginning to show in Duncan and Jake’s increasingly gregarious behavior. “Absolutely exquisite,” Duncan agreed. “She’ll make Ian an excellent wife,” said the duke. “We’ve done well, gentlemen,” he added, lifting his glass in yet another congratulatory toast to his companions. “To you, Duncan,” he said with a bow, “for making Ian see the light.” “To you, Edward,” said the vicar to the duke, “for forcing society to accept them.” Turning to Jake, he added, “And to you, old friend, for insisting on going to the village for the servingwomen and bringing old Attila and Miss Throckmorton-Jones with you.” That toast belatedly called to mind the silent duenna who was standing stiffly beside them, her face completely devoid of expression. “And to you, Miss Throckmorton-Jones,” said Duncan with a deep, gallant bow, “for taking that laudanum and spilling the truth to me about what Ian did two years ago. ‘Twas that, and that alone, which caused everything else to be put into motion, so to speak. But here,” said Duncan, nonplussed as he waved to a servant bearing a tray of champagne, “you do not have a glass, my dear woman, to share in our toasts.” “I do not take strong spirits,” Lucinda informed Duncan. “Furthermore, my good man,” she added with a superior expression that might have been a smile or a smirk, “I do not take laudanum, either.” And on that staggering announcement, she swept up her unbecoming gray skirts and walked off to dampen the spirits of another group. She left behind her three dumbstruck, staring men who gaped at each other and then suddenly erupted into shouts of laughter.

As concerning marriage, besides that it is a covenant, the entrance into which only is free, but the continuance in it forced and compulsory, having another dependence than that of our own free will, and a bargain commonly contracted to other ends, there almost always happens a thousand intricacies in it to unravel, enough to break the thread and to divert the current of a lively affection: whereas friendship has no manner of business or traffic with aught but itself. Moreover, to say truth, the ordinary talent of women is not such as is sufficient to maintain the conference and communication required to the support of this sacred tie; nor do they appear to be endued with constancy of mind, to sustain the pinch of so hard and durable a knot. And doubtless, if without this, there could be such a free and voluntary familiarity contracted, where not only the souls might have this entire fruition, but the bodies also might share in the alliance, and a man be engaged throughout, the friendship would certainly be more full and perfect; but it is without example that this sex has ever yet arrived at such perfection; and, by the common consent of the ancient schools, it is wholly rejected from it.

Throughout history we read of Masters in every conceivable form of human endeavor describing a sensation of suddenly possessing heightened intellectual powers after years of immersion in their field. The great chess Master Bobby Fischer spoke of being able to think beyond the various moves of his pieces on the chessboard; after a while he could see “fields of forces” that allowed him to anticipate the entire direction of the match. For the pianist Glenn Gould, he no longer had to focus on notes or parts of the music he was playing, but instead saw the entire architecture of the piece and could express it. Albert Einstein suddenly was able to realize not just the answer to a problem, but a whole new way of looking at the universe, contained in a visual image he intuited. The inventor Thomas Edison spoke of a vision he had for illuminating an entire city with electric light, this complex system communicated to him through a single image. In all of these instances, these practitioners of various skills described a sensation of seeing more. They were suddenly able to grasp an entire situation through an image or an idea, or a combination of images and ideas. They experienced this power as intuition, or a fingertip feel.

So you’re saying,” I interjected, “that there is no organized, conspiratorial evil in the world, no satanic plot to which we fall prey?” “None. There is only human fear and the bizarre ways that humans try to ward it off.” “What about the many references in sacred texts and scriptures to Satan?” “This idea is a metaphor, a symbolic way of warning people to look to the divine for security, not to their sometimes tragic ego urges and habits. Blaming an outside force for everything bad was perhaps important at a certain stage in human development. But now it obscures the truth, because blaming our behavior on forces outside ourselves is a way of avoiding responsibility. And we tend to use the idea of Satan to project that some people are inherently evil so we can dehumanize the ones we disagree with and write them off. It is time now to understand the true nature of human evil in a more sophisticated way and then to deal with it.” “If there is no satanic plot,” I said, “then ‘possession’ doesn’t exist.” “That’s not so,” Wil said emphatically. “Psychological ‘possession’ does exist. But it is not the result of a conspiracy of evil; it is just energy dynamics. Fearful people want to control others. That’s why certain groups try to pull you in and convince you to follow them, and ask you to submit to their authority, or fight you if you try to leave.” “When I was first drawn into that illusory town, I thought I had been possessed by some demonic force.” “No, you were drawn in because you made the same mistake you made earlier: you didn’t just open up and listen to those souls; you gave yourself over to them, as if they automatically had all the answers, without checking to see if they were connected and motivated by love. And unlike the souls who are divinely connected, they didn’t back away from you. They just pulled you into their world, the same way some crazy group or cult might do in the physical dimension if you don’t discriminate.” Wil paused as if in thought, then continued. “All this is more of the Tenth Insight; that’s why we’re seeing it. As communication between the two dimensions increases, we’ll begin to have more encounters with souls in the Afterlife. This part of the Insight is that we must discern between those souls who are awake and connected with the spirit of love and those who are fearful and stuck in an obsessive trance of some kind. But we must do so without invalidating and dehumanizing those caught in such fear dramas by thinking they are demons or devils. They are souls in a growth process, just like us.

[...]Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now. Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who ' 'reflects' the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object - and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura - the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself - to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques. This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity - not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory. The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.

Dostum offered this exoneration as evidence of his loyalty to the Americans. But his conviction that the Americans were by his side during the incident raised another set of difficult questions about whether the Special Forces and CIA personnel witnessed any of the communications between Dostum and his commanders about the murders, and failed to either stop them, or report them after the fact. Nutsch told me he knew of no abuses. “My team has been investigated multiple times over this,” he said. “We did not witness, nor observe, anything.” Just as Dostum considered the American special forces blood brothers, the camaraderie was apparent on Nutsch’s side. “I saw him as a charismatic leader. Led from the front. Took care of his guys,” he added. In a celebratory Hollywood rendition of 595’s collaboration with Dostum called 12 Strong, Nutsch was portrayed, with exaggerated brawn and smolder, by Chris Hemsworth, the actor who played the superhero Thor. Nutsch grew testy when I asked a series of questions about the more complicated realities of the story. “Dostum’s enemies are the ones accusing him of these things,” he said. When I told him Dostum had admitted the killings may have occurred, and suggested two of his commanders may have been involved, Nutsch paused, then replied, “I don’t have a reaction to that.

I know Christians who yearn for God's older style of a power-worker who topples pharaohs, flattens Jericho's walls, and scorches the priests of Baal. I do not. I believe the kingdom now advances through grace and freedom, God's goal all along. I accept Jesus' assurance that his departure from earth represents progress, by opening a door for the Counselor to enter. We know how counselors work: not by giving orders and imposing changes through external force. A good counselor works on the inside, bringing to the surface dormant health. For a relationship between such unequal partners, prayer provides an ideal medium. Prayer is cooperation with God, a consent that opens the way for grace to work. Most of the time the Counselor communicates subtly: feeding ideas into my mind, bringing to awareness a caustic comment I just made, inspiring me to choose better than I would have done otherwise, shedding light on the hidden dangers of temptation, sensitizing me to another's needs. God's Spirit whispers rather than shouts, and brings peace not turmoil. Although such a partnership with God may lack the drama of the bargaining sessions with Abraham and Moses, the advance in intimacy is striking. . . The partnership binds so tight that it becomes hard to distinguish who is doing what, God or the human partner. God has come that close.

One of the most important of these truths—a new ethic of interaction—began to surface in various places around the globe, but ultimately found clear expression in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. Instantly I could see the Birth Visions of hundreds of individuals born into the Greek culture, each hoping to remember this timely insight. For generations they had seen the waste and injustice of mankind’s unending violence upon itself, and knew that humans could transcend the habit of fighting and conquering others and implement a new system for the exchange and comparison of ideas, a system that protected the sovereign right of every individual to hold his unique view, regardless of physical strength—a system that was already known and followed in the Afterlife. As I watched, this new way of interaction began to emerge and take form on Earth, finally becoming known as democracy. In this method of exchanging ideas, communication between humans still often degenerated into an insecure power struggle, but at least now, for the first time ever, the process was in place to pursue the evolution of human reality at the verbal rather than the physical level. At the same time, another watershed idea, one destined to completely transform the human understanding of spiritual reality, was surfacing in the written histories of a small tribe in the Middle East. Similarly I could also see the Birth Visions of many of the proponents of this idea as well. These individuals, born into the Judaic culture, knew before birth that while we were correct to intuit a divine source, our description of this source was flawed and distorted. Our concept of many gods was merely a fragmented picture of a larger whole. In truth, they realized, there was only one God, a God, in their view, that was still demanding and threatening and patriarchal—and still existing outside of ourselves—but for the first time, personal and responsive, and the sole creator of all humans. As I continued to watch, I saw this intuition of one divine source emerging and being clarified in cultures all over the world. In China and India, long the leaders in technology, trade, and social development, Hinduism and Buddhism, along with other Eastern religions, moved the East toward a more contemplative focus. Those who created these religions intuited that God was more than a personage. God was a force, a consciousness, that could only be completely found by attaining what they described as an enlightenment experience. Rather than just pleasing God by obeying certain laws or rituals, the Eastern religions sought connection with God on the inside, as a shift in awareness, an opening up of one’s consciousness to a harmony and security that was constantly available.

You’ve got great base stats, so someone like you wouldn’t get how I feel.” Aoi Hinami’s mouth moved ever so slightly, like she was repeating my words, but I couldn’t hear her. I wasn’t even sure what my voice sounded like just then. “Life is unfair. I’m ugly, I have a bad build, I overthink until I can’t do anything, I’m wishy-washy, people make fun of everything I do, and I have no confidence in my ability to communicate. How is someone like me supposed to beat someone strong like you?” This might have been the first time I ever said something like that to a stranger. “But that’s all fine. Because life’s not fair. You don’t get results just by trying hard. If you could, I would, but life doesn’t have rules. No rewards, no right answers. As a game, it’s a piece of shit. If there’s no right answer, then there’s no point in trying. And I hate the way normies like you live. Your confidence is totally baseless, and you go around in packs just pretending to have fun.” With the floodgates opened, I couldn’t stop myself. “Even when I have a reason to be confident, I shy away. When I’m in a group I just feel alone, and it’s not fun. I’m used to this life. I don’t know why things are this way. You have a problem with that? I’ve been like this as long as I can remember. That’s fine with me. I’m a loner, but I have my fun. I’m fine with this…” I clenched my fists. “…So don’t force your values on me!

There has been a revolution in the way people think. They have just noticed, without daring to say it, that the old paradigm, according to which ‘the fate of humanity, individual and collective, is getting better every day, thanks to science, democratisation, and egalitarian emancipation’, is false. The age that believed it is over. This illusion has fallen. This progress (debatable anyhow according to people like Ivan Illich)[203] lasted probably less than a century. Today, the unintended consequences of mass technology are beginning to be felt: new resistant viruses, the toxicity of processed food, the exhaustion of the soil and the shrinking of the world’s agricultural production, the general and rapid degradation of the environment, the threat of the invention of new weapons of mass destruction to add to nuclear weapons, and so on. In addition, technology is entering its baroque age. The fundamental inventions were discovered by the end of the 1950s. The improvements to them made in later decades have contributed fewer and fewer concrete ameliorations, like so many useless decorative motifs added to the superstructure of a monument. The Internet has probably had fewer revolutionary effects than the telegraph or the telephone. The Internet is a significant improvement applied to a pan-communication that was already substantially realised. Techno-science is following the ‘80-20’ power law. At the beginning it takes 20 units of energy to obtain 60 units of force. Later it takes 80 units of energy to realise only 20 units of force.

Just how important a close moment-to-moment connection between mother and infant can be was illustrated by a cleverly designed study, known as the “double TV experiment,” in which infants and mothers interacted via a closed-circuit television system. In separate rooms, infant and mother observed each other and, on “live feed,” communicated by means of the universal infant-mother language: gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions. The infants were happy during this phase of the experiment. “When the infants were unknowingly replayed the ‘happy responses’ from the mother recorded from the prior minute,” writes the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, “they still became as profoundly distressed as infants do in the classic ‘flat face’ experiments in which mothers-in-person gave no facial emotional response to their infant’s bid for attunement.” Why were the infants distressed despite the sight of their mothers’ happy and friendly faces? Because happy and friendly are not enough. What they needed were signals that the mother is aligned with, responsive to and participating in their mental states from moment to moment. All that was lacking in the instant video replay, during which infants saw their mother’s face unresponsive to the messages they, the infants, were sending out. This sharing of emotional spaces is called attunement. Emotional stress on the mother interferes with infant brain development because it tends to interfere with the attunement contact. Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional selfregulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at that moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb. Attunement does not mean mechanically imitating the infant. It cannot be simulated, even with the best of goodwill. As we all know, there are differences between a real smile and a staged smile. The muscles of smiling are exactly the same in each case, but the signals that set the smile muscles to work do not come from the same centers in the brain. As a consequence, those muscles respond differently to the signals, depending on their origin. This is why only very good actors can mimic a genuine, heartfelt smile. The attunement process is far too subtle to be maintained by a simple act of will on the part of the parent. Infants, particularly sensitive infants, intuit the difference between a parent’s real psychological states and her attempts to soothe and protect the infant by means of feigned emotional expressions. A loving parent who is feeling depressed or anxious may try to hide that fact from the infant, but the effort is futile. In fact, it is much easier to fool an adult with forced emotion than a baby. The emotional sensory radar of the infant has not yet been scrambled. It reads feelings clearly. They cannot be hidden from the infant behind a screen of words, or camouflaged by well-meant but forced gestures. It is unfortunate but true that we grow far more stupid than that by the time we reach adulthood.

After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile, and when I saw that all the things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them; I determined at last to inquire whether there was anything which might be truly good, and able to communicate its goodness, and by which the mind might be affected to the exclusion of all other things; I determined, I say, to inquire whether I might discover and attain the faculty of enjoying throughout eternity continual supreme happiness.. I could see the many advantages acquired from honor and riches, and that I should be debarred from acquiring these things if I wished seriously to investigate a new matter…But the more one possesses of either of them, the more the pleasure is increased, and the more one is in con- sequence encouraged to increase them; whereas if at any time our hope is frustrated, there arises in us the deepest pain. Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it we must direct our lives in such a way as to please the fancy of men, avoiding what they dislike and seeking what pleases them. . .. But the love towards a thing eternal and infinite alone feeds the mind with a pleasure secure from all pain… The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature….The more the mind knows, the better it understands its forces and the order of nature; the more it understands its forces or strength, the better it will be able to direct itself and lay down the rules for itself; and the more it understands the order of nature, the more easily it will be able to liberate itself from useless things; this is the whole method.

Sometimes I feel impatient about how much ableism has forced us to emphasize accessibility to get people to pay even a modicum of attention to it. Collective access is revolutionary because disabled people of color (and disabled people in general) choosing each other is revolutionary. And, in many ways access should not be a revolutionary concept. It is the routine, every day part of the work. It is only the first step in movement building. People talk about access as the outcome, not the process, as if having spaces be accessible is enough to get us all free. Disabled people are so much more than our access needs; we can’t have a movement without safety and access, and yet there is so much more still waiting for us collectively once we build this skillset of negotiating access needs with each other. Tonight I am taking time to appreciate and enjoy access as a communication of our deepest desires. When my new friend makes their house wheelchair accessible so I can come over, a whole new level of safety and trust opens up. When a love takes initiative to reach out to event organizers to make sure my buds and I can fully participate, that’s thoughtfulness, and also political commitment in practice. When I eat dinner with dear ones and they know which spoon or cup to grab, that’s attunement. When I can ask a friend to move my body, it’s because I know they want me to be comfortable out in the world. When I can do the impairment-related parts of my routine around someone, that’s intimacy, a gift of letting each other into our most private worlds. Feeling thankful for access—and interdependence—as an opportunity for us to show up for one another, and also for crip spaces that give us a taste of what can take place when we have each other. I am so hungry for us to be together. I am so ready for what is around the corner. —STACEY PARK

Ultimately, what does it mean to be ignoble? — Words are sound signals for ideas, but ideas are more or less firm image signs for sensations which return frequently and occur together, for groups of sensations. To understand each other, it is not yet sufficient that people use the same words; they must also use the same words for the same form of inner experiences; in the end they must hold their experience in common with each other. That’s why human beings belonging to a single people understand each other better among themselves than associations of different peoples, even when they use the same language; or rather, when human beings have lived together for a long time under similar conditions (climate, soil, danger, needs, work), then something arises out of that which “understands itself” — a people ... The assessments of value in a man reveal something about the structure of his soul and where it looks for its conditions of life, its essential needs. Now, assume that need has always brought together only such people as could indicate with similar signs similar requirements and similar experiences, then it generally turns out that the easy ability to communicate need, that is, in the last analysis, familiarity with only average and common experiences, must have been the most powerful of all the forces which have so far determined things among human beings. People who are more similar and more ordinary have been and always are at an advantage; the more exceptional, more refined, rarer, and more difficult to understand easily remain isolated; in their isolation they are subject to accidents and rarely propagate themselves. People have to summon up huge counter-forces to check this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile [advance into similarity], the further development of human beings into what’s similar, ordinary, average, herd-like — into what’s common.

Matt Espenshade confirmed that in spite of the deaths of so many of the kidnappers, many more are still at large, including their leaders. Those men might hope to be forgotten; they are not. The FBI has continued its investigative interest in those involved with the kidnapping. The leaders, especially, are of prime interest to the Bureau. And now the considerable unseen assets in that region are steadily feeding back information on these targeted individuals to learn their operational methods and their locations and hunt them down. The surviving kidnappers and their colleagues are welcome to sneer at the danger. It may help them pass the time, just as it did for Bin Laden’s henchmen to chuckle at the idea of payback. If the men nobody sees coming are dispatched to capture or kill them, the surviving kidnappers will find themselves dealing with a force of air, sea, and land fighters s obsessed with the work they do that they have trained themselves into the physical and mental toughness of world-class athletes. They will carry the latest in weapons, armor, visual systems, and communication devises. Whether they are Navy SEAL fighters, DEVGRU warriors, Army Delta Force soldiers, Green Berets, or any of the elite soldiers under United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), they will share the elite warriors’ determination to achieve success in their mission assignment. The news that they are coming for you is the worst you could receive. But nobody gets advance warning from these men. They consider themselves born for this. They have fought like panthers to be part of their team. For most of them, there is a strong sense of pride in succeeding at missions nobody else can get done; in lethal challenges. They actually prefer levels of difficulty so high it seems only a sucker would seek them, the sorts of situations seen more and more often these days. Impossible odds.

It was a particular pleasure when she climbed into the dark confines of her coach and sat back with a deep sigh, all without realizing he was sitting in the shadows across from her. She rapped on the roof three times, and the coach pulled away with the horses at a sedate walk. “Did you have fun, Miss Windham?” She didn’t scream, which was a point in her favor, though her hand disappeared into her reticule. “You might hit me at this range, even in the dark,” Hazlit said. “But I really wish you wouldn’t. In such a situation, even a gentleman might be forced to take desperate measures.” “Good evening, Mr. Hazlit. Not quite a pleasure to see you.” “You hired me, Miss Windham. Were we to communicate exclusively in notes written in disappearing ink?” “No.” Her ungloved hand emerged from her reticule. “I meant I can’t quite see you.” She took off her other glove and stuffed them both into her bag. “I suppose it makes sense you’d prefer to meet in private. I wasn’t sure whether to approach you, since you insist on determining the time and place you meet with a client. You did not look to be enjoying yourself.” “You did.” How could peevishness creep into only two syllables? In the dark, her teeth gleamed in a smile. “I did. A little bit, I did. There are advantages to being on the shelf, though I’ve yet to truly appreciate them.” “One being that you can tease and flirt and carry on like a strumpet all night?” The peevishness was gone, but Hazlit hardly liked himself for the condescension that had taken its place. “If I’m flirting and teasing, then the gentlemen are also flirting and teasing, and yet you hardly compare them to streetwalkers. They are being gallant, but you accuse me of being immoral. Hardly fair, Mr. Hazlit.” “They do not have their hair swinging around their backsides like some dollymop working the docks.” She went still, as if he’d slapped her, and Hazlit had to wonder if she wouldn’t be justified in shooting him.

One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is by no means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it incomprehensible. Perhaps that was part of the author's intention — he didn't want to be understood by just 'anybody'. Every nobler spirit and taste selects his audience when he wants to communicate; in selecting it, he simultaneously erects barriers against 'the others'. All subtler laws of a style originated therein: they simultaneously keep away, create a distance, forbid 'entrance', understanding, as said above — while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours. And let me say this amongst ourselves and about my own case: I want neither the inexperience nor the liveliness of my temperament to keep me from being understandable to you, my friends — not the liveliness, as much as it forces me to deal with a matter swiftly in order to deal with it at all. For I approach deep problems such as I do cold baths: fast in, fast out. That this is no way to get to the depths, to get deep enough, is the superstition of those who fear water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. Oh, the great cold makes one fast! And incidentally: does a matter stay unrecognized, not understood, merely because it has been touched in flight; is only glanced at, seen in a flash? Does one absolutely have to sit firmly on it first? At least there are truths that are especially shy and ticklish and can't be caught except suddenly — that one must surprise or leave alone. Finally, my brevity has yet another value: given the questions that occupy me, I must say many things briefly so that they will be heard even more briefly. For, as an immoralist, one needs to avoid corrupting innocents — I mean, asses and old maids of both sexes to whom life offers nothing but their innocence; even more, my writing should inspire, elevate, and encourage them to be virtuous.

What is the meaning of the antithetical concepts Apollonian and Dionysian which I have introduced into the vocabulary of Aesthetic, as representing two distinct modes of ecstasy? — Apollonian ecstasy acts above all as a force stimulating the eye, so that it acquires the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are essentially visionaries. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole system of passions is stimulated and intensified, so that it discharges itself by all the means of expression at once, and vents all its power of representation, of imitation, of transfiguration, of transformation, together with every kind of mimicry and histrionic display at the same time. The essential feature remains the facility in transforming, the inability to refrain from reaction (—a similar state to that of certain hysterical patients, who at the slightest hint assume any role). It is impossible for the Dionysian artist not to understand any suggestion; no outward sign of emotion escapes him, he possesses the instinct of comprehension and of divination in the highest degree, just as he is capable of the most perfect art of communication. He enters into every skin, into every passion: he is continually changing himself. Music as we understand it today is likewise a general excitation and discharge of the emotions; but, notwithstanding this, it is only the remnant of a much richer world of emotional expression, a mere residuum of Dionysian histrionism. For music to be made possible as a special art, quite a number of senses, and particularly the muscular sense, had to be paralysed (at least relatively: for all rhythm still appeals to our muscles to a certain extent): and thus man no longer imitates and represents physically everything he feels, as soon as he feels it. Nevertheless that is the normal Dionysian state, and in any case its primitive state. Music is the slowly attained specialisation of this state at the cost of kindred capacities.

The beginning of our acquaintance with the outside world is not only sensory but is entirely subjective. For a long time we know only a sensorial subjective reality. We are not, however, alone: always we are in communication with other human beings—parents, teachers, etc. Without ever stopping to think about it, we behave as if all these others share the same subjective reality as we. There are as many subjective realities as there are subjects. The one thing that is common to all these subjective realities is the one reality we use in communicating with one another: the one “objective” reality for all of us. But, apart from this, there is obviously a third reality. This is Reality—with a capital R—that is understood to exist whether you and I are alive or whether we know it or ignore it. This is the Reality which must exist and must be there, whether men exist or not. When we use our thinking, and not only our sensing, we realize that this third Reality is more than likely the first. This Reality is immensely complex and is only very superficially known, either to science or philosophy or in music or poetry. But our sense of self-importance makes us believe that our subjective reality is just as valid. The “objective” reality is, finally, that part of our subjective reality which we are willing to concede to our fellow men. I can see that you can see and that you can read, but I can never believe that you can see as I can, or understand what you read as I do, even though logic forces me to recognize I must be wrong and have no grounds for thinking in this way. My subjective reality is mine entirely and follows all my whims. “Objective” reality is less whimsical: it is the reality experienced by all men. It limits and restricts your and my subjective reality to that upon which all others agree. Subjective reality is anchored in us and is as real as our bodies. Objective reality is the measure of our sanity. But Reality has never as yet been perceived in its entirety. Our belief that we know Reality is an illusion, a maya; it is a measure of our ignorance.

A PRACTICE FOR MINDFUL EATING When you do anything consciously, including eating, you override the brain’s default setting and communicate directly with the higher brain, which is responsible for conscious thoughts and actions. Very often we eat unconsciously, without thinking or weighing the consequences of what we’re doing. You can change the situation with a simple mindfulness practice. The next time you eat anything, whether as a meal or a snack, do the following: Step 1: Pause before you eat the first bite and take a deep breath. Step 2: Ask yourself, “Why am I eating this?” Step 3: Whatever answer you get, take note of it. Better yet, write it down—you might even start a mindful eating journal. Step 4: Make a conscious choice to eat or not eat. There is nothing more to do, but this simple practice can lead to major benefits. Your goal is to return to a normal biorhythm of hunger and satiation. When you pause to make a choice, your reason for eating should therefore be “I’m hungry.” But there are a host of other reasons we reach for food, like the following: “I’m bored.” “I can’t resist.” “I need comforting.” “There’s no use letting all this food go to waste.” “I’m stressed out.” “I feel a craving.” “I’m depressed.” “I’m anxious.” “I don’t know why.” “I’m lonely.” “I’m sick of dieting.” “The other people I’m with are eating.” “There’s not much left. I might as well finish the package.” “I feel like celebrating.” When you ask yourself why you are eating, it’s likely that some of these reasons will come into play. Don’t judge against them, and don’t force yourself to reject the food out of guilt. Mindfulness is a conscious state, nothing more or less. In this state you are self-aware, and that’s the key. When you are self-aware, change comes with less effort than in any other state. The end of unconscious eating is often enough to turn around a person’s weight problems, especially if they are mild to moderate. As you can see, there is hope beyond dieting, a way forward for people who moan “I’ve tried everything. Nothing works.” A whole-system approach to weight loss ends the struggle; no longer is your body the enemy and you its victim.

We usually think of empires as violent undertakings. As Frantz Fanon observed in the 1960s, the process of conquering and governing a colony is, by definition, violent. But in the context of global capitalism, empire has a more expansive meaning. Capitalist empires are not simply the states capable of winning the most wars; they are the command centers of the capitalist world system. Their corporations are the largest and most powerful multinationals, extracting profits from all corners of the globe and sucking them back to the imperial core. Their financial institutions are some of the most important nodes in the networks of global finance. The priorities of their governments are forcefully communicated to -and sometimes enforced upon- less powerful states. In fact, at the global level it is much easier to see the equivalence between economic and political power than it is domestically. The power of US businesses abroad is maintained through an international order that prioritizes the interests of US capital, promulgated by the US government and its allies. The power of US finance rests on the central role played by the dollar as the global reserve currency, which is it self a function of American military, political, and economic might. American military power, meanwhile, stems from and helps to reinforce the power of a web of military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and research hubs that provide the expertise and equipment needed to maintain its supremacy. In certain parts of the world, as in Iraq after its invasion, the US government has rules through private corporations like Halliburton. Empire is, then, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the processes through which the world's most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what at the level of the world economy. Throughout history, this imperial power has often been exercised through horrendous acts of violence that have warped the development of entire societies for decades. But today, it is often exerted in far more covert ways, such as through the secretive system of international courts or international financial institutions imposing rigid conditions on countries trying to access emergency lending.

Washington University found that adding a single extra gene dramatically boosted a mouse’s memory and ability. These “smart mice” could navigate mazes faster, remember events better, and outperform other mice in a wide variety of tests. They were dubbed “Doogie mice,” after the precocious character on the TV show Doogie Howser, M.D. Dr. Tsien began by analyzing the gene NR2B, which acts like a switch controlling the brain’s ability to associate one event with another. (Scientists know this because when the gene is silenced or rendered inactive, mice lose this ability.) All learning depends on NR2B, because it controls the communication between memory cells of the hippocampus. First Dr. Tsien created a strain of mice that lacked NR2B, and they showed impaired memory and learning disabilities. Then he created a strain of mice that had more copies of NR2B than normal, and found that the new mice had superior mental capabilities. Placed in a shallow pan of water and forced to swim, normal mice would swim randomly about. They had forgotten from just a few days before that there was a hidden underwater platform. The smart mice, however, went straight to the hidden platform on the first try. Since then, researchers have been able to confirm these results in other labs and create even smarter strains of mice. In 2009, Dr. Tsien published a paper announcing yet another strain of smart mice, dubbed “Hobbie-J” (named after a character in Chinese cartoons). Hobbie-J was able to remember novel facts (such as the location of toys) three times longer than the genetically modified strain of mouse previously thought to be the smartest. “This adds to the notion that NR2B is a universal switch for memory formation,” remarked Dr. Tsien. “It’s like taking Michael Jordon and making him a super Michael Jordan,” said graduate student Deheng Wang. There are limits, however, even to this new mice strain. When these mice were given a choice to take a left or right turn to get a chocolate reward, Hobbie-J was able to remember the correct path for much longer than the normal mice, but after five minutes he, too, forgot. “We can never turn it into a mathematician. They are rats, after all,” says Dr. Tsien. It should also be pointed out that some of the strains of smart mice were exceptionally timid compared to normal mice. Some suspect that, if your memory becomes too great, you also remember all the failures and hurts as well, perhaps making you hesitant. So there is also a potential downside to remembering too much.

Was this luck, or was it more than that? Proving skill is difficult in venture investing because, as we have seen, it hinges on subjective judgment calls rather than objective or quantifiable metrics. If a distressed-debt hedge fund hires analysts and lawyers to scrutinize a bankrupt firm, it can learn precisely which bond is backed by which piece of collateral, and it can foresee how the bankruptcy judge is likely to rule; its profits are not lucky. Likewise, if an algorithmic hedge fund hires astrophysicists to look for patterns in markets, it may discover statistical signals that are reliably profitable. But when Perkins backed Tandem and Genentech, or when Valentine backed Atari, they could not muster the same certainty. They were investing in human founders with human combinations of brilliance and weakness. They were dealing with products and manufacturing processes that were untested and complex; they faced competitors whose behaviors could not be forecast; they were investing over long horizons. In consequence, quantifiable risks were multiplied by unquantifiable uncertainties; there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns; the bracing unpredictability of life could not be masked by neat financial models. Of course, in this environment, luck played its part. Kleiner Perkins lost money on six of the fourteen investments in its first fund. Its methods were not as fail-safe as Tandem’s computers. But Perkins and Valentine were not merely lucky. Just as Arthur Rock embraced methods and attitudes that put him ahead of ARD and the Small Business Investment Companies in the 1960s, so the leading figures of the 1970s had an edge over their competitors. Perkins and Valentine had been managers at leading Valley companies; they knew how to be hands-on; and their contributions to the success of their portfolio companies were obvious. It was Perkins who brought in the early consultants to eliminate the white-hot risks at Tandem, and Perkins who pressed Swanson to contract Genentech’s research out to existing laboratories. Similarly, it was Valentine who drove Atari to focus on Home Pong and to ally itself with Sears, and Valentine who arranged for Warner Communications to buy the company. Early risk elimination plus stage-by-stage financing worked wonders for all three companies. Skeptical observers have sometimes asked whether venture capitalists create innovation or whether they merely show up for it. In the case of Don Valentine and Tom Perkins, there was not much passive showing up. By force of character and intellect, they stamped their will on their portfolio companies.

In the future that globalists and feminists have imagined, for most of us there will only be more clerkdom and masturbation. There will only be more apologizing, more submission, more asking for permission to be men. There will only be more examinations, more certifications, mandatory prerequisites, screening processes, background checks, personality tests, and politicized diagnoses. There will only be more medication. There will be more presenting the secretary with a cup of your own warm urine. There will be mandatory morning stretches and video safety presentations and sign-off sheets for your file. There will be more helmets and goggles and harnesses and bright orange vests with reflective tape. There can only be more counseling and sensitivity training. There will be more administrative hoops to jump through to start your own business and keep it running. There will be more mandatory insurance policies. There will definitely be more taxes. There will probably be more Byzantine sexual harassment laws and corporate policies and more ways for women and protected identity groups to accuse you of misconduct. There will be more micro-managed living, pettier regulations, heavier fines, and harsher penalties. There will be more ways to run afoul of the law and more ways for society to maintain its pleasant illusions by sweeping you under the rug. In 2009 there were almost five times more men either on parole or serving prison terms in the United States than were actively serving in all of the armed forces.[64] If you’re a good boy and you follow the rules, if you learn how to speak passively and inoffensively, if you can convince some other poor sleepwalking sap that you are possessed with an almost unhealthy desire to provide outstanding customer service or increase operational efficiency through the improvement of internal processes and effective organizational communication, if you can say stupid shit like that without laughing, if your record checks out and your pee smells right—you can get yourself a J-O-B. Maybe you can be the guy who administers the test or authorizes the insurance policy. Maybe you can be the guy who helps make some soulless global corporation a little more money. Maybe you can get a pat on the head for coming up with the bright idea to put a bunch of other guys out of work and outsource their boring jobs to guys in some other place who are willing to work longer hours for less money. Whatever you do, no matter what people say, no matter how many team-building activities you attend or how many birthday cards you get from someone’s secretary, you will know that you are a completely replaceable unit of labor in the big scheme of things.

APRIL 6 Don’t be discouraged at the spiritual war you’re called to fight every day. The Lord almighty is with you and wars on your behalf. Between the “already” and the “not yet,” life is war. It can be exhausting, frustrating, and discouraging. We all go through moments when we wish life could just be easier. We wonder why parenting has to be such a continual spiritual battle. We all wish our marriages could be free of war. We all would love it if there were no conflicts at our jobs or in our churches. But we all wake up to a war-torn world every day. It is the sad legacy of a world that has been broken by sin and is constantly under the attack of the enemy. The way the apostle Paul ends his letter to the Ephesian church is interesting and instructive. Having laid out the truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ and having detailed their implications for our street-level living, he ends by talking about spiritual warfare: Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. (Eph. 6:10–20) When you get to this final part of Paul’s letter, it’s tempting to think that he has entirely changed the subject. No longer, it seems, is he talking about everyday Christianity. But that’s exactly what he’s talking about. He is saying to the Ephesian believers, “You know all that I’ve said about marriage, parenting, communication, anger, the church, and so on—it’s all one big spiritual war.” Paul is reminding you that at street level, practical, daily Christianity is war. There really is moral right and wrong. There really is an enemy. There really is seductive and deceptive temptation. You really are spiritually vulnerable. But he says more. He reminds you that by grace you have been properly armed for the battle. The question is, will you use the implements of battle that the cross of Jesus Christ has provided for you?

In respect to the employment of troops, ground may be classified as dispersive, frontier, key, communicating, focal, serious, difficult, encircled, and death. When a feudal lord fights in his own territory, he is in dispersive ground. Here officers and men long to return to their nearby homes. When he makes but a shallow penetration into enemy territory he is in frontier ground. Ground equally advantageous for the enemy or me to occupy is key ground. Ground equally accessible to both the enemy and me is communicating. This is level and extensive ground in which one may come and go, sufficient in extent for battle and to erect opposing fortifications. When a state is enclosed by three other states its territory is focal. He who first gets control of it will gain the support of All-under-Heaven. When the army has penetrated deep into hostile territory, leaving far behind many enemy cities and towns, it is in serious ground. When the army traverses mountains, forests, precipitous country, or marches through defiles, marshlands, or swamps, or any place where the going is hard, it is in difficult ground. Ground to which access is constricted, where the way out is tortuous, and where a small enemy force can strike my larger one is called 'encircled.' Ground in which the army survives only if it fights with the courage of desperation is called 'death.' Therefore, do not fight in dispersive ground; do not stop in the frontier borderlands. Do not attack an enemy who occupies key ground; in communicating ground do not allow your formations to become separated. In focal ground, ally with neighboring states; in deep ground, plunder. In difficult ground, press on; in encircled ground, devise stratagems; in death ground, fight. In dispersive ground I would unify the determination of the army. In frontier ground I would keep my forces closely linked. In key ground I would hasten up my rear elements. In communicating ground I would pay strict attention to my defenses. In focal ground I would strengthen my alliances. I reward my prospective allies with valuables and silks and bind them with solemn covenants. I abide firmly by the treaties and then my allies will certainly aid me. In serious ground I would ensure a continuous flow of provisions. In difficult ground I would press on over the roads. In encircled ground I would block the points of access and egress. It is military doctrine that an encircling force must leave a gap to show the surrounded troops there is a way out, so that they will not be determined to fight to the death. Then, taking advantage of this, strike. Now, if I am in encircled ground, and the enemy opens a road in order to tempt my troops to take it, I close this means of escape so that my officers and men will have a mind to fight to the death. In death ground I could make it evident that there is no chance of survival. For it is the nature of soldiers to resist when surrounded; to fight to the death when there is no alternative, and when desperate to follow commands implicitly.

According to folk belief that is reflected in the stories and poems, a being who is petrified man and he can revive. In fairy tales, the blind destructiveness of demonic beings can, through humanization psychological demons, transformed into affection and love of the water and freeing petrified beings. In the fairy tale " The Three Sisters " Mezei de-stone petrified people when the hero , which she liked it , obtain them free . In the second story , the hero finding fairy , be petrified to the knee , but since Fairy wish to marry him , she kissed him and freed . When entering a demonic time and space hero can be saved if it behaves in a manner that protects it from the effects of demonic forces . And the tales of fortune Council hero to not turn around and near the terrifying challenges that will find him in the demon area . These recommendations can be tracked ancient prohibited acts in magical behavior . In one short story Penina ( evil mother in law ) , an old man , with demonic qualities , sheds , first of two brothers and their sister who then asks them , iron Balot the place where it should be zero as chorus, which sings wood and green water . When the ball hits the ground resulting clamor and tumult of a thousand voices, but no one sees - the brothers turned , despite warnings that it should not , and was petrified . The old man has contradictory properties assistants and demons . Warning of an old man in a related one variant is more developed - the old man tells the hero to be the place where the ball falls to the reputation of stones and hear thousands of voices around him to cry Get him, go kill him, swang with his sword , stick go ! . The young man did not listen to warnings that reveals the danger : the body does not stones , during the site heroes - like you, and was petrified . The initiation rite in which the suffering of a binding part of the ritual of testing allows the understanding of the magical essence of the prohibition looking back . MAGICAL logic respectful direction of movement is particularly strong in relation to the conduct of the world of demons and the dead . From hero - boys are required to be deaf to the daunting threats of death and temporarily overcome evil by not allowing him to touch his terrible content . The temptation in the case of the two brothers shows failed , while the third attempt brothers usually releases the youngest brother or sister . In fairy tales elements of a rite of passage blended with elements of Remembrance lapot . Silence is one way of preventing the evil demon in a series of ritual acts , thoughts Penina Mezei . Violation of the prohibition of speech allows the communication of man with a demon , and abolishes protection from him . In fairy tales , this ritual obligations lost connection with specific rituals and turned into a motive of testing . The duration of the ban is extended in the spirit of poetic genre in years . Dvanadestorica brothers , to twelve for saving haunted girls , silent for almost seven years, but eleven does not take an oath and petrified ; twelfth brother died three times , defeat the dragon , throw an egg at a crystal mountain , and save the brothers ( Penina Mezei : 115 ) . Petrify in fairy tales is not necessarily caused by fear , or impatience uneducated hero . Self-sacrificing hero resolves accident of his friend's seemingly irrational moves, but he knows that he will be petrified if it is to warn them in advance , he avoids talking . As his friend persuaded him to explain his actions , he is petrified ( Penina Mezei : 129 ) . Petrified friends can save only the blood of a child , and his " borrower " Strikes sacrifice their own child and revives his rescuers . A child is a sacrificial object that provides its innocence and purity of the sacrificial gift of power that allows the return of the forces of life.

In the 1990s legal scholar and public policy advocate Wendy Kaminer published a brace of books engaged with the New Age cultures of recovery and self-help. She represented an Old Left perspective on new superstition, and although she was of the same generation as the cultural studies scholars, she did exactly what Andrew Ross warned academics and elites against. She criticized the middlebrow, therapeutic culture of self-help for undermining critical thinking in popular discourse. She encouraged the debunking of superstition, deplored public professions of piety. Her books were polemical and public interventions that were addressed to the maligned liberal and more or less thoughtful reader who took an interest in the issues of the day. In some ways, her writing was a popularization of some of psychoanalytic theory scholar, sociologist, and cultural critic Philip Rieff’s and Richard Hofstadter’s critiques of a therapeutic culture of anti-intellectualism.77 She speculated that the decline of secular values in the political sphere was linked to the rise of a culture of recovery and self-help that had come out of the popularization of New Age, countercultural beliefs and practices. In both I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety, Kaminer publicly denounced the decline of secular culture and the rise of a therapeutic culture of testimony and self-victimization that brooked no dissent while demanding unprecedented leaps of faith from its adherents.78 Kaminer’s work combined a belief in Habermasian rational communication with an uncompromising skepticism about the ubiquity of piety that for her was shared by both conservatives and liberals. For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.