Fully Occupied Quotes

She turned toward Roarke's office, then stopped in the doorway. He was at his console; captain of his ship. He'd drawn his hair back so it lay on his neck in a short, gleaming black tail. His eyes were cool, cool blue. The colour they were when his mind was fully occupied. He'd taken off his dinner jacket, his shirt was loose at the collar, the sleeves rolled up. There was something... just something about that look that always and forever grabbed her in the gut. She could look at him for hours, and at the end of it, still marvel that he belonged to her. "Someone wants to hurt you," she thought. "I'm not going to let them.

I am not alone, you see;—and those whose time is fully occupied seldom complain of solitude.

«God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.

The assault on education began more than a century ago by industrialists and capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie. In 1891, Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.” The industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has a right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness… is those who are useful.” The arrival of industrialists on university boards of trustees began as early as the 1870s and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business offered the first academic credential in business administration in 1881. The capitalists, from the start, complained that universities were unprofitable. These early twentieth century capitalists, like heads of investment houses and hedge-fund managers, were, as Donoghue writes “motivated by an ethically based anti-intellectualism that transcended interest in the financial bottom line. Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual inquiry for its own sake, led them to insist that if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts.

Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in room number 1 into room number 2; the guest in room number 2 into number 3; the guest in 3 into room 4, and so on. In that way room number 1 became vacant for the new guest. What delights me about this story is that everyone involved, the guests and the owner, accept it as perfectly natural to carry out an infinite number of operations so that one guest can have peace and quiet in a room of his own. That is a great tribute to solitude.

On some level, Mimi always enjoyed her infrequent meetings with Monte, as his love of hearing himself talk and his need to put others in their place kept him so fully occupied, she could usually just sit back and think about something else.

I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied.... None of this is spare time. I can't spare it. ... I have no time to spare.

That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.

The most challenging part of respecting our bodies and healing compulsive eating is the conscious decision to question what keeps us bound and silenced. Until we can sit in our own skin and fully occupy the physical space we’ve been given, we will be apologetic about our bodies. And even when we lose weight because we stuck to a diet, we will remain frightened of ourselves because we know that it’s the diet that’s keeping us thin, not our own capacity to stay true to what we know or want. On diets, we are still relying on the big powerful other to know what’s best and to save us. And whether it’s a good daddy or a good diet that rescues us, we remain victims and food our perpetrator.

The surest way to abstain from evil is to be fully occupied in doing good.

[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention." [...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some "grave breaches," including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting [..] and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.

I’m captivated… Hypnotized, enamored, and fully occupied by him. He lifts his face to look at me. I give up the last fuck I was holding onto as our identical green eyes meld together. And he whispers, “Mine.

Even though the past has gone and can’t be altered, and the future isn’t yet manifest, we choose to mentally occupy these illusory places instead of fully entering and experiencing the one moment we actually occupy – this moment now.

She holds views, which are thought to be very advanced, on Female Education.’ ‘And have you been reared according to these views?’ enquired Gervase, in some misgiving. ‘No, for Mama has been so fully occupied in prescribing for the education of females in general that naturally she has had little time to spare for her own children. Moreover, she is a person of excellent sense, and, mortifying though it has been to her, she has not hesitated to acknowledge that neither I nor my elder brother is in the least bookish.

That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most pre-occupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

Watching television is another high-risk situation. This might seem counterintuitive, since people often look to TV as an escape—something to take their mind off things. But here’s the problem: Most programs are simply not interesting or engaging enough to fully occupy the mind, so it’s all too easy for our thoughts to wander off when we’re sitting in front of the tube. Add to this the fact that depression impairs our ability to concentrate—including the ability to stay focused on a TV program—and it’s no surprise that watching television is often a recipe for disaster. It’s one of the most effective ways to usher in an extended bout of rumination.

If your mind has space, then in that space there is silence—and from that silence everything else comes, for then you can listen, you can pay attention without resistance. That is why it is very important to have space in the mind. If the mind is not overcrowded, not ceaselessly occupied, then it can listen to that dog barking, to the sound of a train crossing the distant bridge, and also be fully aware of what is being said by a person talking here. Then the mind is a living thing, it is not dead.

Look at any picture of Priapus from antiquity, and you will see why he might have had trouble focusing on anything beyond his own anatomy. One fresco in Pompeii shows him fully occupied with the task of weighing his gigantic erection on scales. 25 He raises his filthy hopes, Ovid continues, and tries to sneak up on her, heart racing, on tiptoe (I find myself wondering how he doesn’t tip up,

We are shaped by our daily habits. by the way we pray in the light and in the dark, by the way we speak and the way we trust. We worship God in the way we cry and scream and ask when we are uneasy, in the way we fully trust the Mystery to occupy our corrupt spaces and fill them with joy and fulfillment.

Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties India has had to encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely, one country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the advantage of the strength of the many as well as the strength of the one. India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one, has all along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily; but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not her own creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of extermination is making itself manifest, in the inhospitable shutting out of aliens, by those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history. Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism. India

if I were a gambling addict, then a large portion of my life energy—my time, my thoughts and emotions—would be spent either gambling or fighting my urge to gamble. But for our purposes. feeding my addiction and fighting it are really the same thing. Whether my gambling demon is beating me or I'm beating it doesn't matter. all that matters is that I'm sitting in my prison cell fully engaged in processes that will never move me one inch closer to liberation. That's what demons do. They're like Maya's army of winged monkeys. They always fight a delaying action that expends our resources and prevents us from making forward progress. That's their objective, to occupy us. not to defeat us.

[He] found the beast occupying his bedroom, into which it had broken from a closet adjoining, where it had been, as was thought, securely confined. Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole of the closet.

The teachers were fully occupied with packing up and making other necessary preparations for the departure of those girls who were fortunate enough to have friends and relations able and willing to remove them from the seat of contagion.  Many, already smitten, went home only to die: some died at the school, and were buried quietly and quickly, the nature of the malady forbidding delay. While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death its frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls; while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug and the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out of doors.

I want my daughter to know that she is entitled to be powerful and, on occasion, to compete with other people, including privileged boys and men. I want her to know that if she does end up winning or otherwise outranking them, she may well be entitled to occupy a position of power or authority over them. I want her to be a kind and fearless leader. I want her, of course, to be a graceful loser. I want her to be communally minded and altruistic. At the same time, I want her to feel entitled to make mistakes, moral mistakes included. I want her to know, unlike so many girls and women, that she is lovable and forgivable, even if and when she falters. I want her to be prepared to make amends and admit to her mistakes, fully and freely, when she inevitably makes them.

Cunningly done, O Francis, puissant comte de Sevigny. Nothing crude. Nothing too rich, or sickly, or posturing. Songs like a lost hearth-fire, that one had known from one’s childhood; songs rarely come upon, and the rest like new lovers, moving in their unfamiliarity. Songs which spoke direct to the heart. To the heart, and not to the intellect. She looked at Lymond. The dark wood of his chair defined his head. His profile, pure as the flowered spurs on his porcelain, was turned from the singers. His lids at first she thought were closed; and then she realized that he was fully occupied. He was watching time, and his guests; and guiding noiselessly through his maîtres d’hôtel the weaving pattern of footmen, pages, sommelier. Tonight he had no hostess and equally needed none. He had done this, somewhere, many times, and it was effortless.

He didn’t just come in and read the lines. He had prepared a fully realized character. He had prepared the material so his dialogue had a rhythm, intonation, syntax, the pauses, everything was calculated. He had decided how this character handles his body, how he occupies space, or is uncomfortable occupying space. It was a whole other level of audition. And it was not the character that I envisioned. Frankly, I don’t remember what kind of character I envisioned,

It’s fascinating that fully half of these six major goddesses have sworn off sex and marriage, given that they were worshipped during times when ordinary women had little choice about marriage, and almost no opportunity to reject it as a way of life. Perhaps the only thing we can read into this mismatch is that gods occupy a different plane from mortals and so would live unimaginable lives, and that being unmarried is as natural for a goddess (and unnatural for a mortal)

When the British took control of Egypt the Copts occupied a number of the highest positions in the State. In less than a quarter of a century almost all the Coptic Heads of Departments had disappeared. They were at first fully represented in the bench of judges, but gradually the number was reduced to nil; the process of removing them and shutting the door against fresh appointments has gone on until they have been reduced to a state of discouragement bordering on despair!” These are the words of an Englishman.

Today in the US, we're sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads, set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family and tending to the house. Even back then, it wasn't true for everyone. Today, it is true for almost no one, except for one significant group: the most powerful positions in society are often occupied by men who do wives who do not work outside the home, and those men may not fully understand the lives of the people who work for them.

His mind was completely occupied with the image of Aline by the river, the rich mass of her pinned-up hair, the exquisite lines of her body and throat. Time had only made Aline's beauty more eloquent. Her body was ripe and fully developed, the form of a woman in her prime. With maturity, her face had become more delicately sculpted, the nose thinner, the lips faded from deep rose to the pale shade of pink that tinted the inside of a seashell. And there was that damned, never-forgotten beauty mark, the festive dark fleck that lured his attention to the tender corner of her mouth.

In the manner characteristic of their species they had lived hitherto without serious thought for matters of public concern. They were fully occupied in keeping themselves and their families afloat in the maelstrom of economic individualism. Inevitably their chief concern was private fulfilment, and its essential means, money. National affairs, racial affairs, cosmical events, were of interest to them only in their economic bearing, or at most as occasions of curiosity, wonder or ridicule. They produced and consumed, bought and sold, played ritual games with balls, and transported themselves hither and thither in mechanical vehicles in search of a goal which ever eluded them. They indulged in illicit sexual intercourse; or with public applause they married, propagated, launched their children upon the maelstrom. The overwhelming majority were enslaved by the custom of the herd. Nowhere was there any clear perception of the issues at stake, nowhere any recognition that the species was faced with the supreme crisis of its career. Scarcely a man or woman in Europe or America, still less in the remote East, realized that the great test of the human animal had come, and come, alas, too soon.

Dallas pointed out to me once that there is a world of difference between being busy and being hurried. Being busy is an outward condition, a condition of the body. It occurs when we have many things to do. Busy-ness is inevitable in modern culture. If you are alive today in North America, you are a busy person. There are limits to how much busy-ness we can tolerate, so we wisely find ways to slow down whenever we can. We take vacations, we sit in a La-Z-Boy® with a good book, we enjoy a leisurely meal with friends. By itself, busy-ness is not lethal. Being hurried is an inner condition, a condition of the soul. It means to be so preoccupied with myself and my life that I am unable to be fully present with God, with myself, and with other people. I am unable to occupy this present moment. Busy-ness migrates to hurry when we let it squeeze God out of our lives. Note the differences between the two: Busy Hurried A full schedule Preoccupied Many activities Unable to be fully present An outward condition An inner condition of the soul Physically demanding Spiritually draining Reminds me I need God Causes me to be unavailable to God I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul. I cannot rest in God with a hurried soul.

The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living. An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.

There are human tempers, bland, glowing, and genial, within whose influence it is as good for the poor in spirit to live, as it is for the feeble in frame to bask in the glow of noon. Of the number of these choice natures were certainly both Dr. Bretton’s and his mother’s. They liked to communicate happiness, as some like to occasion misery: they did it instinctively; without fuss, and apparently with little consciousness; the means to give pleasure rose spontaneously in their minds. Every day while I stayed with them, some little plan was proposed which resulted in beneficial enjoyment. Fully occupied as was Dr. John’s time, he still made it in his way to accompany us in each brief excursion. I can hardly tell how he managed his engagements; they were numerous, yet by dint of system, he classed them in an order which left him a daily period of liberty. I often saw him hard-worked, yet seldom over-driven, and never irritated, confused, or oppressed. What he did was accomplished with the ease and grace of all-sufficing strength; with the bountiful cheerfulness of high and unbroken energies. Under his guidance I saw, in that one happy fortnight, more of Villette, its environs, and its inhabitants, than I had seen in the whole eight months of my previous residence. He took me to places of interest in the town, of whose names I had not before so much as heard; with willingness and spirit he communicates much noteworthy information.

It is incumbent on each of us to cultivate his or her own wisdom. So gradual a progression is the onset of our aging that we one day find it to be fully upon us. In its own unhurried way, age soundlessly and with persistence treads ever closer behind us on slippered feet, catches up, and finally blends itself into us—all while we are still denying its nearness. It enters at last into the depths of one’s being, not only to occupy them but to become their very essence. In time, we not only acknowledge aging’s presence within us, but come to know it as well as we knew—and still covet—the exuberant youth that once dwelt there. And then, finally, we try to reconcile ourselves to the inescapable certainty that we are now included among the elderly.

Even as we live and breathe and move and celebrate life, we can meditate on the occupation of death as it resides in us as a reminder to be alive, to be open, and to live in fullness, and also to know that those who have died are contained within us. We occupy them—not just family, genetically, ancestry, but also in the relationships we have. We occupy them in our stories, in our narratives, in our customs, in our memories, all of that is within us, and we occupy them in us. And then when we die, those who remain are living testament to our lives. And our lives are now living testament to those who lived before us. So, I guess my prayer today is to meditate on the occupation of death... and until that day live fully, in fullness of hope and joy.

Domestic society being confirmed, therefore, by this bond of love, there should flourish in it that "order of love," as St. Augustine calls it. This order includes both the primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience, which the Apostle commends in these words: "Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church." This subjection, however, does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor does it bid her obey her husband's every request if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to wife; nor, in fine, does it imply that the wife should be put on a level with those persons who in law are called minors, to whom it is not customary to allow free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment, or of their ignorance of human affairs. But it forbids that exaggerated liberty which cares not for the good of the family; it forbids that in this body which is the family, the heart be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole body and the proximate danger of ruin. For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love. Again, this subjection of wife to husband in its degree and manner may vary according to the different conditions of persons, place and time. In fact, if the husband neglect his duty, it falls to the wife to take his place in directing the family. But the structure of the family and its fundamental law, established and confirmed by God, must always and everywhere be maintained intact.

it appears various ancient Mystics had a hard time explaining with their archaic languages lacking the words for detailing “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” the Trinity concept being misunderstood by a good host the Father is the immutable unmoving Godhead from whence the Holy Ghost flows to all widespread the Son, a physical expression in those whose self is dead God can't be received fully if the “me” occupies space the sense of individual selfhood disappears without a trace the higher nature of God is formless unmanifested from it, this changing world of form is emanated everything is God, in God, all-inclusively unending ungraspable by brain-mind and its inferior comprehending people wonder, “okay, but what created God?” contemplate “Eternal” or “Infinite” to see the query flawed All is the Mind of God without exception including your Mind prior to conception formless No-Thing, yet Infinitely Everything yet both, yet neither, for it's beyond expounding

When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world.

My mother, without a doubt, occupied the center of our home. Universal respect surrounded her in the entire village. Certainly she had many cares. I myself was only a child in this home. If I reverently recall my mother, I see her before me as one who served. She served me and the other children. She served not only while I was a helpless babe in arms. (That indeed I cannot remember.) She served even when I already had strength for work. She served always. She served till the day of her death. And, my Lord, still I never thought in terms like this: Though my mother enjoyed universal respect, she did not think it beneath her to serve me. The only way I can think of her is that she served me, for she was my mother. My Lord! Thus I no longer want to say about you: ALTHOUGH you were clearly conscious of your dignity, still you did not think it beneath your dignity to perform the task of a servant. After this I should like to put it this way: BECAUSE you were the fully authorized son of the God of eternal love, THEREFORE you served. You served not only here in this biblical scene. You always served.

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah. The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science. But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

How can there be a fusion of the thinker with his thoughts? Not through the action of will, nor through discipline, nor through any form of effort, control, or concentration, nor through any other means. The use of a means implies an agent who is acting, does it not? As long as there is an actor, there will be a division. The fusion takes place only when the mind is utterly still without trying to be still. There is this stillness, not when the thinker comes to an end, but only when thought itself has come to an end. There must be freedom from the response of conditioning, which is thought. Each problem is solved only when idea, conclusion, is not; conclusions, idea, thought, are the agitations of the mind. How can there be understanding when the mind is agitated? Earnestness must be tempered with the swift play of spontaneity. You will find, if you have heard all that has been said, that truth will come in moments when you are not expecting it. If I may say so, be open, sensitive, be fully aware of what is from moment to moment. Don’t build around yourself a wall of impregnable thought. The bliss of truth comes when the mind is not occupied with its own activities and struggles.

That edge, where artists are always transforming chaos into order, can be a very rough and dangerous place. Living there, an artist constantly risks falling fully into the chaos, instead of transforming it. But artists have always lived there, on the border of human understanding. Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life. You are very creative when you are dreaming. That is why, when you remember a dream, you think, “Where in the world did that come from?” It is very strange and incomprehensible that something can happen in your head, and you have no idea how it got there or what it means. It is a miracle: nature’s voice manifesting itself in your psyche. And it happens every night. Like art, the dream mediates between order and chaos. So, it is half chaos. That is why it is not comprehensible. It is a vision, not a fully fledged articulated production. Those who actualize those half-born visions into artistic productions are those who begin to transform what we do not understand into what we can at least start to see. That is the role of the artist, occupying the vanguard. That is their biological niche. They are the initial civilizing agents.

He: "I mean, are you happy and are you fully alive?" I laughed: ''As you can see, you wove witty jokes into the lecture to please your listeners. You heaped up learned expressions to impress them. You were restless and hasty, as if still compelled to snatch up all knowledge. You are not in yourself" Although these words at first seemed laughable to me, they still made an impression on me, and reluctantly I had to / credit the old man, since he was right. Then he said: "Dear Ammonius, I have delightful tidings for you: God has become flesh in his son and has brought us all salvation." ""What are you saying," I called, "you probably mean Osiris, who shall appear in the mortal body?" "No," he replied, "this man lived in Judea and was born from a virgin." I laughed and answered: "I already know about this; a Jewish trader has brought tidings of our virgin queen to Judea, whose image appears on the walls of one of our temples, and reported it as a fairy tale." "No," the old man insisted, "he was the Son of God." "Then you mean Horus the son of Osiris, don't you?" I answered. "No,hewasnotHorus,butarealman,andhewashung from a cross." "Oh, but this must be Seth, surely; whose punishments our old ones have often described." But the old man stood by his conviction and said: "He died and rose up on the third day." "Well, then he must be Osiris," I replied impatiently. "No," he cried, "he is called Jesus the anointed one." ''Ah, you really mean this Jewish God, whom the poor honor at the harbor, and whose unclean mysteries they celebrate in cellars." "He was a man and yet the Son of God," said the old man staring at me intently. "That's nonsense, dear old man," I said, and showed him to the door. But like an echo from distant rock faces the words returned to me: a man and yet the Son of God. It seemed significant to me, and this phrase was what brought me to Christianity. I: "But don't you think that Christianity could ultimately be a transformation ofyour Egyptian teachings?" A: "If you say that our old teachings were less adequate expressions of Christianity, then I'm more likely to agree with you." I: "Yes, but do you then assume that the history of religions is aimed at a final goal?" A: "My father once bought a black slave at the market from the region of the source of the Nile. He came from a country that had heard ofneither Osiris nor the other Gods; he told me many things in a more simple language that said the same as we believed about Osiris and the other Gods. I learned to understand that those uneducated Negroes unknowingly already possessed most of what the religions of the cultured peoples had developed into complete doctrines. Those able to read that language correctly could thus recognize in it not only the pagan doctrines but also the doctrine of Jesus. And it's with this that I now occupy myself I read the gospels and seek their meaning which is yet to come.We know their meaning as it lies before us, but not their hidden meaning which points to the future. It's erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it's always one and the same religion. Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent." I: "Have you found out the meaning which is yet to come?" A: "No, not yet; it's very difficult, but I hope I'll succeed. Sometimes it seems to me that I need the stimulation of others, but I realize that those are temptations of Satan." I: "Don't you believe that you'd succeed ifyou were nearer men?" A: "maybeyoureright." He looks at me suddenly as if doubtful and suspicious. "But, I love the desert, do you understand? This yellow, sun-glowing desert. Here you can see the countenance of the sun every day; you are alone, you can see glorious Helios-no, that is - pagan-what's wrong with me? I'm confused-you are Satan- I recognize you-give way; adversary!" He jumps up incensed and wants to lunge at me. But I am far away in the twentieth century.

Hunting in my experience—and by hunting I simply mean being out on the land—is a state of mind. All of one’s faculties are brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than an analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have the land around you like clothing. To engage in a wordless dialogue with it, one so absorbing that you cease to talk with your human companions. It means to release yourself from rational images of what something “means” and to be concerned only that it “is.” And then to recognize that things exist only insofar as they can be related to other things. These relationships—fresh drops of moisture on top of rocks at a river crossing and a raven’s distant voice—become patterns. The patterns are always in motion. Suddenly the pattern—which includes physical hunger, a memory of your family, and memories of the valley you are walking through, these particular plants and smells—takes in the caribou. There is a caribou standing in front of you. The release of the arrow or bullet is like a word spoken out loud. It occurs at the periphery of your concentration. The mind we know in dreaming, a nonrational, nonlinear comprehension of events in which slips in time and space are normal, is, I believe, the conscious working mind of an aboriginal hunter. It is a frame of mind that redefines patience, endurance, and expectation. The focus of a hunter in a hunting society was not killing animals but attending to the myriad relationships he understood bound him into the world he occupied with them. He tended to those duties carefully because he perceived in them everything he understood about survival. This does not mean, certainly, that every man did this, or that good men did not starve. Or that shamans whose duty it was to intercede with the forces that empowered these relationships weren’t occasionally thinking of personal gain or subterfuge. It only means that most men understood how to behave.

commonly crossed talons, and eagles squared off against falcons and loons, to say nothing of other eagles. This was no different from when wildlife populations had been at their apex before Euramericans swept over the continent. Conflicts and displays of territoriality were common, and sometimes these kinds of events manifested unexpected and even unconventional behavior that not even scientists could explain. The mystery revealed itself most strikingly when eagles at the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge in Illinois gave cam viewers a rousing performance in 2017 of an intereagle conflict different from Ozzie and M-15’s. Five years earlier, a couple named Valor and Hope had occupied a nest at the eighty-foot top of a silver maple. Valor was not the quintessential devoted parent. He was an unreliable provider. After eggs were laid that year, he rarely assumed his sitting duties. When chicks were in the nest and Hope called for him to bring food, he typically ignored her, forcing Hope to leave the chicks in Valor’s capricious care as she herself went off to hunt. At best, he would squat at the nest’s edge for a few minutes before taking flight to wherever whim took him. In the end, Hope could not sustain the brood without a fully present partner, and her two eaglets died. When Hope returned to the nest the next year, 2013, she brought another mate with her. Valor showed up only to find he’d been ousted. He didn’t fight off his rival, which seems consistent with his inertia as a parent. He didn’t leave the eagledom either, and the new mate didn’t chase him away. Hope and her new partner, whom the refuge’s nest stewards named Valor II, remained cordial toward the original Valor. A couple years later, Valor was part of nest life again, alongside Hope and Valor II. Having emerged from his parental torpor, he assumed the responsibilities of a proper partner. The birds formed a threesome. The refuge’s visitor service manager quipped that the upper Mississippi had its “own little soap opera.” In 2015, the couple and their new partner raised three eaglets.44 Parenting trios in the wild aren’t altogether uncommon, although

If I had lied to the CIA, perhaps I might have passed a test. Instead of writing a book about the White House, I’d be poisoning a drug kingpin with a dart gun concealed inside a slightly larger dart gun, or making love to a breathy supermodel in the interest of national security. I’ll never know. I confessed to smoking pot two months before. The sunniness vanished from my interviewer’s voice. “Normally we like people who break the rules,” Skipper told me, “but we can’t consider anyone who’s used illegal substances in the past twelve months.” Just like that, my career as a terrorist hunter was over. I thought my yearning for higher purpose would vanish with my CIA dreams, the way a Styrofoam container follows last night’s Chinese food into the trash. To my surprise, it stuck around. In the weeks that followed, I pictured myself in all sorts of identities: hipster, world traveler, banker, white guy who plays blues guitar. But these personas were like jeans a half size too small. Trying them on gave me an uncomfortable gut feeling and put my flaws on full display. My search for replacement selves began in November. By New Year’s Eve I was mired in the kind of existential funk that leads people to find Jesus, or the Paleo diet, or Ayn Rand. Instead, on January 3, I found a candidate. I was on an airplane when I discovered him, preparing for our initial descent into JFK. This was during the early days of live in-flight television, and I was halfway between the Home Shopping Network and one of the lesser ESPNs when I stumbled across coverage of a campaign rally in Iowa. Apparently, a caucus had just finished. Speeches were about to begin. With nothing better to occupy my time, I confirmed that my seat belt was fully fastened. I made sure my tray table was locked. Then, with the arena shrunk to fit my tiny seatback screen, I watched a two-inch-tall guy declare victory. It’s not like I hadn’t heard about Barack Obama. I had heard his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His presidential campaign had energized my more earnest friends. But I was far too mature to take them seriously. They supported someone with the middle name Hussein to be president of the United States. While they were at it, why not cast a ballot for the Tooth Fairy? Why not nominate Whoopi Goldberg for pope?

The object of the mediating function, therefore, according to Schiller, is “living form,” for this would be precisely a symbol in which the opposites are united; “a concept that serves to denote all aesthetic qualities of phenomena and, in a word, what we call Beauty in the widest sense of the term.”75 But the symbol presupposes a function that creates symbols, and in addition a function that understands them. This latter function takes no part in the creation of the symbol, it is a function in its own right, which one could call symbolic thinking or symbolic understanding. The essence of the symbol consists in the fact that it represents in itself something that is not wholly understandable, and that it hints only intuitively at its possible meaning. The creation of a symbol is not a rational process, for a rational process could never produce an image that represents a content which is at bottom incomprehensible. To understand a symbol we need a certain amount of intuition which apprehends, if only approximately, the meaning of the symbol that has been created, and then incorporates it into consciousness. Schiller calls the symbol-creating function a third instinct, the play instinct; it bears no resemblance to the two opposing functions, but stands between them and does justice to both their natures—always provided (a point Schiller does not mention) that sensation and thinking are serious functions. But there are many people for whom neither function is altogether serious, and for them seriousness must occupy the middle place instead of play. Although elsewhere Schiller denies the existence of a third, mediating, basic instinct,76 we will nevertheless assume, though his conclusion is somewhat at fault, his intuition to be all the more accurate. For, as a matter of fact, something does stand between the opposites, but in the pure differentiated type it has become invisible. In the introvert it is what I have called feeling-sensation. On account of its relative repression, the inferior function is only partly attached to consciousness; its other part is attached to the unconscious. The differentiated function is the most fully adapted to external reality; it is essentially the reality-function; hence it is as much as possible shut off from any admixture of fantastic elements. These elements, therefore, become associated with the inferior functions, which are similarly repressed. For this reason the sensation of the introvert, which is usually sentimental, has a very strong tinge of unconscious fantasy. The third element, in which the opposites merge, is fantasy activity, which is creative and receptive at once. This is the function Schiller calls the play instinct, by which he means more than he actually says. He exclaims: “For, to declare it once and for all, man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly man when he is playing.” For him the object of the play instinct is beauty. “Man shall only play with Beauty, and only with Beauty shall he play.”77

In a passage of the third volume of Capital7, Marx very aptly describes the material side of social life, and especially its economic side, that of production and consumption, as an extension of human metabolism, i.e. of man’s exchange of matter with nature. He clearly states that our freedom must always be limited by the necessities of this metabolism. All that can be achieved in the direction of making us more free, he says, is ‘to conduct this metabolism rationally, … with a minimum expenditure of energy and under conditions most dignified and adequate to human nature. Yet it will still remain the kingdom of necessity. Only outside and beyond it can that development of human faculties begin which constitutes an end in itself—the true kingdom of freedom. But this can flourish only on the ground occupied by the kingdom of necessity, which remains its basis …’ Immediately before this, Marx says: ‘The kingdom of freedom actually begins only where drudgery, enforced by hardship and by external purposes, ends; it thus lies, quite naturally, beyond the sphere of proper material production.’ And he ends the whole passage by drawing a practical conclusion which clearly shows that it was his sole aim to open the way into that non-materialist kingdom of freedom for all men alike: ‘The shortening of the labour day is the fundamental pre-requisite.’ In my opinion this passage leaves no doubt regarding what I have called the dualism of Marx’s practical view of life. With Hegel he thinks that freedom is the aim of historical development. With Hegel he identifies the realm of freedom with that of man’s mental life. But he recognizes that we are not purely spiritual beings; that we are not fully free, nor capable of ever achieving full freedom, unable as we shall always be to emancipate ourselves entirely from the necessities of our metabolism, and thus from productive toil. All we can achieve is to improve upon the exhausting and undignified conditions of labour, to make them more worthy of man, to equalize them, and to reduce drudgery to such an extent that all of us can be free for some part of our lives. This, I believe, is the central idea of Marx’s ‘view of life’; central also in so far as it seems to me to be the most influential of his doctrines.

Sometimes it seems like he just wants to punish someone, anyone, for a long list of grievances that he has never made clear, which you can never ask about because he keeps his emotions so guarded that any question would be interpreted as assault. I wonder if dragging us to this village and the nearby town wear he spent his childhood is a way of sinking us all into his own personal hell so that we can see how this strange combination of poverty and opportunity, these broken and muddy roads, these crumbling houses, these overburdened men and women walking slowly in these streets singing praise songs to keep themselves going, created the strange combination of love and anger and pride and fear that is my father. He always sat in the passenger seat while we drove around the village so he could fully view what he sometimes called a world of wasted opportunity. With OJ or my mother in the car, he pointed out all the things he would make right if only he had the power. With me now, he says nothing. Occasionally he turns to look at me with the same expression that occupies his face when he has to solve a problem at the office. I sink down in my seat and wish that my mother had come.

Kim notes in his book Flowers of Emptiness that “self” is the translation of the Japanese word ware. He writes ware has two possible interpretations in this context: (1) self/being and (2) time/impermanence.3 Following Kim’s lead we can understand “to set the self in array” is to fully occupy the moment (time) of one’s existence (being). Setting time in array is to fully occupy the fluctuating impermanence of the present moment as embodied in one’s person. Since a being-time includes the individual’s unique being-time and simultaneously the arising of all being(s)-times(s), this becomes the totality of all being at that moment practicing together.

First, A ship of the finest make and model available shall be furnished to carry the constructors home. 2nd, The said ship shall be laden with various cargo as here specified: diamonds—four bushels, gold coin—forty bushels, platinum, palladium, and whatever other ready valuables they happen to think of—eight bushels of each, also whatever mementos and tokens from the Royal Apartments the signatories of this instrument may deem appropriate. 3rd, Until such time as the said ship shall be in readiness for takeoff, every nut and bolt in place, fully loaded and delivered up to the constructors complete with red carpet, an eighty-piece send-off band and children's chorus, an abundance of honors, decorations and awards, and a wildly cheering crowd—until then, no King. 4th, That a formal expression of undying gratitude shall be stamped upon a gold medallion and addressed to Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors Trurl and Klapaucius, Delight and Terror of the Universe, and moreover it shall contain a full account of their victory and be duly signed and notarized by every high and low official in the land, then set in the richly embellished barrel of the King's favorite cannon, which Lord Protozor, Master of the Royal Hunt, shall himself and wholly unaided carry on board—no other Protozor but the one who lured Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors to this planet thinking to work their painful and ignominious death thereby. 5th, That the aforesaid Protozor shall accompany them on their return journey as insurance against any sort of double-dealing, pursuit, and the like. On board he shall occupy a cage three by three by four feet and shall receive a a daily allowance of humble pie with a filling made of that very same sawdust which Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors saw fit to order in the process of indulging the King's foolishness and which was subsequently taken to police headquarters by unmarked balloon. 6th and lastly, The King need not crave forgiveness of Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors on bended knee, since he is much too beneath them to deserve notice.

The way to learn it is to exercise yourself in living in the present moment. Each time your attention is free to occupy itself with the thought of Jesus,—whether it be with time to think and pray, or only for a few passing seconds,—let your first thought be to say, Now, at this moment, I do abide in Jesus. Use such time, not in vain regrets that you have not been abiding fully, or still more hurtful fears that you will not be able to abide, but just at once take the position the Father has given you: “I am in Christ; this is the place God has given me. I accept it; here I rest; I do now abide in Jesus.

Our 182-passenger Boeing Classic this morning is under the able command of Captain Hiram Slatt, discharged from service in the United States Air Force mission in Afghanistan after six heroic deployments and now returned, following a restorative sabbatical at the VA Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Wheeling, West Virginia, to his “first love”—civilian piloting for North American Airways. Captain Slatt has informed us that, once we are cleared for takeoff, our flying time will be between approximately seventeen and twenty-two hours depending upon ever-shifting Pacific Ocean air currents and the ability of our seasoned Classic 878 to withstand gale-force winds of 90 knots roaring “like a vast army of demons” (in Captain Slatt’s colorful terminology) over the Arctic Circle. As you have perhaps noticed Flight 443 is a full—i.e., “overbooked”—flight. Actually most North American Airways flights are overbooked—it is Airways protocol to persist in assuming that a certain percentage of passengers will simply fail to show up at the gate having somehow expired, or disappeared, en route. For those of you who boarded with tickets for seats already taken—North American Airways apologizes for this unforeseeable development. We have dealt with the emergency situation by assigning seats in four lavatories as well as in the hold and in designated areas of the overhead bin. Therefore our request to passengers in Economy Plus, Economy, and Economy Minus is that you force your carry-ons beneath the seat in front of you; and what cannot be crammed into that space, or in the overhead bin, if no one is occupying the overhead bin, you must grip securely on your lap for the duration of the flight. Passengers in First Class may give their drink orders now. SECURITY:

For example,” I explain, “if I were a gambling addict, then a large portion of my life energy—my time, my thoughts and emotions—would be spent either gambling or fighting my urge to gamble. But for our purposes, feeding my addiction and fighting it are really the same thing. Whether my gambling demon is beating me or I’m beating it doesn’t matter, all that matters is that I’m sitting in my prison cell fully engaged in processes that will never move me one inch closer to liberation. That’s what demons do. They’re like Maya’s army of winged monkeys. They always fight a delaying action that expends our resources and prevents us from making forward progress. That’s their objective, to occupy us, not to defeat us.

That opposition is politically and ideologically diverse. Alaa and his comrades are part of the left, internationalist, anti-sectarian, youth-led movement that is part of a global confrontation with transnational capital and its national organs, a movement that has seen expressions from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street. And because this strain has refused to fully surrender its hopes for a liberated Egypt, it too has faced the wrath of the vengeful regime of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Fully occupied by the process of achieving innumerable goals, we lose the ability to determine which goals really matter, and why.

I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers. In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly. That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.” I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.

The answer may lie in something we do not always fully appreciate about the crucifixion of Jesus: just how institutional it was. The central institutions of Jesus’ world—the Roman occupying army and its procurator, the Romans’ client king Herod, and the religious establishment led by the Jerusalem Sanhedrin and its high priest—all play pivotal roles in the trials that lead to Jesus’ condemnation. And in doing so all of them are revealed to be deeply corrupt.

One reason Occupy got so much attention in the media at first--most of the seasoned activists I talked to agreed that we had never seen anything like it--was that so many more mainstream activist groups so quickly endorsed our cause. I am referring here particularly to those organizations that might be said to define the left wing of the Democratic Party: MoveOn.org, for example, or Rebuild the Dream. Such groups were enormously energized by the birth f Occupy. But, as I touched on above, most also seem to have assumed that the principled rejection of electoral politics and top-down forms of organization was simply a passing phase, the childhood of a movement that, they assumed, would mature into something resembling a left-wing Tea Party. From their perspective, the camps soon became a distraction. The real business of the movement would begin once Occupy became a conduit for guiding young activists into legislative campaigns, and eventually, get-out-the-vote drives for progressive candidates. It took some time for them to fully realize that the core of the movement was serious about its principles. It’s also fairly clear that when the camps were cleared, not only such groups, but the liberal establishment more generally, made a strategic decision to look the other way. From the perspective of the radicals, this was the ultimate betrayal. We had made our commitment to horizontal principles clear from the outset. They were the essence of what we were trying to do. But at the same time, we understood that there has always been a tacit understanding, in America, between radical groupes like ourselves, and their liberal allies. The radicals’ call for revolutionary change creates a fire to the liberals’ left that makes the liberals’ own proposals for reform seem a more reasonable alternative. We win them a place at the table. They keep us out of jail. In these terms, the liberal establishment utterly failed to live up to their side of the bargain. Occupy succeeded brilliantly in changing the national debate to begin addressing issues of financial power, the corruption of the political process, and social inequality, all to the benefit of the liberal establishment, which had struggled to gain traction around these issues. But when the Tasers, batons, and SWAT teams arrived, that establishment simply disappeared and left us to our fate. (p. 140-141)

The poet read the scriptures, questioning whether the gifts received by men came from deities or from other men. And he did not understand why they were not all distributed equally. This bothered him, for he believed deep within that, according to the law of causality – he thought – there must be a reason, even if obscure or secret. This occupied his nights and days, for he did not understand the differences, luck, and injustices. How could there be evil in a world with a Good Creator? Or, even if there were no creator, he knew that the belief in transcendent justice was the foundation of everything. It was necessary to believe in it, he thought. Until one day, in a dream, he encountered King Solomon, seated on his throne, who was said to be the wisest of men. Then, the poet raised his face towards the King and asked: Oh wisest of men, answer me, why do some have more, others have less, why you, even being a King, are nobler than any of those vagabonds who pass through Jerusalem? Is your blood made of gold, your skin of silver, and your hair of silk? Then, the King, staring at the poet and scratching his beard, also amazed by his boldness, took a deep breath, thought, and then said: “You have many doubts, my friend, indeed; I may not have the answers to all of them and it would not be wise to answer what has no answer. Only God properly fully understands destiny and divine will; but I tell you: if you have been honored by destiny with any gift, possessions, benefits, or even time, use them in favor of your neighbor. For example, I am not a King for myself; I bear the burden of governance and use it for the benefit of my people. If you have been honored in some way, it is to honor others with the most valuable thing you possess.

The Kennedys were indeed more successful at the rough-and-tumble of politics than the Rockefellers. But, as JFK had understood, that was not the full story when it came to evaluating a family's power. He fully appreciated that the Rockefellers held a unique place in the pantheon of American power, one rooted not so much within the democratic system as within what scholars would later refer to as "the deep state" that subterranean network of financial, intelligence, and military interests that guided national policy no matter who occupied the White House. The Kennedys had risen from saloonkeepers and ward heelers to the top of American politics. But they were still overshadowed by the imperial power of the Rockefellers.

a person who is fully occupied with Christ, who knows Him well, and who is in touch with Him through daily fellowship can boldly say, “Christ is all I need. You can strip everything else away from me, and I would still be left with Christ. Take away my gifts and my ministry; take away signs and wonders; take away the sense of His presence; take away my ability to read; and take away every spiritual and religious pursuit I have, and I will still have Christ. And in having Him, I have everything.

The dead are fully assimilated into the living, a process he called introjection. In mourning that does not proceed normally, mourning in which something has gone wrong, this benign internalization does not happen. Instead, there’s an incorporation. The dead occupy only a part of the one who has survived; they are sectioned off, hidden in a crypt, and from this place of encryption they haunt the living.

In many ways, this book is not about the politicians who are turning the ANC and Nelson Mandela’s legacy into a nightmare. It is about all of us, South Africans, who keep quiet when our voices are needed. It is about those of us who keep quiet when journalists like Mzilikazi wa Afrika are arrested on trumped-up charges.11 It is about those of us who have forgotten that freedom is never fully achieved, but is defended and renewed every single day, in every square inch of space we occupy in the world. If the South Africa of our dreams withers and dies, it will be because we have stepped away from the public square. Where is the real ANC? Crucially, where are the men and women who fought so valiantly for this new South Africa?

Simon explained, “Demons are the spirits of the Nephilim. You will remember the readings in synagogue from the Scriptures that in the days of Noah, the fallen Sons of God mated with the daughters of men. Their unholy offspring were the Nephilim, giant hybrid bastards of angel and human essence. This unholy mixing of heaven and earth, was a violation of the separation of creation. But it was also the attempt to corrupt the human bloodline of the promised Messiah who would crush the head of the Serpent.” Peter interjected, “The Nephilim were killed in the Flood.” Simon nodded. “Yes, but their seed rose again to occupy the land of Canaan that was promised as Israel’s inheritance by Yahweh. Joshua used the holy wars of Yahweh to cleanse the land from the evil filth of the Nephilim, whose descendants were the mighty Anakim and Rephaim. It was not until King David that they were fully subdued and wiped out.” Peter asked Jesus directly, “Well, then what do you mean that the Nephilim are back, Rabbi?” Jesus sighed. “The god of this world, and his principalities and powers know that I am here. So they have awakened the spirits of the Nephilim to occupy the Land. The holy wars of Yahweh are renewed in the heavenlies.” Simon added for clarification, “Rabbi is cleansing the land for inheritance by Messiah.” “In the synagogue,” said Jesus, “I did not quote the entire passage from Isaiah. I left out the last line.” “What was the line, Rabbi?” asked Peter. Jesus said somberly, “To proclaim the day of vengeance of our God.

So, tell me, what did you think of my Bram?” Abigail asked as she settled herself in the chair, looking as if she fully intended to stay for a while. “Don’t you think we should discuss your daughter first?” Abigail immediately turned stubborn. “Not particularly. There’s nothing much to say about Iris other than that she loathes me and we don’t share an amicable relationship. Now Bram, on the other hand, is a delightful subject to speak about.” Lucetta settled into the bubbles. “Why do you imagine he was wearing that patch when there’s evidently nothing wrong with his eye?” “It was so gallant of him to whisk you into the castle and bring you up to this tower room, wasn’t it?” Abigail countered, as if Lucetta hadn’t posed a question. “Do you believe he enjoys assuming a pirate persona when he’s at his leisure? Although . . . now that I consider the matter, what does he do when he’s not at his leisure?” Lucetta countered right back. Abigail crossed her arms over her chest and immediately took to looking a little grumpy. “I’m not exactly certain what Bram does, dear. My son-in-law, Phillip—Bram’s father—made a rather large fortune when he invested in a sugar plantation years ago down in Cuba. Because of that fortune, Bram, along with his brother and sister, aren’t required to pursue professions, or make advantageous marriages, although . . . I’m sure Bram does something to occupy his time.” “And

It is certainly to be regretted that we have so many things to do and our business day is so fully occupied that somehow or other we seem to make mistakes which could have been avoided if we had really spent the time necessary to think the matter through to a logical conclusion.

Being hurried is an inner condition, a condition of the soul. It means to be so preoccupied with myself and my life that I am unable to be fully present with God, with myself, and with other people. I am unable to occupy this present moment. Busy-ness migrates to hurry when we let it squeeze God out of our lives.

Historically, when oppressed Jews would pray for a political change, for a new king, the new king would often turn out to be worse than the previous one. They applied the old wisdom and they were right. In fact, the Soviet regime was worse than the years we lived under the Romanian regime. Luckily, we did not fully comprehend, in those first weeks, what suffering we were facing. The Russian troops, making their appearance that first day, were poorly dressed and shod; they spoke only Russian or Ukrainian. Some of them asked passers-by what time it was and grabbed their watches. Local communists and the ubiquitous opportunists started to occupy high positions, as initially, everything was improvised

We have no fitting label for individuals like Henley whom predators target to convert into helpers. They’re not the same as the victims they help to harm, but they’re also not the same as the primary predator. They occupy a fuzzy middle ground. They’re often chosen merely because they’re young, vulnerable, weak, needy, or compliant and therefore easy to manipulate. Since society tends to view them as equal offenders, especially when they do heinous things, researchers haven’t fully studied their unique experiences. Yet dissecting how individuals who’d never considered killing someone might do so under certain influences can reveal ways to protect future potential candidates. Corll had two known apprentices, both immature teenage boys. At Corll’s behest, they learned to abduct, guard, murder, and bury other boys.

Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and it’s Beyond. If one says, ‘Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it’s the only life you’ve got!’ it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite (‘Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air—think about eternity!’), it also sounds deep. If one combines the two sides (‘Bring eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!’), we get another profound thought. Needless to say, the same goes for its inversion: ‘Do not try in vain to bring together eternity and your terrestrial life, accept humbly that you are forever split between Heaven and Earth!’ If, finally, one simply gets perplexed by all these reversals and claims: ‘Life is an enigma, do not try to penetrate its secrets, accept the beauty of its unfathomable mystery!’ the result is no less profound than its reversal: ‘Do not allow yourself to be distracted by false mysteries that just dissimulate the fact that, ultimately, life is very simple—it is what it is, it is simply here without reason and rhyme!’ Needless to add that, by uniting mystery and simplicity, one again obtains a wisdom: ‘The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life.’ This tautological imbecility points towards the fact that a Master is excluded from the economy of symbolic exchange—not wholly excluded, since he occupies a special, exceptional place in it. For the Master, there is no ‘tit for tat,’ since, for him, tit is in a way already its own tat.

While I wait to heal, I often find solace in solitude. I don't fully understand why, but I know I must be alone. I withdraw from the world, and in that quiet space, I focus solely on my recovery. This solitude forces me to confront my raw emotions, with no distractions to dull their intensity. It is within these moments of despair that my most brilliant ideas emerge. I allow myself to feel deeply, to the point where I can no longer feel. To overcome heartache, it's essential to exhaust every emotion—cry until the tears run dry, feel until you're tired of feeling, talk about the person until even your own voice bores you. When you are drained, empty, and devoid of emotion, you are almost across the bridge to healing. It is only then that true detachment begins. Each time my heart has been broken, I've learned how to heal myself. Heartbreak no longer holds power over me. I've realized that the only way to get over it is to go through it. The longer I deny my feelings to protect myself, the more pain I endure. But if I accept the situation and fully experience my emotions, the pain fades more quickly. At most, they may occupy my thoughts for a few days; if I loved them deeply, maybe two or three weeks. I simply withdraw from society and return when I am better, when I am healed. During my healing process, I commit to self-improvement. I channel my energy into refining the parts of myself that led to unnecessary pain. I acknowledge my mistakes, see where I went wrong, and take responsibility for my role in my suffering. And as long as he makes no effort, I am gone. The quickest way for any man to lose me is to stop trying and to make his intentions clear. While he may think I am suffering, I am actually healing. I am recalibrating, renewing, and rehabilitating. I am resurrecting, realigning, adjusting, refocusing, and resetting. I am fine-tuning. In the midst of this, I give him nothing—no attention, no thoughts, no feelings. Exes thrive on your negative emotions, so silence must be so profound that it echoes. No attention, no access. They may resort to stalking through fake profiles, but let them exert the effort. Block all other avenues of communication. I am reshaping, reorienting, tweaking, reassessing, reconfiguring, restructuring. In my absence, I am transforming. Ducked. I am for all ill purposes and intentions, my most productive and fruitful self when I am hurt or alone. This leads my naysayers, detractors and enemies to learn that for the most part, excluding death, I am by most standards, indestructible. I will build empires with the stones one throws at me. I will create fertilizers with the trash and feaces hurled at me. I will rise like pheonix from the ashes. I am antifragile, I can withstand trials, tribulations, chaos and uncertainty and grow in the face of adversity. I am the epitome of the resilience paradox, trial bloom, adversity alchemy, refiners fire and the pheonix effect. I am fortitude - me. Ducked. What’s even more magical, is what comes out on the other side of this process. It’s a peace, you do not want anyone to destroy. A clarity, you won’t risk blurring. A renewed you, a different version of you, stronger, fierce, centered and certain. A rebirth, refinement. You never saw it coming. Neither will they. Copyright ©️ 2024 Crystal Evans

It is only through history that a people becomes fully conscious of itself. This is why history should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, and is to the human race what the reflective, coherent, rationally conditioned consciousness is to the individual, the absence of which imprisons animals in the narrow, intuitive present. This is why every gap in history is like a gap in the recollecting self-consciousness of a human being; and we stand before a memorial of prehistoric antiquity that has outlived information about itself, such as, e.g., the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Yucatan, just as insensibly and naïvely as an animal in the presence of a human action in which it is involved as a servant, or just as a person before his own old secret code to which he has forgotten the key, or indeed just as a sleepwalker who discovers in the morning what he has done during the night. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. This is the true value of history; and accordingly the chief basis for the universal and excessive interest we take in it is that it is of personal concern to the human race.

It is only through history that a people becomes fully conscious of itself. This is why history should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, and is to the human race what the reflective, coherent, rationally conditioned consciousness is to the individual, the absence of which imprisons animals in the narrow, intuitive present. This is why every gap in history is like a gap in the recollecting self-consciousness of a human being; and we stand before a memorial of prehistoric antiquity that has outlived information about itself, such as, e.g., the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Yucatan, just as insensibly and naïvely as an animal in the presence of a human action in which it is involved as a servant, or just as a person before his own old secret code to which he has forgotten the key, or indeed just as a sleepwalker who discovers in the morning what he has done during the night. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. This is the true value of history; and accordingly the chief basis for the universal and excessive interest we take in it is that it is of personal concern to the human race.

It is only through history that a people becomes fully conscious of itself. This is why history should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, and is to the human race what the reflective, coherent, rationally conditioned consciousness is to the individual, the absence of which imprisons animals in the narrow, intuitive present. This is why every gap in history is like a gap in the recollecting self-consciousness of a human being; and we stand before a memorial of prehistoric antiquity that has outlived information about itself, such as, e.g., the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Yucatan, just as insensibly and naïvely as an animal in the presence of a human action in which it is involved as a servant, or just as a person before his own old secret code to which he has forgotten the key, or indeed just as a sleepwalker who discovers in the morning what he has done during the night. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. This is the true value of history; and accordingly the chief basis for the universal and excessive interest we take in it is that it is of personal concern to the human race.

I can’t believe that he’s holding me up like this. It’s like a standing 69—except there is absolutely no way I have the core strength to suck him off while hanging upside down like Spiderman. Not that he seems bothered. He’s fully occupied where he is.

Government service thus promises multiple payoffs. It would help to challenge the inaccurate and counterproductive perception that government is remote and unresponsive or, worse yet, an occupied foreign power. It is thus fully consistent with the obligation to get involved. The experience might just encourage some of our most talented young people to serve in the government or even to make it their career. If so, we would all benefit.

If each of us is the center of his or her existence, Orest seemed intent on enlarging the center, making it everything. Is this what athletes do, occupy the self more fully? It’s possible we envy them for a prowess that has little to do with sport. In building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, the dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying.

If each of us is the center of his or her existence, Orest seemed intent on enlarging the center, making it everything. Is this what athletes do, occupy the self more fully? It’s possible we envy them for a prowess that has little to do with sport. In building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, they dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying.

What is distinctive about the theistic view of the nature of things is not only that theists assert the existence of God and that they take the world to be fully intelligible only if understood in its relationship to God, but that they conceive of human beings as occupying a unique position in the order of things. Human beings are on the one hand bodies, having a physical, chemical, and animal nature, inhabiting an immediate environment, located at particular points in space and time. Yet on the other hand their understanding extends indefinitely beyond their immediate environment to what is remote in space and time and to the abstract and the universal as well as to the concrete and the particular. And their aspiration to complete and perfect their understanding of the order of things and of their place within in is matched by an aspiration to achieve a relationship with a fully and finally adequate object of desire, and end to which, if they understand themselves rightly (on the theistic view), they are directed by their nature. Yet human beings are not animal bodies plus something else. The human being is a unity, not a duality.

Everything man achieves begins with definiteness of purpose. Name a single instance, if you can, where a man has achieved any form of success without a definite motive, based on a definite purpose, carried out through a definite plan. But, you must remember that there is one more factor that must be considered in connection with definiteness of purpose. The purpose must be expressed in terms of intense action. Here is where the power of the emotions gives an account of itself. The emotional feeling of desire for the attainment of a definite purpose is the power that gives life and action to that purpose, and influences one to move on his own initiative. To ensure satisfactory results, one’s definite purpose should be given obsessional proportions. It should be backed by a burning desire for its attainment. Desires of this sort take full possession of one’s mind and keep it so fully occupied that it has no inclination or opportunity to entertain stray thoughts released by the minds of others.

If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.

According to the United Nations, there are 593 checkpoints and roadblocks across the West Bank impeding Palestinian movement. Of the more than 30 checkpoints that connect Israel with the West Bank and Gaza, more than half have been fully or partially privatized since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005. Some of the Israeli security corporations involved in privatized security work are usually staffed with veterans of the Israeli military. They also operate in West Bank settlements. Private companies include G1 Secure Solutions, Malam Team, Modi’in Ezrachi, and T&M Israel, which are hired by settler organizations.33 It is an effective model that benefits a range of Israeli players and erases any distinction between Israel proper and the occupied territories.

The Palestine laboratory can only thrive if enough nations believe in its underlying premise. It’s unsurprising that repressive regimes want to mimic Israeli repression, using Israeli technology to oppress their own unwanted or restive populations, but the Jewish state craves Western approval to fully realize its diplomatic and military potential. Aside from the US, Germany is arguably the greatest prize of all. Israel helped Germany rehabilitate its shattered image after World War II, while Berlin grants legitimacy to a country that brutally occupies the Palestinians (a nonpeople in the eyes of successive German governments). Germany purchasing increasing amounts of Israeli defense equipment is just one way it can atone for its historical guilt. When Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas visited Germany in August 2022 and spoke alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he accused Israel of committing “fifty Holocausts” against his people. The German establishment expressed outrage over the comment but the hypocrisy was clear; the Palestinians are under endless occupation but it’s only they who have to apologize. Germany has taken its love affair with Israel to dangerous, even absurd heights. The Deutsche Welle media organization updated its code of conduct in 2022 and insisted that all employees, when speaking on behalf of the organization or even in a personal capacity, must “support the right of Israel to exist” or face punishment, likely dismissal.40 After the Israeli military shot dead Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank city of Jenin in May 2022, German police banned a peaceful public vigil in Berlin because of what German authorities called an “immediate risk” of violence and anti-Semitic messaging. When protestors ignored this request and took to the streets to both commemorate Abu Akleh and Nakba Day, police arrested 170 people for expressing solidarity with Palestine. A Palestinian in Germany, Majed Abusalama, tweeted that he had been assaulted by the police. “I just left the hospital an hour ago with an arm sling to hold my shoulder after the German racist police almost dislocated my shoulder with their violent actions to us wearing Palestine Kuffiyas,” he wrote. “This is the new wave of anti-Palestinian everything in Berlin. Insane, right?” This followed years of anti-Palestinian incitement by the German political elite, from the German Parliament designating the BDS movement as anti-Semitic in 2019 to pressuring German institutions to refuse any space for pro-Palestinian voices, Jewish or Palestinian.41 The Palestinian intellectual Tariq Baconi gave a powerful speech in Berlin in May 2022 at a conference titled “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” He noted that “states like Germany have once again accepted Palestinians as collateral. Their oppression and colonization is a fair price to pay to allow Germany to atone for its past crimes.

Is that part of what we are seeing? Are increasingly violent conspiracy theorists in the Mirror World afraid of being rounded up, treated as second-class, occupied, and culled because on some level they know that these are the genocidal behaviors that created and sustain their relative but increasingly precarious privileges? Are they terrified that if the truths of the Shadow Lands—past, present, and future—are ever fully revealed and reckoned with, then it can only result in a dramatic role reversal, with the victims becoming the victimizers?

In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it.

In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior.

In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior. They “felt they had more time available . . . and were less impatient . . . more willing to volunteer their time to help others . . . preferred experiences over material products . . . and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.” A quiet parietal lobe promotes empathy, compassion, relaxation, appreciation, connectedness, and self-esteem.

Mrs. Barton asked her about the new litter, and whether she had sold all her last litter but one, but Sally gave such stupid answers that Mrs. Barton came to the conclusion she was thinking of mating Chloe again, a business which always occupied Sally’s mind very fully, as the lurcher did not see eye to eye with her mistress about husbands, preferring natural worth to Norman blood.

Chicago in 1919 spiraled into racial fury, provoking questions about policing, racism, and justice. A century later, those questions have yet to be fully answered.

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

By now night had fully occupied the sky, which was splattered with stars that seemed merely a few feet away. "I can see why religions are born in the desert," Henry said. "Yes, we have this problem," Majid said. "God is always on top of us.

To solve the inability of middle-class renters to purchase single-family homes for the first time, Congress and President Roosevelt created the Federal Housing Administration in 1934. The FHA insured bank mortgages that covered 80 percent of purchase prices, had terms of twenty years, and were fully amortized. To be eligible for such insurance, the FHA insisted on doing its own appraisal of the property to make certain that the loan had a low risk of default. Because the FHA's appraisal standards included a whites-only requirement, racial segregation now became an official requirement of the federal mortgage insurance program. The FHA judged that properties would probably be too risky for insurance if they were in racially mixed neighborhoods or even in white neighborhoods near black ones that might possibly integrate in the future. When a bank applied to the FHA for insurance on a prospective loan, the agency conducted a property appraisal, which was also likely performed by a local real estate agent hired by the agency. as the volume of applications increased, the agency hired its own appraisers, usually from the ranks of the private real estate agents who had previously been working as contractors for the FHA. To guide their work, the FHA provided them with an Underwriting Manual. The first, issued in 1935, gave this instruction: 'If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values.' Appraisers were told to give higher ratings where '[p]rotection against some adverse influences is obtained,' and that '[i]mportant among adverse influences . . . are infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.' The manual concluded that '[a]ll mortgages on properties protected against [such] unfavorable influences, to the extent such protection is possible, will obtain a high rating.' The FHA discouraged banks from making any loans at all in urban neighborhoods rather than newly built suburbs; according to the Underwriting Manual, 'older properties . . . have a tendency to accelerate the rate of transition to lower class occupancy.' The FHA favored mortgages in areas where boulevards or highways served to separate African American families from whites, stating that '[n]atural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences, . . . includ[ing] prevention of the infiltration of . . . lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.

God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.

Intellectual and cultural preparation may have made it possible to imagine fascism, but they did not thereby bring fascism about. Even for Sternhell, the ideology of fascism, fully formed, he believes, by 1912, did not shape fascist regimes all by itself. Fascist regimes had to be woven into societies by choices and actions. The intellectual and cultural critics who are sometimes considered the creators of fascism actually account better for the space made available for fascism than they do fascism itself. They explain most directly the weakness of fascism’s rivals, the previously ascendant bourgeois liberalism and the powerful reformist socialism of pre-1914 Europe. Concrete choices and actions were necessary before fascism could come into being, exploit that weakness, and occupy those spaces.

[God] occupies all the difficult spaces humanity has endured. While I can't fully reconcile the problem of evil and why so many people have been sexually violated over the centuries, I do know this: Jesus has wept alongside me, and he weeps for his church to rise up valiantly and love the least, the last, and the lost. This is our WE TOO moment, to purposefully suffer alongside the sexually broken.

In order to achieve flow, that thing has to be CHALLENGING enough to occupy your whole brain. All of your capacities. So you're fully immersed in that activity. [...] A lot of people are doing things that they don't enjoy in the moment and they're not finding it challenging or fulfilling in a good way. It might be so challenging or so hard that they give up, or they don't know what they're doing, or they're just bored [because it's not challenging enough]. Those are all going to be unfulfilling achievement activities. [...] In order to get that intrinsic enjoyment of the activity it has to have, built into it, baked into the activity... it has to be challenging enough. [...] Growing itself is enjoyable [because it's challenging].

Knowing means understanding there are things we can never know All knowledge is limited by positionality and governed by relationships The world cannot be fully understood by life in human shapes because humans cannot occupy the spaces held by all other life or to see to the end of connections Every pebble contains the hill but the hill is greater than all the pebbles This means it is important to be cautious about drawing conclusions or setting yourself on a course of action Important to be open to changing to shifting in response to shifts in Country Important to maintain constant awareness of all the voices of the life around you and what they're trying to tell you One of my grandfathers called this learning to read the signs

I’m convinced half my laugh lines will be because of him. After Mama died, I thought the closest I would come to joy would be the absence of pain. I was ready to settle for that. To just not feel that black hurt that hovered over every part of my life and seemed to occupy my very soul. Rhyson has taught me that joy has its own space. It is not the absence of anything, but its own presence. Its own entity. It fully inhabits us if we let it, and I have it with him.