“
When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.
”
”
Tom Robbins
“
If your love for another person doesn’t include loving yourself then your love is incomplete.
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
I always knew there was no one who is going to accept my flaws and understand my brokenness.And i knew it very well that nobody would hold my hand when the wind of darkness overcome my life so i just pushed them,i pushed them all away.
”
”
Carl W. Bazil
“
I've pursued dreams and achieved them, but I don't think anybody should think their life is incomplete if they don't follow some dream. Happiness doesn't come from achievements, or money, or any sort of treasure. Happiness is a frame of mind, not a destination. It's appreciating what you've got and building relationships with those around you.
”
”
Janette Rallison
“
Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world ... That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us.
”
”
N.T. Wright (Simply Christian)
“
To see and appreciate the soul of others with whom you are in a relationship is a higher state of awareness. To see only their outer characteristics provides a limited and incomplete perspective. Their current personality, just like their current physical body, is a temporary manifestation. They have had many bodies and many personalities but only one enduring soul, only one continuous spiritual essence. See this essence and you will see the real person.
”
”
Brian L. Weiss (Miracles Happen: The Transformational Healing Power of Past-Life Memories)
“
I realized that I'm lonely without her and she's incomplete without me. There will be no end to our love story..
”
”
Taimoor Madni
“
An incomplete list:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.
No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.
No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
“
A relationship is not meant to be the joining at the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God.
”
”
Marianne Williamson (Return to Love)
“
...mismatched attachment styles can lead to a great deal of unhappiness in marriage, even for people who love each other greatly. If you are in such a relationship, don't feel guilty for feeling incomplete or unsatisfied. After all, your most basic needs often go unmet, and love alone isn't enough to make the relationship work.
”
”
Amir Levine (Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love)
“
A great many people do believe that to be single is to be somehow incomplete and that they need to find the other half. [...] We believe, on the other hand, that the fundamental sexual unit is one person. Adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun and companionable, but does not complete anybody.
”
”
Dossie Easton (The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love)
“
Relationships aren't two incomplete halves coming together to make a whole. Rather, it's two complete wholes coming together to create something greater than their sum.
”
”
Andrew Daniel
“
When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on—series polygamy—until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Still Life With Woodpecker)
“
I can not be a part of myself -
for everything that creates my soul
incompletes my heart.
”
”
Laura Chouette
“
Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
When we feel incomplete, we might search for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we may blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment.
”
”
Tom Robbins
“
No one completes us. No one is our missing piece, our other half. We complete ourselves or fail to. No one else could be successful in that role because each of us is utterly unique. There isn’t another “you” anywhere on this planet. If you somehow feel incomplete, the answers aren’t out there somewhere. The answers are in the room. You have them.
”
”
Susan Scott (Fierce Love: Creating a Love that Lasts---One Conversation at a Time)
“
It is always appropriate to ask for love, but to ask any other adult (including our parents in the present) to meet our primal needs is unfair and unrealistic. Most of us emerge from childhood with conscious and unconscious primal wounds and emotional unfinished business. What we leave incomplete we are doomed to repeat. The untreated traumas of childhood become the frustrating dramas of adulthood. Our fantasy of the “perfect partner,” or our disappointments in a relationship we do not change or leave, or the dramas that keep arising in our relationships reveal our unique unmet primal wounds and needs. We try so hard to get from others what once we missed. What was missed can never be made up for, only mourned and let go of. Only then are we able to relate to adults as adults.
”
”
David Richo (How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly)
“
The enormous difference between the relationships you need, and the one you deeply want. The need is created out of an accumulation of negativities, planted by traumatic experiences: fear, doubts, anxiety, dependence, weakness in certain realms, inadequacy, incompleteness. A certain relationship can remove the fear, calm anxiety, supply a certain completion, replace a loss, fulfill an organic insufficiency, lull an insecurity, supply a substitute love.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944)
“
as architect of choosing...
choose. to. live.
awakened. entirely. wholly.
wildly powerful,
deeply masterful,
authentically creative,
thriving.
this is not a hoped-for possible self.
[reminder: this is an immutable Law of your being]
needing not to learn the skill of being whole,
the antidote is to unlearn the habit of living incompletely
here’s the practice:
‘know thyself‘—its about spirit
righteousness is underrated
elevate connection with the changeless essence
seek similitude with the will of Source and will of self
'choose thyself'—its about substance
sacred. sagacious. spacious.
in thought, word and deed—
intend to: honor virtue. innovate enthusiastically. master integrity.
'become who you are'—its about style
a human, being an entrepreneur of life experiences
a human, being a purveyor of preferences
being-well with the known experience of soul, in service
your relationship with insecurities, contradictions, & failures?
obstacles or...invitations to grow?
[mindset forms manifestation]
emotions are messengers are gifts
data for discernment: dare to deconstruct them your fears
a belief renovation: fear.less.
& aspire towards ascendance, anyway
support your shine
lean into the Light
be.come.
incandescent
as architect of choosing, I choose...
to disrupt the energy of the status quo,
to eclipse the realms of ordinary,
& to live--a life-well lived.
w/ spirit, substance & style.
”
”
LaShaun Middlebrooks Collier
“
The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
“
Time has a savage way of gnawing away at life, leaving it transitory and incomplete, so that life in its fullness can never be enjoyed by any temporal being.
”
”
William Lane Craig (Time And Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship To Time)
“
Loving people are compassionate towards others. However, if that compassion doesn’t start at home and doesn’t include self-forgiveness, it is incomplete and lopsided.
”
”
Annette Vaillancourt (How to Manifest Your SoulMate with EFT: Relationship as a Spiritual Path)
“
Family isn’t just a social construct, you know darling, it is formed in the heart. It’s instinctive, this feeling of belonging to someone whose absence keeps you incomplete. . .
”
”
Franciska Soares (They Whisper in my Blood)
“
As we read the Bible, we see that God's role is not that of a scientist managing robots. Neither is God a frustrated artist who left an incomplete work and chose to start an altogether different one. Throughout the biblical testimonies, God is an involved character who loves relentlessly, judges fairly, and joins wholly in ongoing relationship with creation. The Bible itself has a "to be continued" ending, and God is to be understood as continuing in the action of the drama. God still partners with people today in an ongoing story of renewal.
”
”
Sara Gaston Barton
“
Men and women are born incomplete, and need each other to become whole. They are born with complimentary qualities and characteristics. Each one needs the other to fulfill his or her human destiny.
”
”
Brian Tracy (Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed)
“
In true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world. In fact, we might define true community as that place where the person you least want to live with lives….
Community will teach us that our grip on truth is fragile and incomplete, that we need many ears o hear the fullness of God’s word for our lives. And the disappointments of community life can be transformed by our discovery that the only dependable power for life lies beyond all human structures and relationships.
In this religious grounding lies the only real hedge against the risk of disappointment in seeking community. That risk can be borne only if it is not community one seeks, but truth, light, God. Do not commit yourself to community, but commit yourself to God…In that commitment you will find yourself drawn into community.
Parker Palmer, A Place Called Community, 1977
”
”
Parker J. Palmer
“
The most important relationship in the world is the bond that you share with your own self. Are you comfortable being you or you’re always trying to be someone else? Are you able to live up to your own expectations or often end up feeling inadequate and incomplete? Are you being true to yourself and your dreams or you’re trying to live someone else’s definition of success? Those are some vital questions you’d have to answer to determine how you feel about yourself and your life. We often see the world as a reflection of who we are. When you’re cool and tranquil on the inside, you will echo the same peace in all your relationships. When you’re all messed up inside, your actions and reactions too will resonate your inner chaos. To have beautiful and worthy relationships, begin by having an honest and fulfilling relationship with yourself.
”
”
Manprit Kaur
“
THE RIVER OF A WOMAN
Man is like a desert without the rain of a woman.
Nothing can be born and grown without her nourishment.
She is a life-giving river that gives and loves without holding anything back.
And without her water, man would walk around aimlessly,
feeling incomplete and hollow like an empty well.
The longer he roams, the deeper the hole within his soul expands,
growing bigger and bigger like a barren tree whose branches resemble the cracks on hard, dry soil.
And he shall continue to feel incomplete and malnourished,
until – he encounters a godly woman, to show him life
and quench his thirst.
”
”
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
Sometimes in life, you lose someone- someone you
loved but couldn't get. Then you look up at the stars,
one of which you think is that person, and wish that
someday, they come back, and you can continue what
was left incomplete, live the life you always dreamed of.
What if a miracle occurs, and the person reappears in
your life? What would you do?
”
”
Pankaj Giri (The Unforgettable Woman)
“
When we feel incomplete, lonely and disconnected from ourselves, the ideal of true love becomes a beacon of hope promising to save us. Soon we start sincerely believing that our beloved will “complete us,” and thus make our lives meaningful again. Unfortunately, such a myth is destructive to our mental, emotional, and psychological well-being in the long term.
”
”
Mateo Sol (Twin Flames and Soul Mates: How to Find, Create, and Sustain Awakened Relationships)
“
Having seen my love now / and said farewell / I know how very shallow my heart was of old / as if I had never before known love,’” Tokai intoned. “Gonchunagon Atsutada’s poem,” I said. I had no idea why I remembered this.
“In college,” he said, “they taught us that ‘seen’ meant a lover’s tryst, including a physical relationship. At the time it didn’t mean much, but now, at this age, I’ve finally experienced what the poet felt. The deep sense of loss after you’ve met the woman you love, have made love, then said goodbye. Like you’re suffocating. The same emotion hasn’t changed at all in a thousand years. I’ve never had this feeling up till now, and it makes me realize how incomplete I’ve been, as a person. I was a little late in noticing this, though.
”
”
Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women)
“
Love is intimacy, Eli. Love is feeling protected, trusted, secure with yourself. Love is feeling like you’re home. Like there is nowhere else you want to be than in your person’s arms. Love is feeling this unbridled connection with another human, a connection so strong that when they’re not around, you feel . . . empty, incomplete. And love grows with intensity as your relationship grows. It starts small, like this tiny kernel needling at your back, bringing awareness to your brain that something is taking over and that an emotion is growing inside you. And as time passes, that kernel blooms into something bigger, something that eclipses your heart and takes up room in your chest, so when you see your person, all you can do is let out a deep breath of relief because they’re there. With you. For you. And if that person is the right person, if they’re truly the match to your soul, then they will make sure that nothing bad ever happens to you. That no matter what life throws at you—death, joy, heartache—they will be there, by your side, holding your hand, and reminding you that despite what you might be going through, there is always a home in their arms.
”
”
Meghan Quinn (Those Three Little Words (The Vancouver Agitators, #2))
“
Paul DiMaggio (1997) has looked at the interaction between cognition and social life. He notes that under everyday circumstances, people organize information via automatic cognition, using "culturally available schemata - knowledge structures that represent objects of events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information".
”
”
Wendy Griswold (Cultures and Societies in a Changing World (Sociology for a New Century Series))
“
I cannot accept his death. It will never heal. Because it was an incomplete, an aborted, an unfulfillable relationship. One can accept death when it comes as a culmination, a natural death. But something here, this failure, was like an artificial surgery. Amputation, not natural death.
What I cannot bear is that to survive the destructiveness of others, we rebel, strike out, harm them, turn away. I wish I had been a saint.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955)
“
It is recognised now that Freud never gave proper attention, even in man, to growth of the ego or self: 'the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment'. Analysts who have freed themselves from Freud's bias and joined other behavioural scientists in studying the human need, and that interference with it, in any dimension, is the source of psychic trouble. The sexual is only one dimension of the human potential. Freud saw women only in terms of their sexual relationship with men. But in all those women in whom he saw sexual problems, there must have been very severe problems of blocked growth, growth short of full human identity -- an immature, incomplete self. Society as it was then, by explicit denial of education and independence, prevented women from realising their full potential, or from attaining those interests and ideals that might stimulated their growth. Freud reported these deficiencies, but could only explain them as the toll of 'penis envy'. He saw that women who secretly hungered to be man's equal would not enjoy being his object; and in this, he seemed to be describing a fact. But when he dismissed woman's yearning for equality as 'penis envy', was he not merely stating his own view that woman could never really be man's equal, any more than she could wear his penis?
”
”
Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)
“
The key to finding a mate who can fulfill those needs is to first fully acknowledge your need for intimacy, availability, and security in a relationship - and to believe that they are legitimate. They aren't good or bad, they are simply your needs. Don't let people make you feel guilty for acting "needy" or dependent." Don't be ashamed of feeling incomplete when you're not in a relationship, or for wanting to be close to your partner and to depend on him.
”
”
Amir Levine & Rachel S.F. Heller
“
And it's a case in point of the fact that these traditions—the mythology, the lore—are not being gone to as some kind of fixed, given entity that one then has to have a subservient relationship to. They are active and unfinished; they are subject to change; they are themselves in the process of transformation and transition. They speak to an open and open-ended possibility that the poetics that I've been involved in very much speaks to as well. To see cracks and incompleteness as not only inevitable but opportune.
”
”
Nathaniel Mackey
“
This means that if we are able to make sense of absential relationships, it won’t merely illuminate certain everyday mysteries. If the example of zero is any hint, even just glimpsing the outlines of a systematic way to integrate these phenomena into the natural sciences could light the path to whole new fields of inquiry. And making scientific sense of these most personal of nature’s properties, without trashing them, has the potential to transform the way we personally see ourselves within the scheme of things. The
”
”
Terrence W. Deacon (Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter)
“
In the nineteenth century, a young woman named Ellen Richards, trained in chemistry and unable to work in her field, announced the foundation of a new science she called oekology, or the science of living. This was the discipline later called domestic science or home economics, involving the effort to professionalize and dignify the work of the housewife by drawing on science and technology.* A single Greek root, oekos, has wandered through changing conceptions of human living, as well as changing fashions in spelling, producing the contemporary fields of economics and ecology, which frequently seem to be at odds. It also offers the less well-known term ekistics, coined by the city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to refer to a science of human settlement that would include the architectural creation of human spaces, their social and economic integration, and their relationship with the natural environment. Each of these latter-day coinages represents an incomplete view, but together they represent a view that includes biology and architecture, kitchens and stock exchanges, the growth of meadows and children as well as the GNP.
”
”
Mary Catherine Bateson (Composing a Life)
“
A Christian who met a total stranger who also followed Christ would have an instant bond: We belong to the same spiritual family. Just like Michelle, the girl on the plane, felt an immediate bond with me because of Christ, so should we with other Christians. When we as believers are committed to Christian fellowship, we are known and needed. We each have certain gifts and roles to play. Without us, the church is incomplete. When we use our God-given gifts in relationship with fellow Christians, we experience the deep satisfaction of being a part of the larger body of Christ.
”
”
Craig Groeschel (The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living As If He Doesn't Exist)
“
AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
“
But in modern culture, there’s a contradiction built into the social remedies to stress. On the one hand, being around other people is often a core part of allowing our stress response to complete, particularly for women. On the other hand, we put the brakes on, self-inhibiting our stress response, in order to stay socially appropriate and not make other people uncomfortable. We hold on to our incomplete stress response in order to access the security of being with our tribe. And, of course, this contradiction is even more pronounced for women, who are the culturally sanctioned “managers of relationships.”32
”
”
Emily Nagoski (Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life)
“
Romantic love has highs and lows and lots of rare emotions and dangerous sensations but it bores easily and has no friendship in it, and often when it's over, it is as if a tornado passed. It's a very expensive form of recreation, a theatre play with daydreams, a frolic of your own in which you are the main event.
Human love is based in every day, not fantasies or illusions. It acknowledges the other person as a separate person and even loves them for their imperfections, for their vulnerabilities and their incompleteness, and allows them to change and to grow. It seeks to honour, not to use, to empower, not to overpower, and when it fails, it just gets cranky, it does not blow a fuse.
”
”
Merle Shain (Courage My Love)
“
Every incomplete promise, commitment, and agreement saps your strength because it blocks your momentum and inhibits your ability to move forward. Incomplete tasks keep calling you back to the past to take care of them. So think about what you can complete today. Additionally, when you’re creating an environment to support your goals, remember that you get in life what you tolerate. This is true in every area of your life—particularly within your relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. What you have decided to tolerate is also reflected in the situations and circumstances of your life right now. Put another way, you will get in life what you accept and expect you are worthy of.
”
”
Darren Hardy (The Compound Effect)
“
At times I think of the subject matter of the book to be written as of something that already exists: thoughts already thought, dialogue already spoken, stories already happened, places and settings seen; the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing. At other times, on the contrary, I seem to understand that between the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of complementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.
”
”
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)
“
WHEN WE shift our attention from the mechanics and structures of a relationship to its soul, a number of changes occur. We no longer have to carry the weight of guilt about not having done relationship properly, we can give ourselves a pardon for having engaged in folly in our younger days, we can feel the sting of endings without bearing a neurotic degree of responsibility, and we can enjoy the pleasures that a lifetime of relationships has given us. We can end the impossible quest for the perfect structure—the happy family, the completely satisfying marriage, the unbroken friendship. We can find some purpose in the failures, the intimacies that never got off the ground, the possibilities that never took flesh. The soul does not share the spirit’s love of perfection and wholeness, but finds value in fragmentation, incompleteness, and unfulfilled promise.
”
”
Thomas Moore (Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relat)
“
WHY PARADIGMS MATTER
Ideas drive results. People's beliefs drive their actions.
Actions that stem from a simple, complete and accurate paradigm result in personal fulfillment, harmonious relationships, and economic prosperity.
Actions based on false, incomplete and inaccurate paradigms, however well intended or passionately defended, are the cause of widespread misery, suffering and deprivation.
As detailed in Rethinking Survival: Getting to the Positive Paradigm of Change, a fatal information deficit explains the worldwide leadership deficit and related budget deficits.
In a dangerous world where psychological and economic warfare compete with religious extremism and terrorism to undo thousands of years of incremental human progress, a healing balance is urgently needed.
Restoring a simple, complete and accurate paradigm of leadership and relationships now could make the difference between human survival on the one hand, and the extinction of the human race (or the end of civilization as we know it), on the other. p. 7.
”
”
Patricia E. West (The Positive Paradigm Handbook: Make Yourself Whole Using the Wheel of Change)
“
DAY 10 Finding Contentment But godliness with contentment is a great gain. 1 Timothy 6:6 HCSB Everywhere we turn, or so it seems, the world promises us contentment and happiness. We are bombarded by messages offering us the “good life” if only we will purchase products and services that are designed to provide happiness, success, and contentment. But the contentment that the world offers is fleeting and incomplete. Thankfully, the contentment that God offers is all encompassing and everlasting. Happiness depends less upon our circumstances than upon our thoughts. When we turn our thoughts to God, to His gifts, and to His glorious creation, we experience the joy that God intends for His children. But, when we focus on the negative aspects of life—or when we disobey God’s commandments—we cause ourselves needless suffering. Do you sincerely want to be a contented Christian? Then set your mind and your heart upon God’s love and His grace. Seek first the salvation that is available through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and then claim the joy, the contentment, and the spiritual abundance that God offers His children. When you accept rather than fight your circumstances, even though you don’t understand them, you open your heart’s gate to God’s love, peace, joy, and contentment. Amy Carmichael Oh, what a happy soul I am, although I cannot see! I am resolved that in this world, contented I will be. Fanny Crosby If I could just hang in there, being faithful to my own tasks, God would make me joyful and content. The responsibility is mine, but the power is His. Peg Rankin The key to contentment is to consider. Consider who you are and be satisfied with that. Consider what you have and be satisfied with that. Consider what God’s doing and be satisfied with that. Luci Swindoll Jesus Christ is the One by Whom, for Whom, through Whom everything was made. Therefore, He knows what’s wrong in your life and how to fix it. Anne Graham Lotz God is everything that is good and comfortable for us. He is our clothing that for love wraps us, clasps us, and all surrounds us for tender love. Juliana of Norwich
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Freeman Smith (Fifty Shades of Grace: Devotions Celebrating God's Unlimited Gift)
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Like addiction itself, anxiety will always find a target, but exists independently of its targets. Only when we become aware of it does it wrap itself in identifiable colours. More often we repress it, bury it under ideas, identifications, deeds, beliefs and relationships. We build above it a mound of activities and attributes that we mistake for our true selves. We then expend our energies trying to convince the world that our self-made fiction is reality.
As genuine as our strengths and achievements may be, they cannot but feel hollow until we acknowledge the anxiety they cover up. Incompleteness is the baseline state of the addict. The addict believes — either with full awareness or unconsciously — that he is “not enough.” As he is, he is inadequate to face life’s demands or to present an acceptable face to the world. He is unable to tolerate his own emotions without artificial supports. He must escape the painful experience of the void within through any activity that fills his mind with even temporary purpose, be it work, gambling, shopping, eating or sexual seeking.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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If ... we hear ourselves speaking words that convey attunement to the process unfolding in this moment--a felt sense of receiving, cultivating, believing, supporting and trusting--we are more apt to be attending from the right with support from the left.
This way of experiencing may also be coupled with attention to felt sense, comfort with being rather than pressure to do, and a respect for the undulating rise and fall of healing that unfolds naturally in the space between.
When we are in this mode, we have a tendency to speak more tentatively and to check in with our relational partner about how he or she is receiving what we are offering.
This past part is particularly important because it reflects our growing felt-sense awareness that the system of the person we are helping knows more about what needs to happen next than we do.
In addition to the humility and respect this engenders, we may also notice that instead of wanting to get rid of some state, we are more apt to acknowledge its meaningfulness and be present to it just as it is.
Listening in this way, the so-called negative state may reveal itself as telling an important truth and become an opening toward healing.
We may also be aware of the limitation and incompleteness of words, leading us to honor silence as well.
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Bonnie Badenoch (The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
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Question : I FEEL I HAVE SURRENDERED TO SAI BABA, BUT STILL I FEEL THE NECESSITY OF WORKING WITH ANOTHER TEACHER OR GURU. IS THIS POSSIBLE?
Osho : The first thing is to remember that the master really does not work. He is there, his presence works, but the presence can work only if you have trust. If you don't have trust, nothing can be done.
So really, if you feel you have surrendered to Sai Baba, what is the need to come to me? If the surrender has really happened, then asking for another master is futile. I doubt your surrender, your trust, because when trust has happened nothing more is needed.
It is good if you feel an intimate closeness with Sai Baba..But then don't wander here and there, then don't go to anybody else, because this is impossible.
If you have surrendered then move to Sai Baba, open yourself to him so that he can work; then don't go seeking here and there.
I am ready to help, but for that you will have to be receptive.
If you trust me, something becomes possible.
You cannot be forced into nirvana, you can only flow into it.
There are many who go on wandering from one master to another. The total result may be simply confusion, because each master works in his own way, he has his own methods, and you go on accumulating information. That information is bound to be contradictory. Then you will get confused, you may even go insane.
It is better to stick to one master and give your heart totally to him. If then nothing happens, move. But be finished with that master, don't be in an incomplete relationship.
First go back to Sai Baba, be finished with him. Either you are transformed, then there is no need to find anyone; or Sai Baba is not your master, it is proved. Then come to me.
And the same applies to my own disciples. If you are here with me, be finished with me. Be totally with me, so that either the mutation happens and then there is no need to find anyone or to go anywhere, or you come to realize, "This man is not for me." Then you can leave me totally, then you can move, then somewhere else.... But being here with me halfheartedly and then moving to someone else halfheartedly will not do. Rather, it may be dangerous. You may become so split, so divided, with so many voices in you, that you may become a crowd.
Patience is needed. If you are totally devoted to one master the thing is bound to happen. And I would say that even if the master is not true, the thing can happen if you are totally devoted. Even if the master is false the happening is possible if you are totally devoted - because the happening doesn't happen through the master, it happens through total devotion.
So even a dead master, or a master who has never been, just the name, will do. The real alchemy, the science of mutation, is within you. The master is at the most just a catalytic agent, nothing more.
Go back to your own master and be with him. And don't try to judge him; you have got no way to judge anybody. All that you can do is give your total heart to him. And what have you got to lose?
So why be so afraid? You have got nothing to lose, so why be so untrusting? Give yourself totally.
Many times it has happened that a disciple was transformed through a master who was not a master at all. And many times the contrary has also happened: the master was true but the disciple was not transformed. The ultimate thing depends on you, not on me. You are the deciding factor.
So wherever you go, make it a law: go with your total heart. Otherwise you will move with empty hands everywhere. And the more you move, the more you go to this master and that, the more there will be confusion, suffering, and finally you may decide that there exists no one who can transform you. Or, you may come to conclude that there is nothing like transformation, this is all hocus-pocus.
And the reason will only be this - that you were never anywhere with your total heart.
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Osho (Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi- Discourses on Akshyupanishad)
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Every human being with normal mental and emotional faculties longs for more. People typically associate their longing for more with a desire to somehow improve their lot in life—to get a better job, a nicer house, a more loving spouse, become famous, and so on. If only this, that, or some other thing were different, we say to ourselves, then we’d feel complete and happy. Some chase this “if only” all their lives. For others, the “if only” turns into resentment when they lose hope of ever acquiring completeness. But even if we get lucky and acquire our “if only,” it never quite satisfies. Acquiring the better job, the bigger house, the new spouse, or world fame we longed for may provide a temporary sense of happiness and completeness, but it never lasts. Sooner or later, the hunger returns. The best word in any language that captures this vague, unquenchable yearning, according to C. S. Lewis and other writers, is the German word Sehnsucht (pronounced “zane-zookt”).[9] It’s an unusual word that is hard to translate, for it expresses a deep longing or craving for something that you can’t quite identify and that always feels just out of reach. Some have described Sehnsucht as a vague and bittersweet nostalgia and/or longing for a distant country, but one that cannot be found on earth. Others have described it as a quasi-mystical sense that we (and our present world) are incomplete, combined with an unattainable yearning for whatever it is that would complete it. Scientists have offered several different explanations for this puzzling phenomenon—puzzling, because it’s hard to understand how natural processes alone could have evolved beings that hunger for something nature itself doesn’t provide.[10] But this longing is not puzzling from a biblical perspective, for Scripture teaches us that humans and the entire creation are fallen and estranged from God. Lewis saw Sehnsucht as reflective of our “pilgrim status.” It indicates that we are not where we were meant to be, where we are destined to be; we are not home. Lewis once wrote to a friend that “our best havings are wantings,” for our “wantings” are reminders that humans are meant for a different and better state.[11] In another place he wrote: Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside is . . . the truest index of our real situation.[12] With Lewis, Christians have always identified this Sehnsucht that resides in the human heart as a yearning for God. As St. Augustine famously prayed, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”[13] In this light, we might think of Sehnsucht as a sort of homing device placed in us by our Creator to lead us into a passionate relationship with him.
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Gregory A. Boyd (Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty)
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Cultivate Spiritual Allies One of the most significant things you learn from the life of Paul is that the self-made man is incomplete. Paul believed that mature manhood was forged in the body of Christ In his letters, Paul talks often about the people he was serving and being served by in the body of Christ. As you live in the body of Christ, you should be intentional about cultivating at least three key relationships based on Paul’s example: 1. Paul: You need a mentor, a coach, or shepherd who is further along in their walk with Christ. You need the accountability and counsel of more mature men. Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done. Typically there’s more demand than supply for mentors. Some churches try to meet this need with complicated mentoring matchmaker type programs. Typically, you can find a mentor more naturally than that. Think of who is already in your life. Is there an elder, a pastor, a professor, a businessman, or other person that you already respect? Seek that man out; let him know that you respect the way he lives his life and ask if you can take him out for coffee or lunch to ask him some questions — and then see where it goes from there. Don’t be surprised if that one person isn’t able to mentor you in everything. While he may be a great spiritual mentor, you may need other mentors in the areas of marriage, fathering, money, and so on. 2. Timothy: You need to be a Paul to another man (or men). God calls us to make disciples (Matthew 28:19). The books of 1st and 2nd Timothy demonstrate some of the investment that Paul made in Timothy as a younger brother (and rising leader) in the faith. It’s your job to reproduce in others the things you learn from the Paul(s) in your life. This kind of relationship should also be organic. You don’t need to approach strangers to offer your mentoring services. As you lead and serve in your spheres of influence, you’ll attract other men who want your input. Don’t be surprised if they don’t quite know what to ask of you. One practical way to engage with someone who asks for your input is to suggest that they come up with three questions that you can answer over coffee or lunch and then see where it goes from there. 3. Barnabas: You need a go-to friend who is a peer. One of Paul’s most faithful ministry companions was named Barnabas. Acts 4:36 tells us that Barnabas’s name means “son of encouragement.” Have you found an encouraging companion in your walk with Christ? Don’t take that friendship for granted. Enjoy the blessing of friendship, of someone to walk through life with. Make it a priority to build each other up in the faith. Be a source of sharpening iron (Proverbs 27:17) and friendly wounds (Proverbs 27:6) for each other. But also look for ways to work together to be disruptive — in the good sense of that word. Challenge each other in breaking the patterns of the world around you in order to interrupt it with the Gospel. Consider all the risky situations Paul and Barnabas got themselves into and ask each other, “what are we doing that’s risky for the Gospel?
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Randy Stinson (A Guide To Biblical Manhood)
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Summing Up • An analysis of the form of moral logic underlying most traditionalist positions shows that what traditionalists find most fundamentally wrong with same-sex intimate relationships is that they violate divinely intended gender complementarity. • But “gender complementarity” is really more like a category under which a variety of forms of moral logic may appear. Some of these more specific forms, such as hierarchy, are not universally embraced among traditionalists as the deep meaning of gender complementarity. • The most widely embraced form of gender complementarity among traditionalists focuses on the anatomical or biological complementarity of male and female. The physical union of male and female in this view represents the overcoming of the incompleteness of the male on his own or the female on her own. • But this hypothesis raises a deeper question: Is anatomical or biological gender complementarity what Scripture assumes and teaches? The central issue here is the interpretation of the creation of woman in Genesis 2. • In response to a variety of traditionalist readings of Genesis 2, this chapter has argued the following countertheses: ° The original ʿadam of Genesis 1: 26–2: 18 is not a binary or sexually undifferentiated being that is divided into male and female in Genesis 2: 21. ° The focus in Genesis 2 is not on the complementarity of male and female but on the similarity of male and female. ° The fact that male and female are both created in the divine image (Gen. 1: 27) is intended to convey the value, dominion, and relationality that is shared by both men and women, but not the idea that the complementarity of the genders is somehow necessary to fully express or embody the divine image. ° The one-flesh union spoken of in Genesis 2: 24 connotes not physical complementarity but a kinship bond. • These countertheses demonstrate that Genesis 2 does not teach a normative form of gender complementarity, based on the biological differences between male and female. Therefore, this form of moral logic cannot be assumed as the basis for the negative treatment of same-sex relationships in biblical texts. Hence we need to look further to discern why Scripture says what it does about same-sex intimate relationships.
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James V. Brownson (Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships)
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That is the ultimate alternative: is the opposition between Loveand Law to be reduced to its “truth,” the opposition, internal to theLaw itself, between the determinate positive Law and the excessivesuperego injunction, the Law beyond every measure—that is to say,is the excess of Love with regard to the Law the form of appearanceof a superego Law, of a Law beyond any determinate law; or is theexcessive superego Law the way the dimension beyond the Law ap-pears withinthe domain of the Law, so that the crucial step to be ac-complished is the step (comparable to Nietzsche’s “High Noon”)from the excessive Law to Love, from the way Love appears withinthe domain of the Law to Love beyond the Law? Lacan himselfstruggled continuously with this same deeply Pauline problem: isthere love beyond Law? Paradoxically (in view of the fact that thenotion as unsurpassable Law is usually perceived as Jewish), in thevery last page of Four Fundamental Concepts,he identifies this stance oflove beyond Law as that of Spinoza, opposing it to the Kantian no-tion of moral Law as the ultimate horizon of our experience. InEthics of Psychoanalysis,Lacan deals extensively with the Pauline di-alectic of the Law and its transgression13—perhaps what we shoulddo, therefore, is read this Pauline dialectic together with its corol-lary, Saint Paul’s other paradigmatic passage, the one on love from 1Corinthians 13.
Crucial here is the clearly paradoxical place of Love with regard to All(to the completed series of knowledge or prophecies): first, SaintPaul claims that love is here even if we possess all of knowledge—then, in the second quoted paragraph, he claims that love is hereonly for incomplete beings, that is, beings who possess incompleteknowledge.When I “know fully . . . as I have been fully known,” willthere still be love? Although, in contrast to knowledge, “love neverends,” it is clearly only “now” (while I am still incomplete) that“faith, hope, and love abide.”
The only way out of this deadlock isto read the two inconsistent claims according to Lacan’s feminineformulas of sexuation:14even when it is “all” (complete, with no ex-ception), the field of knowledge remains, in a way, non-all, incom-plete—love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but preciselythat “nothing” which makes incomplete even the complete series/field of knowledge. In other words, the point of the claim that, evenif I were to possess all knowledge, without love, I would be nothing,is not simply that withlove, I am “something”—in love, I am also noth-ing,but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing par-adoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack.Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimatemystery of love, therefore, is that incompleteness is, in a way, higherthan completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking beingloves: we love because we do notknow all. On the other hand, evenif we were to know everything, love would, inexplicably, still behigher than completed knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement ofChristian is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to the place ofGod, that is, of ultimate perfection. That is the kernel of the Chris-tian experience. In the previous pagan attitude, imperfect earthlyphenomena can serve as signs of the unattainable divine perfection.In Christianity, on the contrary, it is physical (or mental) perfectionitself that is the sign of the imperfection (finitude, vulnerability, un-certainty) of you as the absolute person. becomes a sign of this spiritual dimension—not the sign of your“higher” spiritual perfection, but the sign of youas a finite, vulner-able person. Only in this way do we really break out of idolatry. Forthis reason, the properly Christian relationship between sex and loveis not the one between body and soul, but almost the opposite...
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ZIZEK
“
In linguistics, a hyponym is a word that is a more specific subset of a larger, more general word. The more general word is called a hypernym. Tequila is a hyponym of mezcal. Mezcal is the hypernym of tequila.8 In the abstract, that relationship reads like: All Xs are Ys; not all Ys are Xs. What it means here is that all tequilas are mezcal, but not all mezcals are tequila. HOPE YOU’RE NOT IN A RUSH Now, it’s true that many wines are aged for a number of years, and many of the best whiskies can be aged anywhere from six to twenty years before they’re released.
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Josh Clark (Stuff You Should Know: An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things)
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Is it not possible that conscious effort, forcefulness, and opposing action with the apparent natural world are all in fact natural parts of the natural world? In the context of Taoism, could working against the Dao merely be the Dao working against the Dao for the sake of its perpetuation? Perhaps a further step in the logical path of Taoism, and philosophies like it, involves an even greater surrender that doesn’t even permit one to choose or consider if they are surrendering or not. Rather, one is born into surrender. If in Taoism, the relationship of all things is a cooperative, unified whole, even when things appear in conflict, is not human and nature always in cooperation, even when they seem to oppose each other? If darkness creates light, silence creates sound, beauty creates ugliness, good creates bad, does not forcefulness create non-forcefulness? Does not man create nature? Does not consciousness create unconsciousness? Human is part and parcel of nature, and so, how could human act in any other way? How would manmade material or action ever not be natural? Of course, this is just one counter idea that stems from just one interpretation of an elusive mysterious Taoist idea. And to step back on it a little, there is no question that our conscious observations and logic do often fool us, and we are, in many cases, clearly deviating from what’s best when we force or strive for what we think is. Clearly, there are better ways for things to go, plenty of which would go better if we never got involved. Perhaps the only remaining questions are: when should we and when shouldn’t we? And how does one find out without screwing the whole thing up? Perhaps these questions miss the point. Perhaps the point ignores these questions. Of course, like all ideals of philosophy or religion, Taoism’s concepts are likely just that: ideals, ideals that are not without some level of contradiction or general incompleteness on their own. But regardless of this and the potential limits of its applicability, the concepts suggested by Taoism are nonetheless filled with rich insights that provide worthy useful counterweights to the more common, brutish way of mind and culture. The thinking that things must always be a different way, or must go one’s own way for it to be the right way, that there must always be some better ideal around the corner that isn’t or couldn’t be in this moment, right now; that one needs to seek and strive for what they already have and know.
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Robert Pantano
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THE EGO’S SEARCH FOR WHOLENESS Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult. As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you. Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.
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Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
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Zindagi ke kisse, chand lamhon mein rachay,
Aate hain log, rang bharne, phir chale jaate hain saath chhod ke.
Mulaqatein adhuri si, baatein teri yaadon mein khoyi,
Tanha safar, kyun lagta hai, kahani mein hai kuch khaas baat.
Tooti doriyan, rishton ke silsile mein chhupi hain,
Har musafir le kar aata hai, ek anokhi kahani, phir raahein hi bhatak jaati hain.
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Huzefa Nalkheda wala
“
When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on—series polygamy—until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter. Hey, that’s pretty good. If I had pencil and paper, I’d write that down.
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Tom Robbins (Still Life With Woodpecker)
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Love without promises is like a book without words—empty and incomplete.
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Cindy David (What it Means When I Say 'I Do')
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At times I think of the subject matter of the book to be written as of something that already exists: thoughts already thought, dialogue already spoken, stories already happened, places and settings seen; the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing. At other times, on the contrary, I seem to understand that between the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of complementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.
I see that one way or another I keep circling around the idea of an interdependence between the unwritten world and the book I should write. This is why, writing presents itself to me as an operation of such weight that I remain crushed by it.
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Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler)
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In grief, there is an element of inconsolability. In our needs, there is an
element of unsatisfiability. In the face of life’s most profound questions,
there is an unknowability. This fits with the work of Kurt Gödel, the
Czech mathematician, who confirmed the “incompleteness theorem,”
which states that in any mathematical system there are indeed
propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved. These natural
incompletions reflect the first noble truth of Buddhism about the
enduring and ineradicable unsatisfactoriness of all experience. This is not
only Buddha’s truth, it is the one that some of our children and punk
rockers also proclaim.
Yet there is a positive side. Inconsolability means we cannot forget but
always cherish those we loved. Unsatisfiability means we have a
motivation to transcend our immediate desires. Unknowability means we
grow in our sense of wonder and imagination. Indeed, answers close us,
but questions open us. In accepting the given of the first noble truth
without protest, blame, or recourse to an escape to which we can attach,
we win all the way around.
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David Richo (When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships)
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Instead, what I experienced was the core of the being I had become/am becoming in this incarnation. What I experienced convinced me that the circumstances of my life were filled with deliberate purpose and intent. I came away with a deep sense of being rooted in meaningful work and important relationships. I feel that I finally understand what I am about and where I am in my life. I feel grounded in a definite place, with definite people, at an early stage of a rich life. I am also taking away patience for my incompleteness. Everything I was seeing would be mine, but I had to be patient. There was no need to fight the pace of my unfolding. (S11)
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Christopher Martin Bache (LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven)
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There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth. The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.
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Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich)
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Power and control are an illusion, all we have are the relationship of measured things and incomplete descriptions.
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R. A. Delmonico
“
Knowing someone’s voice implies communion, communication, familiarity, and fellowship, in other words— relationship. We know Christ’s voice, because a relationship exists between us. He knows us, and we know Him. His perfect knowledge of us, however, precedes our incomplete knowledge of Him, and our knowledge flows from His.20
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James R. White (Drawn By The Father)
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Gratitude is incomplete without the act of giving thanks.
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Mensah Oteh
“
Gratitude must come from a place of true sincerity to be effective. Without sincerity, the experience is incomplete.
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Mensah Oteh
“
He is your sanctification. Any system that tries to draw your attention away from the person of Christ and onto your own efforts is antichrist in nature. Your union with God is not an incomplete relationship that comes progressively. Time is not the magic formula that makes you holy. Jesus’ sacrifice made you holy. Christ’s work was enough to purify you, spirit, soul and body.
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John Crowder (Mystical Union)
“
putting off. Feeling good is great, but there is a power to completion that goes beyond good feeling into the whole of life. What I’ve come to see is that the act of completing something, no matter how large or how small, puts you into harmony with the universe. If I say to you, “I’ll call you today,” I have created a new force in the universe, a new agreement about how things will be. If I then make good on my agreement and call you today, I line myself up in harmony with those forces. If I don’t call you today, I leave a loose end, an open circuit, an unresolved story line. By not calling you, I communicate something that affects my life and our relationship: my word is no good, and you are not worth my effort to keep my word. My experience has been that each incompletion saps my energy and clouds my relationship with the people on the other end. The act of completion restores my energy and clears the air that circulates through my relationships. Further, though, each act of completion celebrates our connection to the universe
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Gay Hendricks (Five Wishes: How Answering One Simple Question Can Make Your Dreams Come True)
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A whole person presents a completely different possibility in relationships than an incomplete person. A whole person can define needs, express feelings, and set limits. A whole person maintains a separate identity with boundaries rather than defenses. A boundary comes from an awareness of one’s distinctness from another. The ability to build one arises from finishing unfinished childhood agendas. Identifying the harm, feeling the suppressed feelings, and grieving the losses restore wholeness to the incomplete child living inside us. As this work is done, one’s capacity for intimacy expands.
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Anne Katherine (Boundaries Where You End And I Begin: How To Recognize And Set Healthy Boundaries)
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The Genesis text portrays marriage as a solution, not for “incompleteness,” but for aloneness (Gen. 2:18).
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James V. Brownson (Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships)
“
FINDING FULFILLMENT For You, O God, have tested us; You have refined us as silver is refined . . . we went through fire and through water; but You brought us out to rich fulfillment. Psalm 66:10–12 NKJV Everywhere we turn, or so it seems, the world promises fulfillment, contentment, and happiness. But the contentment that the world offers is fleeting and incomplete. Thankfully, the fulfillment that God offers is all encompassing and everlasting. Sometimes, amid the inevitable hustle and bustle of life-here-on-earth, we can forfeit—albeit temporarily—the joy of Christ as we wrestle with the challenges of daily living. Yet God’s Word is clear: fulfillment through Christ is available to all who seek it and claim it. Count yourself among that number. Seek first a personal, transforming relationship with Jesus, and then claim the joy, the fulfillment, and the spiritual abundance that the Shepherd offers His sheep. In serving we uncover the greatest fulfillment within and become a stellar example of a woman who knows and loves Jesus. Vonette Bright We are never more fulfilled than when our longing for God is met by His presence in our lives. Billy Graham A TIMELY TIP Want to increase your sense of fulfillment? Then strive to find God’s path for your life . . . and follow it.
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Freeman (Once A Day Everyday … For A Woman of Grace)
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The mind has a tendency to label everything as bad or a problem. If we wake up stiff in the morning, the mind calls that bad and then worries about getting older. If we find out we are being let go at our job, the mind immediately assumes the worst and worries about the future. Even if something good happens, the mind sees the possible downside or worries about losing what it has just gained. The mind sees its job as rejecting what is presently going on in order to bring about a better future. Its logic is that if we are happy now, we won’t do anything to make things better. So it looks for what's wrong with the way things are so that it can figure out what to do to fix or improve things. This keeps the mind very busy and leaves us with an ongoing sense of incompleteness and lack. Because there is always something going on that could be labeled bad, there is always something to fix or improve upon. As a result, we have an ever-expanding to-do list in our minds. We may feel the need to improve our diet, our appearance, our finances, our health, our relationships, our career.
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Nirmala (That Is That: Essays About True Nature)
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Bessie shifted with the passage of time, with the dial of a clock. I lay here wishing you were here, but you're not. The symbiosis of this relationship is incomplete. He stirred in his sleep, put his arm around her waist and breathed deeply in his sleep. She imagined that he was finally in all these weeks speaking to her, that recognition was there now - he was dead to her but not to another woman.
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Abigail George (Winter in Johannesburg)
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The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seek each other out: like attracted to like.
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William Boyd (Waiting for Sunrise)
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The object of relationship, the object of love, is not that somebody else will complete you, nobody can complete you, if you think that without marriage your life is incomplete you better wake up from slumber. Have you ever asked if Jesus or Paul had ever waited for someone to complete them before fullfilling their purpose? We wouldn't have had the opportunity of reading his chapters in the new testament.
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Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
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If you really love someone!
Then question about trust don’t come?
Till you not trust a person more than God,
Your love always remains incomplete,
Throw your doubting nature away,
Keep trust full or leave me at once,
Let my name become yours,
Let my fame become yours,
If someone says or you think I don’t love you,
Dear! Stab my heart but don’t say you break my trust!
”
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Mahiraj Jadeja (Love Forever)
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The psychological basis of all grief and mourning is attachment. Attachment and dependence occur because we feel incomplete within ourselves; therefore, we seek objects, people, relationships, places, and concepts to fulfill inner needs. Because they are unconsciously utilized to fulfill an inner need, they come to be identified as “mine.” As more energy is poured into them, there is a transition from identifying with the external objects as “mine” to being an actual extension of “me.” Loss of the object or person is experienced as a loss of our own self and an important part of our emotional economy. Loss is experienced as a diminution of the quality of ourselves, which the object or person represented. The more emotional energy invested in the object or person, the greater will be the feeling of loss and the greater the pain associated with the undoing of the bonds of dependence. Attachment creates a dependency, and dependency, because of its nature, intrinsically carries with it a fear of loss.
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David R. Hawkins (Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender (Power vs. Force, #9))
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It is not only the highly creative who would not whole-heartedly agree with Bowlby’s contention that intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves. For the deeply religious, and especially for those whose vocation demands celibacy, attachment to God takes precedence over attachment to persons. Although such people may succeed in loving their neighbours as themselves, the injunction ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’ is truly ‘the first and great commandment’.15 Throughout most of Europe’s recorded history, it was assumed that ultimate happiness was not to be expected from human relationships and institutions, but could only be found in man’s relation with the divine. Indeed, many of the devout believed that human relationships were an obstacle to communion with God. The founders of the monastic movement were the hermits of the Egyptian desert, whose ideal of perfection was only to be achieved through renunciation of the world, mortification of the flesh, and a solitary life of contemplation and rigorous discipline. It was recognized very early that the life of the anchorite was not possible for everyone, and so the ‘coenobitic’ tradition arose in which monks no longer lived alone but shared the life of dedication to God in communities. Intimate attachments, or desires for such attachments, are not unknown within the walls of monasteries, but they are regarded as intrusive distractions and firmly discouraged. Although learning was not a necessary feature of monastic life, the libraries of the monasteries preserved the learning of the past, and attracted those monks who had scholarly interests. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the monasteries led an intellectual revival, and were pre-eminent in history and biography.16 Perhaps monastic discipline and the absence of close personal ties not only facilitated the individual’s relation with God, but also fostered scholarship. It would, I think, be quite wrong to assume that all those who have put their relation with God before their relations with their fellows are abnormal or neurotic. Some of those who choose the monastic or celibate life certainly do so for the ‘wrong’ reasons: because their human relationships have failed, or because they dislike taking responsibility, or because they want a secure haven from the world. But this is not true of all; and even if it were so, would not imply that a life in which intimate attachments to other human beings played little part was necessarily incomplete or inferior. The religious person might argue that modern psycho-analysts have idealized intimate attachments; that human relationships are, because of the nature of man, necessarily imperfect; and that encouraging people to look for complete fulfilment in this way has done more harm than good.
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Anthony Storr (Solitude a Return to the Self)
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Building an intimate, loving relationship with another is the way we overcome the essential aloneness and isolation of the self as an adult. Without such a relationship, the real self will always remain to some extent unfulfilled and incomplete, since the vestiges of that first intimate symbiotic relationship with the mother will always remain in our psyches and memories. Only by risking genuine intimacy are we likely to find a partner who will reinforce and promote a healthy kind of relationship similar to that given up so long ago but never entirely forgotten.
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James F. Masterson (Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age)
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Don’t let people make you feel guilty for acting “needy” or “dependent.” Don’t be ashamed of feeling incomplete when you’re not in a relationship, or for wanting to be close to your partner and to depend on him.
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Amir Levine (Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love)
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AN INCOMPLETE PORTRAIT OF OUR LOVE
written by: Zaki Ansari
An incomplete portrait of our love
Relic of our relationship
like a poor injured dove
An incomplete portrait of our love
framed with some shabby moments
Hanging on my heart’s wall.
Thirsty for some colors of love
Which are missing at all
I have painted, the shadow of your smile.
I have added Some color of your hair,
I drew some marks of your lips
I spread shine of your eyes
Tried to fill with some of our memories
And with some of our dreams
I Gave a touch of your laughter,
and made the shape of your dimple.
Decorated with the beautiful mole
mole the same as you have on pretty face
but many things are mismade
yet, it is dark, it is fade
Missing a complete part which has been made
That’s You, your love, your presence
And all those beautiful colors
which you took with you when you left
How do I complete without you?
even I have lost myself without you,
Yes I’m breathing, yes I’m living
But that’s not life which spent without you.
you are required, Your touch is needed
to make complete
An incomplete portrait of our love
Relic of our relationship, like a poor injured dove
thirsty for some colors of love
Which are missing at all
Maybe there is no chance to make it whole
Complete or incomplete, happiness or sorrow
tears or laughter, the wounds on the soul
Whatever, but it’s a masterpiece of my life,
that’s all
into the bitter ocean of life
only sweetest thing, I have known,
Even it’s incomplete but it’s my own
An incomplete portrait of our love
Relic of our relationship
like a poor injured dove
”
”
Mohammed Zaki Ansari ("Zaki's Gift Of Love")
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The fear of being alone is born out of keeping company with parts of yourself that want you to feel incomplete so that they can lead you into one self-compromising relationship after another!
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Guy Finley (The Secret of Letting Go)
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From the storage room under the basement stairs she pulled out a small cardboard trunk that could only have been Tomas’s. Inside was an unvarnished, incomplete violin…Tomas took one look and burst into tears.
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Robert Eisenberg (Tomas and the Gypsy Violin)
“
Here we are interested in the dynamics of a true loving relationship between sexual partners. They are by definition “equal,” for their surrender must be mutual. Of course, such mutual surrender presupposes great individual maturity. Starry-eyed teenagers who have “fallen” in love are incapable of this act, although to outsiders and to themselves, they may seem to be completely absorbed in one another; in fact, their “love” is a subconscious projection of themselves onto the partner. Strictly speaking, they love themselves in the other. Hence, when reality hits, they “fall out of” love again. That not only teenagers but also so-called adults succumb to this “falling in and out of” love is a commentary on their level of maturity. I am making so much of this because in spiritual surrender, the element of mature love is present as well. When the lover surrenders “body and soul” to the beloved, really what she or he yields up is the usual self-identification with the body and with bodily and emotional and even mental processes. There is a melting away of conventional propriety, shame, and guilt. Indeed, lovers delight in pouring their hearts out to one another, in confiding long-kept secrets or long-cherished hopes, and in “daring” each other to demonstrate their love by overcoming inhibitions and taboos. They are self-forgetful—or so it seems. At least they are on the way to being self-forgetful. That they never quite succeed is as obvious as it is subtle. Their surrender is necessarily incomplete, because their love is imperfect. This lies in the nature of ordinary human love, however extraordinary it may be by conventional standards. Perfect love is possible only with regard to a perfect “object” or, to be more precise, when love is without a specific object but includes all possible objects, the whole universe. This, again, means that perfect love is possible only when there is no ego to create the usual barrier—however tenuous—between an experiencing subject and an experienced object. A genuine loving relationship, especially at the height of its sexual expression, approximates this condition of subject-object transcendence. But it only approximates it. For this condition of near-genuine love to turn into genuine love, the lovers’ images of each other (and of themselves) would have to be sacrificed. In other words, it is only when they come to love the whole person that they love perfectly. Here “whole person” refers to the human being in his or her entirety, comprising both the visible aspects and the invisible dimension; as a manifestation of the Whole (or God) and as that unmanifest Whole itself.
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Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
“
Genesis 2 is not speaking primarily to Adam’s experience of being lonely as much as it is revealing his nature as the person God created him to be. Because God created a communal being—someone designed for relationships—creation is incomplete without a suitable companion.
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Timothy S. Lane (Relationships: A Mess Worth Making)
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What is this touching in me?” “Where does this come from in my history?” “Where have I felt this kind of energy before?” “Can I see the pattern beneath the surface?” “What is the hidden idea, or complex, that is creating this pattern?” “Is there something promising magic, Easy Street, seduction, ‘solution’ here, when, as we know, life will always remain raggedy and incomplete?” And, always; “Am I made larger, or smaller, by this path, this relationship, this decision?
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James Hollis (Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up)
“
Paul VI stated in an address that since the Church begins with God's call, the Church establishes a supernatural religion. Other religions are "unilateral human efforts." While other religions are incomplete and often 'inefficacious and wrong,' the Church creates a safe relationship with God and effects salvation.
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Carlos Walker (Missionary Pope)
“
When you're translating a document or a speech, if you don't have all the words, you don't have all the meaning. I'd only had my words thus far, my thoughts, not hers. That had given me an incomplete picture, one with pockets of omissions… (154)
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Linda Murphy Marshall (Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery)
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Love is feeling protected, trusted, secure with yourself. Love is feeling like you’re home. Like there is nowhere else you want to be than in your person’s arms. Love is feeling this unbridled connection with another human, a connection so strong that when they’re not around, you feel . . . empty, incomplete. And love grows with intensity as your relationship grows. It starts small, like this tiny kernel needling at your back, bringing awareness to your brain that something is taking over and that an emotion is growing inside you. And as time passes, that kernel blooms into something bigger, something that eclipses your heart and takes up room in your chest, so when you see your person, all you can do is let out a deep breath of relief because they’re there. With you. For you. And if that person is the right person, if they’re truly the match to your soul, then they will make sure that nothing bad ever happens to you. That no matter what life throws at you—death, joy, heartache—they will be there, by your side, holding your hand, and reminding you that despite what you might be going through, there is always a home in their arms.
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Meghan Quinn (Those Three Little Words (The Vancouver Agitators, #2))
“
Love relationships are somewhat different, though. We are trying to become whole and so we seek out whatever we need to learn, a way to express the part of our chart which feels incomplete.
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John Green (Do You Love Me?: The Astrology of Relationships)
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Whether a line forms a complete sentence or an incomplete one, whether it forms a musical phrase or strikes a harsh note, its purpose is clearly not limited to revealing sense. It is a unit of attention. The line momentarily removes a selection of words from the normal flow of language and suspends it for examination. You might compare this to the instant of consciousness – approximately three seconds long – which neuropsychologists believe constitutes the present moment. In that brief space we can appreciate the language contained in the line on a number of levels: its rhythm, its sound, its ideas, its phrase-making or its metaphoric content. We can even relate it to previous lines and anticipate its relationship with subsequent ones.
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Linda Anderson (Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings)
“
Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a screen, a map must distort reality. As a scale model, the map must use symbols that almost always are proportionally much bigger or thicker than the features they represent. To avoid hiding critical information in a fog of detail, the map must offer a selective, incomplete view of reality. There’s no escape from the cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies.
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Mark Monmonier (How to Lie with Maps)
“
Person-centered therapy focuses on a warm empathic relationship which clearly exemplifies the love of Christ. Jones and Butman (2011) suggest that there is no approach to psychology that mirrors the concerns of the faith as well as does existential therapy. It is good for an individual to reflect on their actions and take responsibility for their choices. However, Olson (2002) suggests that the goal for the Christian is a reconciled life rather than an actualized life. As a Christian, one should seek to emulate the life of Christ and be guided by the Holy Spirit (Olson, 2002). Jones and Butman also point out that the existential understanding of psychopathology is incomplete as it sees guilt as a manifestation of inauthenticity, rather than a result of sinful choices. The Christian faith teaches a moral responsibility for our actions and we are held responsible by God for our choices. In humanistic psychology, the self is held accountable, while in the Christian faith humans are accountable to God. The Christian is instructed to submit to God and his commands, seeking to please God rather than himself. Also, there are derivatives of therapies that intentionally integrate spirituality into the therapy. Gestalt Pastoral Care (GPC) is an example. It involves blending gestalt concepts for growth, healing prayer, and spiritual companioning (Norberg, 2016).
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Robyn Simmons, Stacey Lilley, and Anita Kuhnley (Introduction to Counseling: Integration of Faith, Professional Identity, and Clinical Practice)
“
Consider this incomplete list of things that can be made better with data: Answering a factual question Telling a story Exploring a relationship Discovering a pattern Making a case for a decision Automating a process Judging an experiment
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Max Shron (Thinking with Data: How to Turn Information into Insights)
“
From now on, adopt the mindset that you will always finish your business. Don’t leave anything incomplete in your relationships, work, and all other areas. Keep moving forward.
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Marc Reklau (30 Days—Change Your Habits, Change Your Life: A Couple of Simple Steps Every Day to Create the Life You Want)
“
Though the poem has something of the typical sonnet structure (discussed in Chapter 5, below), in its original printing it is followed enigmatically by two pairs of brackets. Although for many years the general assumption was that the parentheses were simply a printer's aberration, or his way of indicating that the poem appeared to be incomplete, more recently they have been relentlessly interrogated,
yielding an extraordinary range of interpretations which must derive rather from the reader than from the author. They have been compared to the (empty) marks in an account book; to the shape of an hourglass that contains no sand; to little moons that `image a repeated waxing and waning of the moon, pointing to fickleness and frailty' (quoted in Duncan-Jones, p. 126); to representations of a grave; and-because they stand in for a couplet-to the image of a failure to couple. They may be seen as marking a breathing space before the reader embarks on the second part; in their suggestion of curtailment they may indicate that the male/male relationship of the first part has petered out in insterility; they may even invite readers to contribute a couplet of their own devising.
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Paul Edmondson (Shakespeare's Sonnets (Oxford Shakespeare Topics))