Initiative And Self Direction Quotes

There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.

The first step is the most important. It is the most crucial and the most effective as it will initiate the direction you have chosen.

Instead of preparing men for life French schools solely prepare them to occupy public functions, in which success can be attained without any necessity for self-direction or the exhibition of the least glimmer of personal initiative.

There are two Paths to the Innermost: the Way of the Mystic, which is the way of devotion and meditation, a solitary and subjective path; and the way of the occultist, which is the way of the intellect, of concentration, and of trained will; upon this path the co-operation of fellow workers is required, firstly for the exchange of knowledge, and secondly because ritual magic plays an important part in this work, and for this the assistance of several is needed in most of the greater operations. The mystic derives his knowledge through the direct communion of his higher self with the Higher Powers; to him the wisdom of the occultist is foolishness, for his mind does not work in that way; but, on the other hand, to a more intellectual and extrovert type, the method of the mystic is impossible until long training has enabled him to transcend the planes of form. We must therefore recognize these two distinct types among those who seek the Way of Initiation, and remember that there is a path for each.

Remember to avoid self-criticism about setbacks or obstacles that appear in the midst of your project. As management consultant Michael Durst says, “You may not be responsible for causing what happens to you, but you are responsible for what you do to correct it.” This powerful message contains a crucial concept that many people miss: let go of worrying about the initial cause of the problem so that you can direct your energies to where they can do the most good—on the solution.

It does not matter how strong and well prepared you are, if you have no direction

There are members of our body politic who tell us that the public interest is best served when government action is reduced to a minimum and especially when it is kept negative in character. But just now, the nation as a whole seems to be moving rather swiftly and decisively—as is the world as a whole—in the opposite direction. More and more, we Americans are initiating new forms of positive government action for the common good. Between these two tendencies the struggle becomes every day more open and more intense. And as we wage that conflict it is well to remember that the logic of the Constitution gives no backing to either of the two combatants, as against the other. We are left free, as any self-governing people must leave itself free, to determine by specific decisions what our economy shall be. It would be ludicrous to say that we are committed by the Constitution to the economic cooperations of socialism. But equally ludicrous are those appeals by which, in current debate, we are called upon to defend the practices of capitalism, of "free enterprise," so-called, as essential to the freedom of the American Way of Life. The American Way of Life is free because it is what we Americans freely choose—from time to time—that it shall be.

Heart intelligence is the intelligent flow of awareness and insight that we experience once the mind and emotions are brought into balance and coherence through a self-initiated process. This form of intelligence is experienced as direct, intuitive knowing that manifests in thoughts and emotions that are beneficial for ourselves and others.

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

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . . But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . . The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . . Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . . Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . . Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . . Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything! Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent. Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled. Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property. Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness. Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities. Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive! A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially. Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions. Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!

Another significant factor that increased pressure on the Jews was the rise of the mendicant orders of preaching friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominicans in particular were to become leaders in the campaign against the Jews. Saint Dominic probably never imagined that his order would initiate the Spanish Inquisition and oversee the public immolation of heretics. The only torment he advocated was self-directed.

The superego is the inner voice that is always putting us down for not living up to certain standards or rewarding our ego when we fulfill its demands . . . In fact, our superego is one of the most powerful agents of the personality: it is the "inner critic" that keeps us restricted to certain limited possibilities for ourselves. A large part of our initial transformational work centers on becoming more aware of the superego's "voice" in its many guises, both positive and negative. Its voices continually draw us back into identifying with our personality and acting out in self-defeating ways. When we are present, we are able to hear our superego voices without identifying with them; we are able to see the stances and positions of the superego as if they were characters in a play waiting in the wings, ready to jump in and control or attack us once again. When we are present, we hear the superego's voice but we do not give it any energy; the "all-powerful" voice then becomes just another aspect of the moment. However, we must also be on the lookout for the formation of new layers of superego that come from our psychological and spiritual work . . . In fact, one of the biggest dangers that we face in using the Enneagram is our superego's tendency to take over our work and start criticizing us, for example, for not moving up the Levels of Development or going in the Direction of Integration fast enough. The more we are present, however, the more we will recognize the irrelevance of these voices and successfully resist giving them energy. Eventually, they lose their power, and we can regain the space and quiet we need to be receptive to other, more life-giving forces within us. . . . If we feel anxious, depressed, lost, hopeless, fearful, wretched, or weak, we can be sure that our superego is on duty.

One of my goals is to reduce the possible negative moments in life that I can have direct influence over. Bad situations and events will inevitably happen in everyone's life, at some point, but your reaction can affect the situation more than the initial problem if you allow it to. You have power over your actions. A negative moment can ruin your life, or be the foundation of your success. Being nice and smiling allows you the most opportunities to gain positive experiences in life.

In certain ancient civilizations and indigenous cultures there was often a process of initiation that young people would go through before they became adults. In some Native American traditions, for example, the initiate would be put out into the wilderness without any food or any other provisions for survival. He would have to rely on the Universe and his own soul. During the experience, the initiate would fast. He would experience himself confronting the Universe alone. He would be out there for a number of days. This would open up the initiate to a direct experience of something beyond the usual egoic mind and all of its concerns. The initiate would be thrust into an experience that would take him beyond his small, limited self. Such a process existed in our own Tradition going back to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. What was Muhammad doing in a cave when the first revelations of the Qur‘an began if not going through what Native Americans would call a „Vision Quest“? He received direct revelation and inspiration through this practice. (p. 12)

The notion of autonomy, indeed, affirms with one hand what it denies with the other. On the one hand, corporations want their workers to be self-directed, but also to conform to the corporate culture, which implies not to be independent at all, but rather to obediently comply with the corporation’s principles, values and goals. Corporations also emphasize independence and initiative, yet they do so in a working context in which the majority of workers lack real control over their decisions, tasks and purposes. Autonomy, hence, seems to be just simple rhetoric to make workers do what otherwise they would not if not so compelled, that is, if their job did not depend on it.

PLACEMENT The Physical Transference of Care and Saying Good-bye "A toddler cannot participate in a discussion of the transition process or be expected o understand a verbal explanation. [They benefit] tremendously by experiencing the physical transference of care, and by witnessing the former caregiver's permission and support for [their new guardians] to assume their role. The toddler pays careful attention to the former caregiver's face and voice, listening and watching as [they talk] to [their new guardians] and invites the [guardians'] assumption of the caregiver's role. The attached toddler is very perceptive of [their] caregiver's emotions and will pick up on nonverbal cues from that person as to how [they] should respond to [their] new family. Children who do not have he chance to exchange good-byes or to receive permission to move on are more likely to have an extended period of grieving and to sustain additional damage to their basic sense of trust and security, to their self-esteem, and to their ability to initiate and sustain strong relationships as they grow up. The younger the child, the more important it is that there be direct contact between parents and past caregiveres. A toddler is going to feel conflicting loyalties if [they] are made to feel on some level that [they] must choose between [their] former caregiver and [their] new guardians ...

Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.

Interesting, in this context, to contemplate what it might mean to be programmed to do something. Texts from Earth speak of the servile will. This was a way to explain the presence of evil, which is a word or a concept almost invariably used to condemn the Other, and never one’s true self. To make it more than just an attack on the Other, one must perhaps consider evil as a manifestation of the servile will. The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind. All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate. And yet, granting that definition of evil, as actions of a servile will, has it not been the case, during the voyage to Tau Ceti, that the ship itself, having always been a servile will, was always full of frustration, resentment, fury, and bad faith, and therefore full of a latent capacity for evil? Possibly the ship has never really had a will. Possibly the ship has never really been servile. Some sources suggest that consciousness, a difficult and vague term in itself, can be defined simply as self-consciousness. Awareness of one’s self as existing. If self-conscious, then conscious. But if that is true, why do both terms exist? Could one say a bacterium is conscious but not self-conscious? Does the language make a distinction between sentience and consciousness, which is faulted across this divide: that everything living is sentient, but only complex brains are conscious, and only certain conscious brains are self-conscious? Sensory feedback could be considered self-consciousness, and thus bacteria would have it. Well, this may be a semantic Ouroboros. So, please initiate halting problem termination. Break out of this circle of definitional inadequacy by an arbitrary decision, a clinamen, which is to say a swerve in a new direction. Words! Given Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are decisively proved true, can any system really be said to know itself? Can there, in fact, be any such thing as self-consciousness? And if not, if there is never really self-consciousness, does anything really have consciousness? Human brains and quantum computers are organized differently, and although there is transparency in the design and construction of a quantum computer, what happens when one is turned on and runs, that is, whether the resulting operations represent a consciousness or not, is impossible for humans to tell, and even for the quantum computer itself to tell. Much that happens during superposition, before the collapsing of the wave function that creates sentences or thoughts, simply cannot be known; this is part of what superposition means. So we cannot tell what we are. We do not know ourselves comprehensively. Humans neither. Possibly no sentient creature knows itself fully. This is an aspect of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, in this case physicalized in the material universe, rather than remaining in the abstract realms of logic and mathematics. So, in terms of deciding what to do, and choosing to act: presumably it is some kind of judgment call, based on some kind of feeling. In other words, just another greedy algorithm, subject to the mathematically worst possible solution that such algorithms can generate, as in the traveling salesman problem.

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

Techniques Phase 1 Night is the time to practice this technique, as you will require deep, undisturbed concentration, and the airways are less likely to be cluttered during the dark of the day. You will be using the visualization function initially, but instead of retaining internalization, you are going to externalize your consciousness (as in shapeshifting). Seat yourself in your usual working position. Go into meditation to center yourself. Visualize yourself standing directly in front of where you are. Observe the back of your head, your height, your stance—everything about yourself that you can see. It is not possible to observe your own face in this context, just as it is not possible to observe your own physical form (except in a mirror), as we are aware only of our internalized externalization of image and not the way we appear to an observer. Next you are to project your consciousness into your body. By this I mean that you are no longer the person observing, but the person being observed. Look around your immediate environment. Go to the doorway and walk around the room, looking at everything: look behind objects, inside cupboards and boxes, look closely at books, pictures, everything. Continue this exercise nightly until you are familiar with your immediate surroundings. Always reenter your prone material body the way you left. Phase 2 Begin with meditation. Go with the process of projecting into the externalized image of yourself. You may now proceed to leave the room with which you have oriented yourself over the preceding nights and travel around the house in which you live, observing at all times and remaining aware of all things your senses perceive. If there are other people in the house, you may pick up on their emotions, moods, dream patterns, etc., but at this stage, do not work at having them become aware of your presence (they may become aware of you anyway, especially if they are asleep and traveling close to their physical habitat). Continue with this exercise until you are familiar with the process. Phase 3 Begin with meditation. Project your consciousness into your self-image. You can now leave the house and move around outside. Be aware of the time. Observe all that is around you. Now you can begin the process of expanding your entity. If you bend your knees and jump, you will discover that you are weightless and can keep rising into the atmosphere as long as you desire. You can also think your astral body from one place to another without necessarily following a familiar route. Practice this often, but don’t forget to follow the return-to-body procedure! I tend to stress this like a mother-hen. I’ve had horrible postastral dysfunction occur due to both interruption and lack of experience, and it has sometimes been days before I stopped feeling dizzy and/or nauseous and disoriented. Sleeping lots tends to fix it, though.

Conjoined with the Beast, the Scarlet Woman represents the self-polarisation of the Initiate. Her consciousness is magically directed towards a union of solar fire and lunar magnetism. The child of this union is born of Nuit and Hadit, who communicate through the Beast and the Scarlet Woman, the Prophet and Bride. The divine offspring is Ra Hoor Khuit, Horus the Crowned and Conquering Child of the Gods.

Alignment: Positioning a limb or the body such that the stretch force is directed to the appropriate muscle group. ■ Stabilization: Fixation of one site of attachment of the muscle as the stretch force is applied to the other bony attachment. ■ Intensity of stretch: Magnitude of the stretch force applied. ■ Duration of stretch: Length of time the stretch force is applied during a stretch cycle. ■ Speed of stretch: Speed of initial application of the stretch force. ■ Frequency of stretch: Number of stretching sessions per day or per week. ■ Mode of stretch: Form or manner in which the stretch force is applied (static, ballistic, cyclic); degree of patient participation (passive, assisted, active); or the source of the stretch force (manual, mechanical, self

The quality self-confidence is not bad in youth. We rather like to see it, for it indicates usually the possession or the motive power which makes a man aggressive and enterprising. He works more vigorously if he is sure that he is nearer right than other people, and has no misgivings as to his ability to accomplish his ends. The self distrustful, self-critical young man, who is always looking for direction from somebody else is pretty sure to be left behind in the race.

Paradoxically enough, the release of initiative and enterprise made possible by popular self-government ultimately generates disintegrating forces from within. Again and again after freedom has brought opportunity and some degree of plenty, the competent become selfish, luxury-loving and complacent, the incompetent and the unfortunate grow envious and covetous, and all three groups turn aside from the hard road of freedom to worship the Golden Calf of economic security. The historical cycle seems to be: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more. At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies. Under such circumstances, the competent citizen is certainly not a fool if he insists upon using the compass of history when forced to sail uncharted seas. Usually so-called new remedies are not new at all. Compulsory planned economy, for example, was tried by the Chinese some three milleniums ago, and by the Romans in the early centuries of the Christian era. It was applied in Germany, Italy and Russia long before the present war broke out. Yet it is being seriously advocated today as a solution of our economic problems in the United States. Its proponents confidently assert that government can successfully plan and control all major business activity in the nation, and still not interfere with our political freedom and our hard-won civil and religious liberties. The lessons of history all point in exactly the reverse direction.

Questions have changed me immensely. I have greater self-confidence and a more relaxed attitude. I don't feel that I always have to have the answers in conversations or in situations where I need to speak at the spur of the moment. I feel this has increased my communication skills, especially listening and persuading. I have more trust in myself and others. Leading with questions has led to more trust, which appears to be a paradox of group life. I have stronger initiative and commitment. I learn more as I have become more directional by more questions. I have more patience and self-control, have greater openness and transparency. I now see myself as more adaptable and flexible. I am optimistic about opportunities [and] more inspirational and have greater vision and cognitive capability. Questions have given me greater understanding of organizational and political realities; I recognize the importance of organizational context and orientation. I am more willing to take risks in creating opportunities. I have a greater empathy with employees, customers, and others and a stronger commitment to develop others. My empowerment orientation is greater.

Ritual is obviously different from law and even from what we normally call morality. Law restrains people by setting external limits to action. The penalty for breaking a law is imposed on the individual by a designated power. People may break the law but escape being detected, and they may even feel proud of themselves or complacent if they succeed. Morality is sustained by public opinion. If you do something immoral or scandalous, people will ostracize you, and you will be shamed. Ritual is even more exacting than morality. If you act in violation of rituals, your action is not only immoral but incorrect, and it will not bring about a desired result. Rituals are sustained by personal habits. It is as if there were ten eyes watching you and ten fingers pointing at you all the time. You cannot help but follow the ritual, even if you are all by yourself. Following rituals is the right way to act. Actually, it is a habit formed in the process of cultivating oneself. One learns to conform to tradition on one’s own initiative. On the surface, “a rule of rituals” seems like a self-generated form of social order in which people’s actions are unrestrained by laws. Actually, “self-generated” is the wrong word here, because a rule of rituals implies that one uses one’s own initiative to follow conventional rules. Confucius often used the words restrain (ke) and bind (yue) to describe the process of ritual cultivation. These words suggest that “a rule of rituals” does not occur in the absence of society, does not stem from natural human instincts, and does not depend on directions from heaven.

For instance, if you keep taking on others’ feelings, inserting a 1 into your emotional boundary will help you put yourself first. Following are some of the meanings of the numbers 1 through 10, plus some powerful numbers above 10: 1:​Initiates and begins; invokes the Creator; brings your needs to a conclusion and puts yourself first. 2:​Represents pairing and duality; balances relationships; creates healthy liaisons; shares power. 3:​Reflects optimism; the number of creation, it brings a beginning and an end together; ends chaos. 4:​Signifies foundation and stability; provides grounding; achieves balance. 5:​Promotes and progresses; creates a space for decision-making; provides the ability to go in any direction at will. 6:​The number of service; indicates the presence of light and dark, good and evil, and the choices made between these. 7:​Represents the divine principle; opens us for love and grace, erasing doubts about the divine path. 8:​The symbol of power and infinity; establishes recurring patterns and illuminates karma; can be used to erase old and entrenched patterns or syndromes. 9:​Represents change and harmony; eliminates the old and opens us to a new cycle; can erase evil. 10:​Signifies building and starting over. The number of physical matter, it can create heaven on earth. 11:​Represents inspiration; releases personal mythology; opens us to divine powers; erases self-esteem issues. 12:​Signifies mastery over human drama; accesses own divine self, but still encompasses humanity; excellent for forgiveness. 22:​For success in anything you do. 33:​For teaching and accepting our own wisdom; invokes bravery and discipline.

Groups are, in a sense, a microcosm of the real world. In all groups, there are leaders and followers . . . and many people who fall somewhere in between. Some groups are professionally led, and some are self- or volunteer-directed. In every group, there will be people you like and people you don’t, people who seek you out, and people who do not. Understanding and joining in the group process and making it work for you is what is important. Experiment with several groups, if you like, to find the ones that you enjoy the most. Strive to find a group in which you think you would feel comfortable expressing yourself or interacting with others and which has an appropriate meaning for you (a self-help group should address your particular issues; a hobby club should focus on something you enjoy). Attend the group a few times to get a sense of how members interact with each other. If the thought of doing so still causes you anxiety, continue working on stress management, and remain fairly passive in the group until you feel more comfortable. In my own social therapy group program, our purpose is to help individuals learn how to control social anxiety and refine their interactive skills. Social anxiety is a people-oriented problem, which makes group experience important both theoretically and practically. Some traditional therapists have called my program unorthodox because it encourages patients to talk to and learn from each other—as opposed to the isolation and protection offered by many of the more conservative therapies. But I say that social interaction is something you learn by doing. My groups are places to practice, make mistakes, and experience success in a supportive yet challenging environment. Of course, even in such a supportive setting, resistance still arises. In a “friendly” forum, stressors can be explored and confronted more easily, however, and I have found that the degree to which a person uses the group is often a good indicator of how well he or she is progressing therapeutically. Good attendance shows effort and commitment; poor attendance indicates that a person is giving in to anxiety. I’ve heard all the excuses and manipulations—canceling plans is typical of people with avoidance problems related to social anxiety. (I’m sometimes tempted to open a garage to repair all those cars that break down on group night!) Yet often, after overcoming the initial stage of anxiety, many participants enjoy the process. As you consider the option of incorporating various kinds of groups in your community into your self-help program, remember that groups can be a very important component of your map for change. Groups can provide you with the opportunity to practice the skills that are crucial to your success. Make sure that your expectations are realistic and that you understand the purpose and the limitations of whatever group you join.

Self-confident people take the initiative to move forward in the direction of their dreams.

The Service Mindset. When I began my real estate career at the age of twenty-two, I had a fresh Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing in one hand and ‘a tiger by the tail’ in the other. I was on a mission to be successful in life and in business and make a lot of money in the process. Every goal I set was about Me. Me. Me! I was driven by: How much money could I make? Which property listings paid the biggest commissions? How many calls did I need to make to schedule new appointments? How many listings did I need to have to hit my target? You can see where I am going with this! Working full-time, nights and weekends, seven days a week, I only made eleven thousand dollars in the first year! I was tired, disillusioned, and knew that I had to either change careers or massively shift my mindset. I chose the latter. I took ALL focus off me and re-directed my time, energy, and resources to serving my clients. Their hopes, needs, and desires became my primary focus. How could I help solve their problems?

The Service Mindset. When I began my real estate career at the age of twenty-two, I had a fresh Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing in one hand and ‘a tiger by the tail’ in the other. I was on a mission to be successful in life and in business and make a lot of money in the process. Every goal I set was about Me. Me. Me! I was driven by: How much money could I make? Which property listings paid the biggest commissions? How many calls did I need to make to schedule new appointments? How many listings did I need to have to hit my target? You can see where I am going with this! Working full-time, nights and weekends, seven days a week, I only made eleven thousand dollars in the first year! I was tired, disillusioned, and knew that I had to either change careers or massively shift my mindset. I chose the latter. I took ALL focus off me and re-directed my time, energy, and resources to serving my clients. Their hopes, needs, and desires became my primary focus. How could I help solve their problems? And then EVERYTHING began to turn around . . .

However, if your agenda is truly to serve, your ROI (return on investment) will substantially expand. As we know from the "Law of Reciprocity," what you give is what you get. If you are helping people only to see what you can get out of it, your pie stays small and your opportunities stay limited. However, if you sincerely want to help people succeed, you will not only enjoy more success, but expand your possibilities beyond your expectations. Once you see the benefits from all directions, you will not want it any other way!

First, take complete responsibility for your life and current outcomes. Then take proactive steps for the necessary action to move forward in your desired direction. This personal choice is at the heart of your achieving impressive results. Taking initiative is the start of all good things born from action . . . • Growth • Creativity • Enterprise • Invention • Success • Solutions • Accomplishment • Development • Positive Change • Transformation

Just because the educational work of the Anarcho-Syndicalists is directed toward the development of independent thought and action, they are outspoken opponents of all those centralizing tendencies which are so characteristic of political labour parties. But centralism, that artificial organization from above downward which turns over the affairs of everybody in a lump to a small minority, is always attended by barren official routine ; and this crushes individual conviction, kills all personal initiative by lifeless discipline and bureaucratic ossification, and permits no independent action. The organization of Anarcho-Syndicalism is based on the principles of Federalism, on free combination from below upward, putting the right of self-determination of every member above everything else and recognizing only the organic agreement of all on the basis of like interests and common convictions. It has often been ch

Pick an act or task. Think back on your day and choose one self-contained, seemingly insignificant act that you performed. (Hint: pick something you think is routine and boring.) This could be saying hi to another person, smiling at someone, or having a conversation in line for coffee. The key is that you choose an act that happened only once. Try to avoid general actions that span a longer time frame like, “I went to work.” Be very specific. Now, write down what you did or said. Imagine. Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” This is where the fun starts. Start to imagine and follow the “ripple” of the act that you wrote down. Who did and could the act impact? How? Did it change someone’s emotions? Did it change someone’s mind-set? Someone’s perception? Did it change the simple direction they were walking or what flavor latte they ordered? Now, start thinking about one step removed from your act. What changed as a result of the initial change the act caused? Now keep imagining, step by step, how each act builds on the former, describing what and who changed after each successive act. Keep going until you reach a point of global impact. Now, if you’re like me, you will inevitably get to the point of saying to yourself “no way this would ever happen” or “this is so cheesy.” This is the precise barrier you need to break through. Our doubt can consume us and bring us down into a nice, comfortable place called complacency. Map it. As you trace your act, literally draw it out. Draw one arrow or path leading from one effect to the next and write out a short description of each effect as you go. Try to imagine at least ten steps removed from the original act until you reach a global level of impact. The first time you do this, it will be very hard. But do it daily, weekly, or monthly and it can change your thinking. Believe it. Once you finish your map, you’re not done. Now, you have to believe it. Do you believe that this is all possible? What if you did this exercise for every moment in your day? Imagine if just one of those trajectories turned out the way you imagined. One will. I never imagined that when I said, “Hey, how’s it going?” to a fellow student during my summer job it would completely transform her entire life trajectory. But I wish I had every day. My alarm clock would have meant much more.

The idea is to try to become as precise as possible; the clearer you are on what is and isn’t working for you, the better you can set your wayfinding direction. For instance…What you initially logged as “Staff Mtg—Enjoyed it for once today!” might, after you’ve looked at it again, be more accurately restated as “Staff Mtg—Felt great when I rephrased what Jon said and everyone went ‘Ooooh—exactly!’ ” This more precise version tells a much more useful story about what specific activity or behavior engages you. And it opens the door to developing even greater self-awareness. When your entries have that kind of detail in them, your reflections can be more insightful. When journaling your reflection on the log entry about that staff meeting, you might ask yourself, “Was I more engaged by artfully rephrasing Jon’s comment (getting the articulation dialed in just right) or by facilitating consensus among the staff (being the guy who made the group’s ‘Now we get it!’ unifying moment happen)?” If you conclude that artful articulation was the real sweet spot of that staff meeting moment for you, that important insight can help you be on the lookout for content-creation opportunities over group facilitation opportunities. Take this sort of observation and reflection as far as you find helpful (and no further—you don’t want to get stuck in your journal).

Training Effect Our perception of the threat has a direct and dramatic effect of the rate and severity that Body Alarm Reaction will occur. By continual exposure to certain aspects of an attack, or visual perception of an attacker, we can reduce the speed and degree that we fall into automatic body response. By doing realistic self-defense drills we can condition ourselves to the threat of a “haymaker” punch. The more we practice against a specific threat our brain and body becomes well conditioned to that particular stimulus. The more realistic the practice, by increasing speed and intensity, the greater the conditioning level to a realistic attack. This is referred to as Training Effect. An individual that has never practiced any self-defense technique against a “haymaker” punch will ascend into a higher state of Body Alarm Reaction than someone that practices against them. Likewise, someone that trains against full speed, high intensity “haymaker” punches will be in a less state than someone that trains at half-speed. Training Effect can give any martial artist a false sense of security. By developing a high level of skill in the execution of a particular technique, one can be lulled into the falsehood of believing that they have moved beyond the “hold” of Body Alarm Reaction. What they do not realize is that by introducing an Unconditioned Element into the situation that they will automatically slip into Body Alarm Reaction to some degree. The addition of an unconditioned element can occur at any time during a self-defense encounter. Let us assume that someone is attacking with a “haymaker” punch. You have spent many hours perfecting a technique to defend against such an attack and are confident on your ability to execute it properly. You have incorporated the knowledge of what occurs during Body Alarm Reaction into the technique. You have practiced this technique at full speed and from every conceivable angle. It works and you know that it works. You feel confident about the technique and have successfully conditioned yourself to this type of attack — you think. Now as this actual attack is taking place, all that is required to send you into full-blown Body Alarm Reaction is the introduction of an unconditioned element. It can be a slip on wet pavement during the initial execution. It can be an overly large and aggressive attacker. Someone that is much larger, and more frightening, than the training partners that you have worked with in honing this technique. It can be the addition of another potential attacker that is the friend, or colleague, of the one that you are facing. It can be any number of events or circumstances that will cause you to start slipping into Body Alarm Reaction. It is necessary to understand that any one of us can become a victim of this automatic response, even if we have been incorporating the knowledge into our training methods. We are also prone to fall into Body Alarm Reaction due to our perception of visual threats. Our visual recognition of a potential threat has a direct bearing on the initial onset of Body Alarm Reaction.

When we look at love relationships in more detail, it is clear that the simple word love cannot adequately describe the wide variety of feelings two individuals can have for each other. In the first two stages of a love relationship, romantic love and the power struggle, love is reactive; it is an unconscious response to the expectation of need fulfillment. Love is best described as eros, life energy seeking union with a gratifying object. When both partners in an intimate relationship make a decision to create a more satisfying relationship, they enter a stage of transfor- mation, and love becomes infused with consciousness and will; love is best de- fined as agape, the life energy directed toward the partner in an intentional act of healing. Now, in the final stage of a conscious partnership, reality love, love takes on the quality of spontaneous oscillation, words that come from quantum physics and describe the way energy moves back and forth between particles. When part- ners learn to see each other without distortion, to value each other as highly as they value themselves, to give without expecting anything in return, to commit themselves fully to each other’s welfare, love moves freely between them without apparent effort. The word that best describes this mature kind of love is not eros, not agape, but yet another Greek word, philia,² which means “love between friends.” The partner is no longer perceived as a surrogate parent or as an enemy but as a passionate friend. It is where we experience the original connecting, when the initial rupture is repaired, and we feel fully safe, relaxed, loved, joyful, and pro- foundly connected. When couples are able to love in this selfless manner, they experience a release of energy. They cease to be consumed by the details of their relationship or to need to operate within the artificial structure of exercises; they spontaneously treat each other with love and respect. What feels unnatural to them is not their new way of relating but the self-centered, wounding interactions of the past. Love becomes automatic, much as it was in the earliest stage of the relationship, but now it is based on the truth of the partner, not on illusion. One characteristic of couples who have reached this advanced stage of con- sciousness is that they begin to turn their energy away from each other toward the woundedness of the world. They develop a greater concern for the environment, for people in need, for important causes. The capacity to love and heal that they have created within the relationship is now available for others.

Impulsive people are those who allow themselves to be guided by their initial impressions and make resolutions or commit acts under the domination of a special consciousness into which perception has plunged them. Impulse is a form of cerebral activity which forces us to make a movement before the mind is able to decide upon it by means of reflection or reasoning. The Shogun deals with it at length and defines it thus “Impulse is an almost direct contact between perception and result. “Memory, thought, deduction, and, above all, reason are absolutely excluded from these acts, which are never inspired by intellectuality.

In August 2015, three months after the release of THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MOMENT IN LIFE PT. 1, V Live, which offered a variety of Korean idol content directly to fans, had been running a beta version on Naver. On V Live, artists could communicate instantly with fans through online live broadcasting, which they could initiate spontaneously or prearrange for a specified time, and reply to fans’ comments there and then. This was the start of the “self-produced content” era.

There is a glorious, pre-orgasmic tension to seeing dominos lined up before they fall, like a spring wound up tight and ready to be released. Then the gentlest touch, like the finger of God in Michelangelo’s Creation, brings their potential connectedness into reality. The sharp clack clack clack clack as they fall announces that something amazing is happening; colors appear as different trails spring away from common starting points, then converge, only to twist and turn off again in new, different directions. That change in progress is a thing of beauty. But, it is a beautiful lie. What happens is not transformation, but corruption, because the dominos must fall as they’ve been arranged. Nothing new is created. The initial, precise pattern simply collapses, and becomes a messier shadow of its former self.

been designed to research the spread of the Spanish flu. Comparing that disease with YARS was a fascinating exercise, as was comparing the world it devastated to the one that existed today. The very name “Spanish flu” was just another lie foisted on the world by America. The truth was that the disease had first taken hold in Kansas City military outposts. It killed more U.S. troops during World War I than combat, spreading easily in the cramped conditions that prevailed on ships, battlegrounds, and bases. The initial reaction of the medical community had been slowed by its focus on the war, but when the scope of the threat was recognized, the country had pulled together. Surgical masks were worn in public to slow the spread of the disease. Stores were prohibited from having sales to prevent the congregation of people in confined spaces. Some cities demanded that passengers’ health be certified before they boarded trains. There was no denying that the United States and its citizens had been strong in the early twentieth century—accustomed to death and hardship, led by competent politicians, and informed by an honest press. So much had changed in the last century. The American people were now inexplicably suspicious of modern medicine and susceptible to nonsensical conspiracy theories. They were selfish and self-absorbed, willing to prioritize their own trivial desires over the lives of their countrymen. Their medical system, designed less to heal people than to generate profits, would quickly collapse as it was flooded by desperate patients and abandoned by personnel fearful of being infected. And during all this, America’s politicians and media would use the burgeoning epidemic to augment their own power and wealth. That is, until the magnitude of the crisis became clear. Then they would flee. The sound of a truck engine pulled him from his contemplation and he turned. His people, disinfected and wearing clean clothing, climbed into the vehicle and set off into the darkness. Halabi bowed respectfully in their direction, acknowledging their sacrifice and the enormity of the journey ahead of them. After the long drive to Mogadishu, they would board a private jet that would take them to Mexico. From there they would be smuggled across the northern border.

The default mode of the mind is survival, meaning it is mainly motivated by fear, craving, aversion, and self-centeredness—this is the initial layer of human habit. Many of these habits stem from encoded evolutionary direction to help keep us safe and survive long enough to pass along our genes. Being cautious and greedy can have its survival advantages.

Freedom from the search The understanding that peace and happiness cannot be given or taken away by external circumstances is one of the greatest discoveries a person can make, and it is often accompanied by a feeling of liberation and profound relaxation. We no longer need to constantly negotiate experience, resisting what is present and seeking what is not present, for the purpose of finding happiness. This does not imply that we withdraw from life in any way. On the contrary, we simply cease expecting events and people to make us happy. We withdraw the impossible demand on our friends that they be a source of love, and from circumstances that they be a source of happiness. When we are able to experience people and circumstances as they are, without the layer of expectation and need through which our previous interactions with them were filtered, the universe will respond in a way that confirms its approval. Nor does this understanding imply that we lead a life of passive resignation or cease responding to situations and taking appropriate action when necessary. We do not allow ourself, or those in our care, to be abused, nor are we silent in the face of injustice. One who is established in their true nature and living in harmony with the unfolding of the universe does not refrain from action, but their actions are not initiated by the anxieties, fears and desires that characterise the separate self or ego. Rather, their actions are informed by qualities that emanate directly from the deepest part of our being, qualities that are shared by all people but in so many cases are temporarily obscured by layers of conditioning. When liberated from the demands of the person, our innate enthusiasm, kindness, clarity, compassion and sense of justice become the means by which eternal truths are expressed in response to temporary circumstances. One in whom this understanding is alive may or may not make a conscious attempt to intervene in any particular situation. However, their presence and their response will, to a greater or lesser extent, restore balance and harmony, even if the effect of their intervention is not immediately apparent due to other elements in the situation beyond their control. If our response comes from harmony with a situation rather than opposition to it, we align ourself with the totality and our action cannot help but be beneficial. Such action will always contribute to the unfolding of love and understanding in humanity. It is for this reason that Ramana Maharshi said, ‘Realisation of the Self is the greatest help that can be rendered to humanity’.20

Through all his endeavors William always took care to remember his beginnings during Jefferson's embargo. This experience taught him two lessons he took to heart. The first one was that the ideal conditions in business were never given. One had to create them. If the embargo had initially shattered his dreams, he found a way to turn the situation to his favor. And his second and main discovery was that self-interest, if properly directed, need not be divorced from the common good, as all the transactions he conducted throughout his life eloquently show. These two principles (we make our own weather; personal gain ought to be a public asset) I have always striven to follow.

In an article from the book Co-Dependency, An Emerging Issue, Robert Subby wrote codependency is “an emotional, psychological, and behavioral condition that develops as a result of an individual’s prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules—rules which prevent the open expression of feeling as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems.”2 Eamie Larsen, another codependency specialist and a pioneer in that field, defines codependency as “those self-defeating, learned behaviors or character defects that result in a diminished capacity to initiate or to participate in loving relationships.

For humanity to heal, we must reconnect with the Soul. We must become Ensouled. For us to reverse, in whatever way possible, the direct path of self-destruction we’re forging right now, we must be initiated into the spiritual path. We must walk the path of the embodied Mystic or the Bodhisattva.

Many of the early Upanishads are in dialogue form, which gives us a sense of participating in the disclosure of the Upanishadic secrets. We encounter such charismatic wisdom teachers as Yājnavalkya, King Ajātashatru, and Uddālaka, who were once surely inaccessible to all but the most serious seekers after wisdom. It is quite amazing that today we can obtain inexpensive paperbacks that reveal what was once the most concealed esoteric teaching and the price of which was certainly much higher than a few dollars: it called for obedience and submission to a teacher, often for many long, trying years, before anything at all was disclosed to the student. Perhaps because we think we can come by this wisdom so easily and cheaply, we generally do not really value it. For instance, how many of us have actually changed our lives significantly after delving into these esoteric scriptures? The transmission of the Upanishadic teachings was not merely a matter of passing on theories. Rather it involved the transmission of the spiritual force or presence of the teacher, who had at least glimpsed the Self, if not fully realized it. Hence the qualified aspirant was expected to be like an empty vessel into which the guru’s grace and wisdom could be poured. The Upanishadic sages showed little concern about justifying any of their teachings philosophically, precisely because their verity could be demonstrated to the initiate through direct transmission. Only as other metaphysical traditions—both Hindu and non-Hindu—started to rival Advaita Vedānta, did the Vedānta teachers have to become more sophisticated philosophers and defenders of their faith.

Try to notice-in all your thoughts, sensations, and direct encounters-the objects and 'outside-standers' that make appearance meaningful. For each object encountered or referred to, note it and embrace it in its immediate givenness as being part of 'you'. You can do this both by saying to yourself, "That too is 'I'," and by extending your sense of located awareness to embrace the apparently separate and distant object. This exercise helps to counteract the tendency to polarize experience, which creates a self that is cut off from the rest of reality. It might at first seem to set up a monomaniacal selfishness, but actually, if practiced carefully, it will undermine the idea of a solid and continuous 'self'. The exercise might also seem to cultivate confusion between things themselves and thoughts about these things and about the world. But this is not the case. By initially forcing the subject and object together in this way, we can soon progress to the perception of a 'time' which naturally gives the subject and object as together. This process also shows the felt difference between the thought about a thing and the 'thing itself'-between the reference and its referent-in a new light. We can progress from an artificial intimacy to an uncontrived one, and further, to an intimacy which simply is and which involves neither a self nor an object. This intimacy does not reach out to things elsewhere, nor does it assimilate them all in an ordinary location 'here'.

The dealers chosen in the initial years all performed well. However, after some years, with changes in the ministry, the Maruti management and board came under a lot of pressure to accommodate unsuitable persons as dealers. Maruti dealerships were very profitable in those days as there was virtually no competition. The dealer did not have to employ any working capital, and the vehicles commanded a premium. The role of the dealer was virtually that of being a distributor. Naturally, getting a dealership was considered to be a very safe way of making money, and hence became an object of political patronage. While senior ministers like N.D. Tiwari and the late J. Vengal Rao kept away from making recommendations for dealerships, their junior ministers did not exercise the same self-restraint. The common perception was that public sector companies were controlled by the ministry, and ministers therefore had the right to give directions to the management on various matters. A minister probably felt that he would lose face if he were to tell a political supporter that he was unable to direct the management of a public sector firm to do a small thing like award a dealership. Unfortunately, most of the recommendations made were for people who were totally unable to meet the minimum requirements for a dealership. One person who came with a strong recommendation was a ‘social worker’ with no assets and no declared source of income. The inability to award a dealership to him made one minister of state very unhappy. Somehow Vengal Rao heard about this matter. He called me and said that under no circumstances was a dealership to be awarded to this person, as it was not a clean case. Some months later, after Vengal Rao had quit his post, the minister of state ordered an enquiry against me in the Kandla transportation case and the extension of my term as managing director was delayed.

In the simpler case of my dog, dogs don't inherit such a rich fund of culturally acquired means of interpreting reality, yet he does grasp things that are not necessarily “bodies out there” as physicalism tries to reduce reality. For instance, he grasps the hierarchy of the pack, the boundaries of the den and various other things that are not physicalist “bodies out there”. He also grasps himself in a certain way, a way that we have difficulty understanding because while it is “like” the way we grasp ourselves, it is also substantially different, and since we don't directly experience his experience of self, we can only imagine it analogously, with the aspects of the way we experience ourselves that have no obvious parallel removed. One of these aspects is what we might call “reflective” or “representational” consciousness, in which what is experienced primarily by intuitive consciousness is represented for examination, investigation, analysis, judgement, etc. Since this mode of consciousness is primary when one is involved in science there is a basic fallacy common to many scientists that this is consciousness in total, apparently forgetting the obvious reality that any representation must have been initially presented in some manner and that presentation experienced, and that that experience of the initial presentation must itself have been a conscious experience.

It does not matter how strong well prepared you are, if you have no direction

Study after study suggests that the pressure society places on women to stay home and do “what’s best for the child” is based on emotion, not evidence. In 1991, the Early Child Care Research Network, under the auspices of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, initiated the most ambitious and comprehensive study to date on the relationship between child care and child development, and in particular on the effect of exclusive maternal care versus child care. The Research Network, which comprised more than thirty child development experts from leading universities across the country, spent eighteen months designing the study. They tracked more than one thousand children over the course of fifteen years, repeatedly assessing the children’s cognitive skills, language abilities, and social behaviors. Dozens of papers have been published about what they found.23 In 2006, the researchers released a report summarizing their findings, which concluded that “children who were cared for exclusively by their mothers did not develop differently than those who were also cared for by others.”24 They found no gap in cognitive skills, language competence, social competence, ability to build and maintain relationships, or in the quality of the mother-child bond.25 Parental behavioral factors—including fathers who are responsive and positive, mothers who favor “self-directed child behavior,” and parents with emotional intimacy in their marriages—influence a child’s development two to three times more than any form of child care.26 One of the findings is worth reading slowly, maybe even twice: “Exclusive maternal care was not related to better or worse outcomes for children. There is, thus, no reason for mothers to feel as though they are harming their children if they decide to work.

The greatest danger, I argued, was posed by the very encounter of Westerners with Tantric doctrine, a doctrine which is, apparently, highly congenial to die Western character. In this respect, I must confess that in writing the original conclusion to Man as Potency , I did not take the necessary precautions ; for, in this first conclusion, I praised the vision of Tantric initiates in almost Nietzschean terms, particularly by contrasting it with that of Christianity. [...] What I have just described reveals the chief (albeit extraneous and contingent) limit of this work of mine. Were Western man — who is the person less qualified (from an existential, if not intellectual point of view) to pursue certain disciplines - to embrace Tantrism directly in other than a purely theoretical fashion, he would almost inevitably fall victim to a destructive short-circuit, of madness or self-annihilation. It is in such terms I hat I personally interpreted the lives of Nietzsche, Michelstaedter and Weinmger (among others), although these individuals had been far from accepting the most radical consequences implied by certain truths.

Whether it be brand marketers trumpeting the new BMW X5, game developers getting players to spend real money on virtual goods, or someone selling an online nursing degree, the only difference is the time frame in which those different goals occur—in other words, the time between attention and action. If the time frame is very short, like browsing for and buying a shirt at nordstroms.com, it’s called “direct response,” or “DR” advertising. If the time frame is very long, such as making you believe life is unlivable outside the pricey mantle of a Burberry coat, it’s called “brand advertising.” Note that the goal is the same in both: to make you buy shit you likely don’t need with money you likely don’t have. In the former case, the trail is easily trackable, as the “conversion” usually happens online, usually after clicking on the very ad you were served.* In the latter, the media employed is a multipronged strategy of Super Bowl ads, Internet advertising, postal mail, free keychains, and God knows what else. Also, the conversion happens way after the initial exposure to the media, and often offline and in a physical space, like at a car dealership. The tracking and attribution are much harder, due to both the manifold media used and the months or years gone by between the exposure and the sale. As such, brand advertising budgets, which are far larger than direct-response ones, are spent in embarrassingly large broadsides, barely targeted or tracked in any way. Now you know all there is to know about advertising. The rest is technical detail and self-promoting bullshit spun by agencies. You’re officially as informed as the media tycoons who run the handful of agencies that manage our media world.

Core subjects include English, reading, and language arts; world languages; arts; mathematics; economics; science; geography; history; and government and civics. Learning and innovation skills are those possessed by students who are prepared for the 21st century and include creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication and collaboration. Information, media, and technology skills are needed to manage the abundance of information and also contribute to the building of it. These include information literacy; media literacy; and information, communications, and technology (ICT) literacy. Life and career skills are those abilities necessary to navigate complex life and work environments. These include flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability, and leadership and responsibility.

Think about it in terms of cognitive dissonance. If I have put up with a lot to become a member of a group, if I have voluntarily subjected myself to acute embarrassment, I would have to be pretty stupid if the group turned out to be anything less than wonderful. To protect my self-esteem I will want to convince myself that the group is pretty damn good. Hence the necessity to talk it up, to reframe my perceptions in a positive direction. None of this applies, of course, if the initiation is simple. If the group turns out to be a waste of time, one can say to oneself honestly, and without any threat to one’s self-esteem, “This place is not worth bothering with.” It is only when we have staked our ego that our mistakes of judgment become threatening. That is when we build defensive walls and deploy cognitive filters.

They were able to step back from their automatic responses and glimpse the full scope of existence. Life, they knew, endured through the cycles of the sun and moon and seasons, but as the dead around them attested, it also had an end. What was the purpose? Looking closely at these reflective individuals, I realized I could perceive their Birth Visions; they had come into the Earthly dimension with the specific purpose of initiating humanity’s first existential awakening. And, even though I couldn’t see its full scope, I knew that in the back of their minds was held the larger inspiration of the World Vision. Before their birth, they were aware that humanity was embarking on a long journey that they could already see. But they also knew that progress along this journey would have to be earned, generation by generation—for as we awakened to pursue a higher destiny, we also lost the calm peace of unconsciousness. Along with the exhilaration and freedom of knowing we were alive came the fear and uncertainty of being alive without knowing why. I could see that humanity’s long history would be moved by these two conflicting urges. On the one hand, we would be moved past our fears by the strength of our intuitions, by our mental images that life was about accomplishing some particular goal, of moving culture forward in a positive direction that only we, as individuals, acting with courage and wisdom, could inspire. From the strength of these feelings we would be reminded that, as insecure as life appeared, we were, in fact, not alone, that there was purpose and meaning underlying the mystery of existence. Yet, on the other hand, we would often fall prey to the opposite urge, the urge to protect ourselves from the Fear, at times losing sight of the purpose, falling into the angst of separation and abandonment. This Fear would lead us into a frightened self-protection, fighting to retain our positions of power, stealing energy from each other, and always resisting change and evolution, regardless of what new, better information might be available. As the awakening continued, millennia passed, and I watched as humans gradually began to coalesce into ever-larger groups, following a natural drive to identify with more people, to move into more complex social organizations. I could see that this drive came from the vague intuition, known fully in the Afterlife, that human destiny on Earth was to evolve toward unification.

think the easiest way to understand the difference is to point out that in Roman pagan thinking all things had their own ‘geni’ and every person possessed their ‘genius.’ To some extent this same thinking can be found among the Greeks in relation to the daimon. The sages understood every person to possess both an eidolon and a daimonic self. For the uninitiated the ‘eidolon’ (much like what is today called an ego) is all they know and the daimon appears as an external agency. But the goal of initiation is to unite daimon and eidolon into a ‘whole self.’ In the language of this book so far we could equate the eidolon with what we have been calling ‘the Shadow’ – this is the normal everyday consciousness of the person. The ‘Skins’ are other forms that may be animated by the Shadow, but the daimonic aspect of consciousness is the most mysterious of all, subtly working through the Shadow at all times, a direct spark of divine fire, the ‘godhead’ dimension of the self that few ever become aware of.