Internal Growth Quotes

Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.

The capacity for growth depends on one’s ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be "solved," then no change will occur.

No two persons can learn something and experience it in the same way.

Self-transformation commences with a period of self-questioning. Questions lead to more questions, bewilderment leads to new discoveries, and growing personal awareness leads to transformation in how a person lives. Purposeful modification of the self only commences with revising our mind’s internal functions. Revamped internal functions eventually alter how we view our external environment.

Your VISION and your self-willingness is the MOST powerful elements to conquer your goal

Of course there were plateaus, periods when my results leveled off while I internalized the information necessary for my next growth spurt, but I didn’t mind.

Maintaining one’s health in today’s toxic rich environment requires proper rest, hydration, an abundant intake of nutrients, and regular internal cleansing practices

I often wish I could go back in time and tell my young, anxious self that my dreams weren't in vain and my sorrows weren't permanent. I can't do that, but I can do something better. I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you; with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

Autumn is a momentum of the natures golden beauty…, so the same it’s time to find your momentum of life

Internal sources of information are those sources that you can find within your own organization.

The ego might resist change until a person’s level of discomfort becomes unbearable. A person can employ logic to overcome the ego’s defense mechanism and intentionally integrate needed revisions in a person’s obsolete or ineffective beliefs and behavior patterns. The subtle sense that something is amiss in a person’s life can lead to a gradual or quick alteration in a person’s conscious thoughts and outlook on life. Resisting change can prolong unhappiness whereas implementing change can establish internal harmony and instate joy in a person’s life.

sometimes deeper mental clarity is preceded by great internal storms healing yourself can be messy seeing yourself through honesty can be jarring and tough; it can even temporarily cause imbalance in your life it is hard work to open yourself up to release your burdens like removing thorns from your body, it may hurt at first, but it is ultimately for your highest good the dark clouds of rainfall are necessary for new growth.

Your traditional EDUCATION is not going to CHANGE your life but the life you are experiencing that can change you. Choose a POSITIVE life STYLE with positive ATTITUDE which could bring you a life with HAPPINESS and WISDOM

Your every positive action in your life will increase your self-esteem and this self-esteem will boost you for more positive action to take you on success

How you think and create your inner world that you gonna become in your outer world. Your inner believe manifest you in the outside

No one 'just adopts'.

Every moment has the possibility of delighting us, nurturing us, supporting us - if we are here to see it. Life is a tremendous gift, but most of us are missing it because we are watching a mental movie of our lives instead. As we learn to trust in the moment and to value awareness, we learn how to turn off the internal mood projector and start living a much more interesting life - the one we are actually starring in.

WONDERLAND It is a person's unquenchable thirst for wonder That sets them on their initial quest for truth. The more doors you open, the smaller you become. The more places you see and the more people you meet, The greater your curiosity grows. The greater your curiosity, the more you will wander. The more you wander, the greater the wonder. The more you quench your thirst for wonder, The more you drink from the cup of life. The more you see and experience, the closer to truth you become. The more languages you learn, the more truths you can unravel. And the more countries you travel, the greater your understanding. And the greater your understanding, the less you see differences. And the more knowledge you gain, the wider your perspective, And the wider your perspective, the lesser your ignorance. Hence, the more wisdom you gain, the smaller you feel. And the smaller you feel, the greater you become. The more you see, the more you love -- The more you love, the less walls you see. The more doors you are willing to open, The less close-minded you will be. The more open-minded you are, The more open your heart. And the more open your heart, The more you will be able to Send and receive -- Truth and TRUE Unconditional LOVE.

If you are not EXCITED enough at your present life its mean your future is not EXITING. Excitement will give you ENTHUSIASM and enthusiasm will give you a positive energetic LIFE STYLE which could give you a successful exiting life…

God helps them that help themselves.” When you begin to help yourself, which means to make the best of what is in yourself, you begin to attract to yourself more and more of those helpful things that may exist all about you. In other words, constructive forces attract constructive forces; positive forces attract positive forces. A growing mind attracts elements and forces that help to promote growth, and people who are determined to make more and more of themselves, are drawn more and more into circumstances through which they will find the opportunity to make more of themselves. And this law works not only in connection with the external world, but also the internal world. When you begin to make a positive determined use of those powers in yourself that are already in positive action, you draw forth into action powers within you that have been dormant, and as this process continues, you will find that you will accumulate volume, capacity and power in your mental world, until you finally become a mental giant.

These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as “product marketing professionals,” “growth hackers,” “creative rockstar interns,” and “public speakers.

The depressed person’s therapist was always extremely careful to avoid appearing to judge or blame the depressed person for clinging to her defenses, or to suggest that the depressed person had in any way consciously chosen or chosen to cling to a chronic depression whose agony made her (i.e., the depressed person’s) every waking hour feel like more than any person could possibly endure. This renunciation of judgment or imposed value was held by the therapeutic school in which the therapist’s philosophy of healing had evolved over almost fifteen years of clinical experience to be integral to the combination of unconditional support and complete honesty about feelings which composed the nurturing professionalism required for a productive therapeutic journey toward authenticity and intrapersonal wholeness. Defenses against intimacy, the depressed person’s therapist’s experiential theory held, were nearly always arrested or vestigial survival-mechanisms; i.e., they had, at one time, been environmentally appropriate and necessary and had very probably served to shield a defenseless childhood psyche against potentially unbearable trauma, but in nearly all cases they (i.e., the defense-mechanisms) had become inappropriately imprinted and arrested and were now, in adulthood, no longer environmentally appropriate and in fact now, paradoxically, actually caused a great deal more trauma and pain than they prevented. Nevertheless, the therapist had made it clear from the outset that she was in no way going to pressure, hector, cajole, argue, persuade, flummox, trick, harangue, shame, or manipulate the depressed person into letting go of her arrested or vestigial defenses before she (i.e., the depressed person) felt ready and able to risk taking the leap of faith in her own internal resources and self-esteem and personal growth and healing to do so (i.e., to leave the nest of her defenses and freely and joyfully fly).

CONFIDENCE is not showing off your VANITY, it’s about to be HUMBLED and KIND to others what are you truly SKILLED and PROFESSIONAL about…

Give yourself a great self-respect to know who you are then your confidence will shine on you

My body is a political battlefield. It is a place of war, of death and suffering, of triumph and victory, of damage and repair, of blood and tears and sweat. It is a place where memories go to find purpose for their existence. It is a place where humans cast all inhibitions aside to discover what exists at their very core. It is a place of growth wearing a mask of destruction. It is a challenge, not for the faint of heart, beckoning us to face it with eyes wide open. The only war is within. When you are ready to fight it, the field awaits.

If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I do not know. But the sexual specificity of the phenomenon leads me to suspect that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love is a stereotypic response of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual stimuli, which serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of the species. Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage. Frequently the trick goes awry one way or another, as when the sexual drives and stimuli are homosexual or when other forces-parental interference, mental illness, conflicting responsibilities or mature self-disciplinesupervene to prevent the bonding. On the other hand, without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary (it would not be practical were it not temporary) regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in whole- hearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows.

Young children begin very early to internalize information that either encourages or discourages self-disclosure. Cues are intuitively understood. Most of what we feel is unexamined and articulated. Cultural norms are unwittingly absorbed. We learn when to speak and when to stay silent. - Pam MacRae (Ch. 2)

Some of those solutions include halting population growth, limiting or eliminating nuclear weapons, developing peaceful means for solving international disputes, reducing our impact on the environment, and preserving species and natural habitats.

People who suffer the most often inflict the most pain onto others. Compassion can be found through understanding this. When someone is internally suffering, sometimes the only reality they know is that of pain and thus their only knowledge is how to be a victim or an abuser. That’s all they are able to communicate. Holding onto the thorn of resentment does not help them or you, but fostering compassion and forgiveness will.

Talking to oneself is a recognized means to learn, in fact, self-speak may be the seed concept behind human consciousness. Private conversation that we hold with ourselves might represent the preeminent means to provoke the speaker into thinking (a form of cognitive auto-stimulation), modify behavior, and perhaps even amend the functional architecture of the plastic human brain. Writing out our private talks with oneself enables a person to “see” what they think, a process that invites reflection, ongoing thoughtful discourse with the self, and refinement of our thinking patterns and beliefs. Internal sotto voice conversations with our private-self provide several advantages, but most people find it difficult to maintain self-speak for an extended period. Internal dialogue must compete with external distractions. Writing allows a person to resume a personal dialogue where they left off before interrupted by outside stimuli. A written disquisition also provides a permanent record that a person can examine, amend, supplement, update, or reject.

Our souls gravitate toward the things meant for us, and everything that is meant for us isn't necessarily pretty, but whatever we are pulled toward is necessary for our growth.

As the expert in knowing yourself, you get to decide what you want to explore in your internal landscape.

REJECTION is kind of your negative ILLUSION which has no value but it’s give you a CLUE to go for next level of your ACTION.

Be the master of your personal internal universe.

It might be uncomfortable. But it's an opportunity. An opportunity for what? Personal growth. Internally, I sighed. Wretched personal growth. Always so unpleasant.

No matter how much pain or dysfunction you have to deal with in your life, every part of your psyche is doing its best to help you

Religion is the process of internal growth, not a lifeless bag of foolish words.

when you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it's can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS

Your personal growth depends on your relationship remaining safe and secure at all times, because if either of you feel the least bit unsafe, untrusting, or insecure, you won’t have the internal resources for personal growth. Instead, your mind and body will be preoccupied by doubt and threat.

What makes America unique is not that it built MIT, or that its grads are generating economic growth and innovation, but that every state in the country has universities trying to do the same. “America has 4,000 colleges and universities,” said Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education. “The rest of the world combined has 7,768 institutions of higher education.

It takes courage to dream, to face our futures and the limiting forces within us. It takes courage to be determined that, as we slow down physically, we are going to grow even more psychologically and spiritually. Courage, the philosopher Aristotle taught us, is the most important of all the virtues, because without it we can’t practice any of the others. Courage is the nearest star that can guide our growth. Maya Angelou said we must be courageous about facing and exploring our personal histories. We must find the courage to care and to create internally, as well as externally, and as she said, we need the courage “to create ourselves daily as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings.

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Any particular advance has been preceded by the contributions of those from many lands who have set firm foundations for further developments. The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved. Further, science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

One of the main tools for entering into the vivid immediacy of quiet mind is "not knowing." Ordinarily, our minds are filled with all kinds of opinions about who we are, what we are doing, what is important and not important, what is right and wrong, and how things ought to turn out. Because our mind is full of opinions and old thoughts, it has no internal space for a fresh impression of the real world around us. We learn nothing new. This also prevents us from really seeing other people - especially the people we love. We imagine that we really know people or even what they are thinking. Many of us know from experience, though, that to experience freshly someone we know can instantly transform our state and theirs. In some cases, this can save a relationship. Not knowing involves suspending our opinions and letting our curiosity within the realm of quiet mind take the lead.

From a scientific perspective the truly revolutionary character of the Industrial Revolution was the dramatic change from an open system where energy is supplied externally by the sun to a closed system where energy is supplied internally by fossil fuel.

I borrowed strength from my position and authority and forced her to do what I wanted her to do. But borrowing strength builds weakness. It builds weakness in the borrower because it reinforces dependence on external factors to get things done. It builds weakness in the person forced to acquiesce, stunting the development of independent reasoning, growth, and internal discipline. And finally, it builds weakness in the relationship. Fear replaces cooperation, and both people involved become more arbitrary and defensive.

China and India have been striking examples of poor countries whose abandonment of severe international trade and investment restrictions led to dramatic increases in their economic growth rates, which in turn led to tens of millions of their citizens rising out of poverty.

The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making: the internal shutdown of vulnerability. From the latin word vulnerare, ‘to wound’, vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotions is a helpless child’s prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. ‘Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,’ wrote the American novelist Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March; ‘if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.’ Intuitively we all know that it’s better to feel than not to feel. Beyond their energizing subjective change, emotions have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us and offer us vital information. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see or hear or taste or sense heat or cold or physical pain. Emotional shutdown is similar. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are. They make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful and meaningful. When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound as ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness…

It builds weakness in the person forced to acquiesce, stunting the development of independent reasoning, growth, and internal discipline. And finally, it builds weakness in the relationship. Fear replaces cooperation, and both people involved become more arbitrary and defensive.

If you'd told me even a year before...that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin. I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director...a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.

All of this highlights several important ideas. First, growth under authoritarian, extractive political institutions in China, though likely to continue for a while yet, will not translate into sustained growth, supported by truly inclusive economic institutions and creative destruction. Second, contrary to the claims of modernization theory, we should not count on authoritarian growth leading to democracy or inclusive political institutions. China, Russia, and several other authoritarian regimes currently experiencing some growth are likely to reach the limits of extractive growth before they transform their political institutions in a more inclusive direction—and in fact, probably before there is any desire among the elite for such changes or any strong opposition forcing them to do so. Third, authoritarian growth is neither desirable nor viable in the long run, and thus should not receive the endorsement of the international community as a template for nations in Latin America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, even if it is a path that many nations will choose precisely because it is sometimes consistent with the interests of the economic and political elites dominating them. Y

Success is a spiritual process, not a worldly one; that is to say it is an internal process, and not external.

Setting a goal is like to set your destination point in your life GPS which could take you to your desire position as you dreamed about...

Of course there were plateaus, periods when my results leveled off while I internalized the information necessary for my next growth spurt,

They fail to consult or listen to the God within them, the knowledge of rightness which inherently resides within the minds of all mankind. We make this failure because we are lazy. It is work to hold these internal debates. They require time and energy just to conduct them. And if we take them seriously—if we seriously listen to this “God within us”—we usually find ourselves being urged to take the more difficult path, the path of more effort rather than less. To conduct the debate is to open ourselves to suffering and struggle. Each and every one of us, more or less frequently, will hold back from this work, will also seek to avoid this painful step. Like Adam and Eve, and every one of our ancestors before us, we are all

Perhaps an even more remarkable contribution of Britain to the growth of freedom in the world was its leading role in the destruction of the international slave trade, and then of slavery itself.

After the 1948 war, there were approximately 700,000 displaced people. Now UNRWA has 5.6 MILLION ‘refugees’ registered in their books… (The refugee status is passed down through the generations.) ...UNRWA keeps the Palestinian people in an eternal loop of displacement. Instead of solving the problem in any meaningful way, they have overseen the problem’s exponential growth… The best way to keep the war with Israel alive is to maintain a perpetual ‘refugee problem’ under UN legitimacy, which maintains an international concept of ‘right of return,’ at the cost of so many hopeless generations.

In this century wars will not be fought over oil, as in the past, but over water. The situation is becoming desperate. The world's water is strained by population growth. There is no more fresh water on earth than two thousand years ago when the population was three percent of its current size. Even without the inevitable droughts, like the current one, it will get worse as demand and pollution increase. Some countries will simply run out of water, sparking a global refugee crisis. Tens of millions of people will flood across international borders. It means the collapse of fisheries, environmental destruction, conflict, lower living standards." She paused for a moment. "As people who deal with the ocean you must see the irony. We are facing a shortage on a planet whose surface is covered two-thirds with water.

Eventually, however, the fact that many once-poor places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore achieved prosperity through freer international trade and investment became so blatant and so widely known that, by the end of the twentieth century, the governments of many other countries began abandoning their zero-sum view of economic transactions. China and India have been striking examples of poor countries whose abandonment of severe international trade and investment restrictions led to dramatic increases in their economic growth rates, which in turn led to tens of millions of their citizens rising out of poverty.

Once we learn how to use adversity to our advantage, we can manufacture the helpful growth opportunity without actual danger or injury. I call this tool the internal solution—we can notice external events that trigger helpful growth or performance opportunities, and then internalize the effects of those events without their actually happening. In this way, adversity becomes a tremendous source of creative inspiration.

We must think of ourselves as a tribe — as an international community that has come together with a common purpose of being initiated into the process. We all have to do it together. There is a link that happens — where THE growth, my growth, depends on the others' growth around us. We can no longer take these steps by ourselves. We have created a synergistic community. We must take a step towards knowledge together.

It started as a youth movement, with educated disgruntled Europeans alienated by the competitive market (or neo-liberal) approach of the European Union project that was urging them on to a life of jobs, flexibility and faster economic growth. But their Eurocentric origins soon gave way to internationalism, as they saw their predicament of multiple insecurities linked to what was happening to others all over the world. Migrants became a substantial part of the precariat demonstrations.

A king or despot can maintain his power if he is astute in internal politics and successful externally. If he is quasi-divine, his dynasty may be prolonged indefinitely. But the growth of civilisation puts an end to belief in his divinity; defeat in war is not always avoidable; and political astuteness cannot be an invariable attribute of monarchs. Therefore sooner or later, if there is no external conquest, there is revolution, and the monarchy is either abolished or shorn of its power.

But when there isn’t a return to homeostasis (because you keep perceiving a threat), vital energy is lost in the system. You have less energy in your internal environment for cell growth and repair, long-term building projects on a cellular level, and healing when that energy is being channeled elsewhere. The cells shut down, they no longer communicate with one another, and they become “selfish.” It’s not time for routine maintenance (let alone for making improvements); it’s time for defense.

The obvious pollution occurring in many places - worst of all, in the planned societies- has encouraged the growth of the environmental movement, which, however, as shown in previous chapters, has an agenda that goes far beyond clean-up and beautification, far beyond the stewardship of nature that is commanded by ancient religious tradition. Embracing the "biospheric vision" in the "spirit of deep ecology", the movement sees human beings as the chief enemy in the struggle on behalf of a deified Nature. The environmental movement, therefore, is the perfect vehicle for population control. It is popular - people do love trees and animals and beautiful scenery - and it is unequivocal in its devotion to reducing human numbers. The environmental agencies of the United Nations, with their chilling blueprints for "demographic transition" and a standardless, undefined but totally planned and controlled "sustainable development", combine the fervor of nature worship with the lack of accountability of an unelected, international bureaucracy.

True sanctification, true growth in holiness, is internal. It will manifest itself on the outside; "The tree is known by its fruit" (Matt. 12:33). But the tree creates the fruit; the fruit does not create the tree. Edward Fisher, in his famous Puritan treatise on sanctification, explained that external conformity to rules without an internal reality fueling it is akin to watering every part of a tree except its roots and expecting it to grow. The internal realities of the Christian are what define true growth in Christ.

In the 1954 Internal Revenue Code, a Republican Congress changed forty-year, straight-line depreciation for buildings to permit 'accelerated depreciation' of greenfield income-producing property in seven years. By enabling owners to depreciate or write off the value of a building in such a short time, the law created a gigantic hidden subsidy for the developers of cheap new commercial buildings located on strips. Accelerated depreciation not only encouraged poor construction, it also discouraged maintenance...After time, the result was abandonment.

The book describes the death experience in terms of the different elements of the body, going deeper and deeper. Physically you feel heavy when the earth element dissolves into water; and when water dissolves into fire you find that the circulation begins to cease functioning. When fire dissolves into air, any feeling of warmth or growth begins to dissolve; and when air dissolves into space you lose the last feeling of contact with the physical world. Finally, when space or consciousness dissolves into the central nāḍī, there is a sense of internal luminosity, an inner glow, when everything has become completely introverted.

The independent growth of state business was caused by a conflict with the financially powerful forces of the time, with the bourgeoisie which went the way of private investment, shunned all state intervention, and refused active financial participation in what appeared to be an “unproductive” enterprise. Thus the Jews were the only part of the population willing to finance the state’s beginnings and to tie their destinies to its further development. With their credit and international connections, they were in an excellent position to help the nation-state to establish itself among the biggest enterprises and employers of the time.9

Today, nearly every government in the world, rich and poor alike, is focused single-mindedly on GDP growth. This is no longer a matter of choice. In a globalised world where capital can move freely across borders at the click of a mouse, nations are forced to compete with one another to attract foreign investment. Governments find themselves under pressure to cut workers’ rights, slash environmental protections, open up public land to developers, privatise public services – whatever it takes to please the barons of international capital in what has become a global rush towards self-imposed structural adjustment. All of this is done in the name of growth.

Philosophically defined, growth is the struggle of life to control its environment or, rather, to include more and more of its environment within the area of its own self-knowing. Perfect freedom of expression is the goal of all life. All things, both animate and inanimate, are striving for that freedom which lies in perfect expression. It naturally follows that there is but one freedom – perfection. Every creature is a slave to those parts of itself as yet unresponsive to the impulses of its internal life principle. Every individual consequently is a slave to his own material constitution; he is a prisoner held in by walls of unresponsive substance. Thus the natural expression of the inner life principle is to refine and improve the qualities of its outer vehicles that it may the more easily control and direct them. It is evident that the more refined the substance, the more easily it is influenced by subtle forces. By a certain definite organization, consciousness equips its outer nature with organs of responsiveness, so that the lower self comes ever more nearly en rapport with its own Cause. A common example is the radio, which is a mechanical contrivance constructed according to definite scientific principles which enable it to pick up vibratory rates of sound inaudible to even the delicate mechanism of the human ear.

Recently, the International Monetary Fund published a report which revealed that too much inequality even inhibits economic growth.22 Perhaps the most fascinating finding, however, is that even rich people suffer when inequality becomes too great. They, too, become more prone to depression, suspicion, and myriad other social difficulties.

Many security analysts still believe that agencies are a poor investment. Not so Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in the world. He has taken substantial positions in three publicly held agencies, and is quoted as saying, ‘The best business is a royalty on the growth of others, requiring very little capital itself … such as the top international advertising agencies.’ If

When someone with a dismissive style starts to work on healing their insecure attachment, they must begin by no longer dismissing and distancing from themselves. This requires that they no longer deny their desires and needs, allowing the longings and wants for connection that have for so long been forbidden. When someone functioning from a dismissive style starts to allow their attachment system to come back online, it can initially be a very tender, raw and even overwhelming process. The skills that come with being able to identify your own feelings are part of a developmental process that takes time. The process of allowing feelings as they arise, learning how to self-soothe and establishing an inner trust that experiencing feelings is safe, cannot be rushed. For the dismissive style, the journey from insecure to secure attachment is one of returning to the body through bringing feelings and sensations back to life and learning how to be with oneself in this process. Once this is established, the risk of then leaning into others, revealing one's internal world, and dismantling the self-reliant exoskeleton through asking for help and care from others can begin.

And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one,—to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory.

Finally, I think we believe that when we see an opportunity , we have the duty to work for the growth of that international community of knowledge and understanding with our colleagues in other lands , with our colleagues in competing, antagonistic, possibly hostile lands, with our colleagues and with others with whom we have any community f interest, any community of professional, of human, of political concern. [...] We think of this as our contribution to the making of a world which is varied and cherishes variety, which is free and cherishes freedom, and which is freely changing to adapt to the inevitable needs of change in the twentieth century and all centuries to come, but a world which, with all its variety, freedom, and change, is without nation states armed for war and above all, a world without war.

Every pregnancy results in roughly two years of lost menstruation. If you are a manufacturer of menstrual pads, this is bad for business. So you ought to know about, and be so happy about, the drop in babies per woman across the world. You ought to know and be happy too about the growth in the number of educated women working away from home. Because these developments have created an exploding market for your products over the last few decades among billions of menstruating women now living on Levels 2 and 3. But, as I realized when I attended an internal meeting at one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of sanitary wear, most Western manufacturers have completely missed this. Instead, when hunting for new customers they are often stuck dreaming up new needs among the 300 million menstruating women on Level 4. “What if we market an even thinner pad for bikinis? What about pads that are invisible, to wear under Lycra? How about one pad for each kind of outfit, each situation, each sport? Special pads for mountain climbers!” Ideally, all the pads are so small they need to be replaced several times a day. But like most rich consumer markets, the basic needs are already met, and producers fight in vain to create demand in ever-smaller segments. Meanwhile, on Levels 2 and 3, roughly 2 billion menstruating women have few alternatives to choose from. These women don’t wear Lycra and won’t spend money on ultrathin pads. They demand a low-cost pad that will be reliable throughout the day so they don’t have to change it when they are out at work. And when they find a product they like, they will probably stick to that brand for their whole lives and recommend it to their daughters.

With the growth of market individualism comes a corollary desire to look for collective, democratic responses when major dislocations of financial collapse, unemployment, heightened inequality, runaway inflation, and the like occur. The more such dislocations occur, the more powerful and internalized, Hayek insists, neoliberal ideology must become; it must become embedded in the media, in economic talking heads, in law and the jurisprudence of the courts, in government policy, and in the souls of participants. Neoliberal ideology must become a machine or engine that infuses economic life as well as a camera that provides a snapshot of it. That means, in turn, that the impersonal processes of regulation work best if courts, churches, schools, the media, music, localities, electoral politics, legislatures, monetary authorities, and corporate organizations internalize and publicize these norms.

The short-termism among US policymakers has meant that the gains from globalization have been misallocated in a way that frustrated millions of Americans and spurred the populist reaction witnessed in 2016. As Alibaba founder Jack Ma pointed out at the Economic Forum in 2017, by choosing to spend $14.2 trillion fighting thirteen wars over three decades, rather than investing in America’s infrastructure, industry, and jobs, policymakers misallocated the wins from globalization. What was clear is that even thirty years ago, industrial jobs in the United States were already on the decline and exposing the economy to greater competition inherent in open international trade, further harming the American worker. The outcome was a missed opportunity to distribute the gains of globalization more widely (and in particular to America’s Rust Belt) and to fund a longer-term infrastructure investment strategy to galvanize the US economy.

PROJECTILE, n. The final arbiter in international disputes. Formerly these disputes were settled by physical contact of the disputants, with such simple arguments as the rudimentary logic of the times could supply—the sword, the spear, and so forth. With the growth of prudence in military affairs the projectile came more and more into favor, and is now held in high esteem by the most courageous. Its capital defect is that it requires personal attendance at the point of propulsion.

Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are common themes in the American culture today. Folks sometimes mistake my meaning when I say, “You have the freedom of choice and the ability to create your best life”, because they all too often rush to drop everything that is weighing them down. They quit the job, ditch the unhappy marriage, cut out negative friends and family, get out of Dodge, etc. I do not advocate such hastiness; in fact, I believe that rash decision-making leads to more problems further down the road. Another unsatisfying job manifests; another unhappy relationship results. These people want a new environment, yet the same negative energy always seems to occupy it. This is because transformation is all about the internal shift, not the external. Any blame placed on outside sources for our unhappiness will forever perpetuate that unhappiness. Pointing the finger is giving away your power of choice and the ability to create our best life. We choose: “That person is making me unhappy” vs. “I make myself happy.” When you are in unhappy times of lack and feelings of separation – great! Sit there and be with it. Find ways to be content with little. Find ways to be happy with your Self. As we reflect on the lives of mystics past and present, it is not the things they possess or the relationships they share that bring them enlightenment – their light is within. The same light can bring us unwavering happiness (joy). Love, Peace, Joy – these three things all come from within and have an unwavering flame – life source – that is not dependent on the conditions of the outside world. This knowing is the power and wisdom that the mystics teach us that we are all capable of achieving. When I say, “You have the freedom of choice and the ability to create your best life”, I am not referring to external conditions; I am referring to the choice you have to look inward and discover the ability to transform the lead of the soul into gold. Transformation is an inner journey of the soul. Why? Because, as we mentioned above, wherever we go, ourselves go with us. Thus, quitting the job, dumping relationships, etc. will not make us happy because we have forgotten the key factor that makes or breaks our happiness: ourselves. When we find, create, and maintain peace, joy, and love within ourselves, we then gain the ability to embrace the external world with the same emotions, perspective, and vibration. This ability is a form of enlightenment. It is the modern man’s enlightenment that transforms an unsatisfying life into one of fulfillment.

At a private lunch when I recently asked one of the world’s highest-ranking international diplomats what, among all the possible scenarios for Pakistan, was the most positive vision she held, everyone around the table laughed nervously. This diplomat was surprisingly honest. She admitted that she had not one positive vision for Pakistan. She was candid about a view that leaders widely hold but seldom acknowledge: humanity is on a slippery slope of resource depletion. It is unlikely leaders can do anything about it. Hence, their job is to make sure their people will lose last. This means securing for their people enough resources from the globe’s diminishing resource pie to ensure that their nation will float even if others sink. From this vantage point, money shields a population from losing first. Leaders beholden to this view therefore embrace even more vigorously GDP growth as their key objective; the financial advantage will allow their constituency to stay just a bit further ahead of the others in the resource race to 2052.

An economically weakened and isolationist America will call into question the Pax Americana, whereby the United States oversees international peace and security, and thus expose the world to the unpredictable whims and values of nondemocratic powers. These are not the solutions the world needs. Creating sustainable economic growth in the twenty-first century requires no less than aggressively retooling history’s greatest engine of growth, democratic capitalism itself. This requires a clear-eyed assessment of how ineffective the system is in its current state, politically as well as economically—and then implementing the repairs that will yield better outcomes. Too much is at stake for us to remain wedded to the status quo. The ominous rise of protectionism and nationalism throughout the world portend that the global economy and community are eroding already. The only way forward is to preserve the best of liberal democratic capitalism and to repair the worst. We cannot cling to past practices and old ideologies simply for their own sake. Doing nothing is no choice at all.

I don't worry about how other people perceive me. I figure out what I want, and I work very hard to make it happen. Simple recipe. I didn't achieve any goals by having it given to me on a silver platter, through fibbing or exaggeration, nor through favours. When you work hard, the universe almost always brings people to you - synergy. The universe will reflect the energy you give it. Stop worrying about what other people think of you, or worrying about the limit(s) they have, in their heads, about your potential. The universe will bring you into your purpose organically. Nothing out of force tastes as good as what you have worked your ass off to achieve, and for which the universe synergistically opens up for you, and brings into your world. As well it is not about proving other people wrong; first and foremost prove your own negative inner voice wrong. The inner voice that internalized the negative energies of others. Sometimes we are our own biggest hurdle. And as a subsequent outcome of rewiring your inner voice, you'll leave others speechless at contesting their limitations of you...seeing the supernova you are.

Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then, that the world of humanity is so full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived. Bryant Wedge, a psychiatrist specializing in the field of international relations, studied negotiations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. and was able to delineate a number of basic assumptions as to the nature of human beings and society and the world held by Americans which differed dramatically from the assumptions of Russians. These assumptions dictated the negotiating behavior of both sides. Yet neither side was aware of its own assumptions or the fact that the other side was operating on a different set of assumptions. The inevitable result was that the negotiating behavior of the Russians seemed to the Americans to be either crazy or deliberately evil, and of course the Americans seemed to the Russians equally crazy or evil.24 We are indeed like the three proverbial blind men, each in touch with only his particular piece of the elephant yet each claiming to know the nature of the whole beast. So we squabble over our different microcosmic world views, and all wars are holy wars.

The great heaps of sediment also underscore an amazing fact about the Earth: that the speeds of tectonic processes, driven by the internal radioactive heat of the Earth are, by happy coincidence, about evenly matched 13 by the tempo of external agents of erosion— wind, rain, rivers, glaciers— powered by gravity and solar energy. In the barbershop analogy, it is as if the hair on a customer’s head keeps growing as fast as the barber can cut it. And while the tectonic growth and erosional trimming of mountains both proceed at an average pace that is deliberate, they are not so slow as to be beyond our perception.

When I was 15 years old, I came in contact with my first ashram, my first spiritual commune, in the form of Ljusbacken ("The Hill of Light") in Delsbo in beautiful Halsingland in the north of Sweden. Ljusbacken consisted of an international gathering of yogis, meditators, therapists, healers and seekers of truth. It was on Ljusbacken that I for the first time came in contact with my path in life: meditation. It was also on Ljusbacken that I meet people for the first time in my 15 year old life, where I on a deep wordless level felt that I meet people, who were on the same path as me. It was the first time that I meet people, who could put words on and confirm my own inner thirst after something that I could only occasionally sense vaguely, like some sort of inner guiding presence, or like a beacon in the distant far out on the open and misty ocean. For the first time in my life, I meet brothers, sisters and friends on the inner path. It was also on Ljusbacken that I meet the mystery called love for the first time in my 15 year old life. With my 15 year old eyes, I watched with wide eyed fascination and fear filled excitement the incomprehensible mystery, which is called woman. My own thirst after truth, together with my inner guiding light, resulted in an early spiritual awakening when I was 15 years old. It led me back to the inner path, which I have already followed for many lives. It led me back to a life lived with vision, with dedication and meaning, and not only a life governed by the endless desires of the ego, a mere vegetating without substance between life and death. It led me to explore the inner journey again, to discover the inner being, the meditative quality within, and to come in intimate contact with the endless and boundless ocean of consciousness, like the drop surrenders to the sea. At the source, the drop and ocean are one.

It is too soon to say when or how this era will end or what will succeed it. But what is clear is that a good many of the trends are worrisome. If, for example, a Sino-American cold war materializes, it is quite possible this era may come to be known as the inter–Cold War era, one bookended by the U.S.-Soviet Cold War and one between the United States and China. Such an outcome would result in lower rates of economic growth for both because trade and investment would inevitably be curtailed. It would also reduce the potential for cooperation on regional and global issues. If the liberal world order is sustained and strengthened with the United States resuming a leading role, this could continue to be an era largely characterized by stability, prosperity, and freedom. It is possible, though, that the United States will choose to largely abandon its leading role in the world. In this case, we could in principle see an era of Chinese primacy, but given China’s character, internal constraints, and the nature and scale of the domestic challenges it faces, this is improbable. More likely is that this will turn out to be an era of deterioration, one in which no country or group of countries exercises effective global leadership. In that case, the future would be one of accelerating global disorder.

Here’s a Reader’s Digest version of my approach. I select mutual funds that have had a good track record of winning for more than five years, preferably for more than ten years. I don’t look at their one-year or three-year track records because I think long term. I spread my retirement, investing evenly across four types of funds. Growth and Income funds get 25 percent of my investment. (They are sometimes called Large Cap or Blue Chip funds.) Growth funds get 25 percent of my investment. (They are sometimes called Mid Cap or Equity funds; an S&P Index fund would also qualify.) International funds get 25 percent of my investment. (They are sometimes called Foreign or Overseas funds.) Aggressive Growth funds get the last 25 percent of my investment. (They are sometimes called Small Cap or Emerging Market funds.) For a full discussion of what mutual funds are and why I use this mix, go to daveramsey.com and visit MyTotalMoneyMakeover.com. The invested 15 percent of your income should take advantage of all the matching and tax advantages available to you. Again, our purpose here is not to teach the detailed differences in every retirement plan out there (see my other materials for that), but let me give you some guidelines on where to invest first. Always start where you have a match. When your company will give you free money, take it. If your 401(k) matches the first 3 percent, the 3 percent you put in will be the first 3 percent of your 15 percent invested. If you don’t have a match, or after you have invested through the match, you should next fund Roth IRAs. The Roth IRA will allow you to invest up to $5,000 per year, per person. There are some limitations as to income and situation, but most people can invest in a Roth IRA. The Roth grows tax-FREE. If you invest $3,000 per year from age thirty-five to age sixty-five, and your mutual funds average 12 percent, you will have $873,000 tax-FREE at age sixty-five. You have invested only $90,000 (30 years x 3,000); the rest is growth, and you pay no taxes. The Roth IRA is a very important tool in virtually anyone’s Total Money Makeover. Start with any match you can get, and then fully fund Roth IRAs. Be sure the total you are putting in is 15 percent of your total household gross income. If not, go back to 401(k)s, 403(b)s, 457s, or SEPPs (for the self-employed), and invest enough so that the total invested is 15 percent of your gross annual pay. Example: Household Income $81,000 Husband $45,000 Wife $36,000 Husband’s 401(k) matches first 3%. 3% of 45,000 ($1,350) goes into the 401(k). Two Roth IRAs are next, totaling $10,000. The goal is 15% of 81,000, which is $12,150. You have $11,350 going in. So you bump the husband’s 401(k) to 5%, making the total invested $12,250.

The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather, macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.

The intuition we refer to then bears above all upon internal duration. It grasps a succession which is not juxtaposition, a growth from within, the uninterrupted prolongation of the past into a present which is already blending into the future. It is the direct vision of the mind by the mind,—nothing intervening, no refraction through the prism, one of whose facets is space and another, language. Instead of states contiguous to states, which become words in juxtaposition to words, we have here the indivisible and therefore substantial continuity of the flow of the inner life. Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.—

As a result of the experience of consistent parental love and caring throughout childhood, such fortunate children will enter adulthood not only with a deep internal sense of their own value but also with a deep internal sense of security. All children are terrified of abandonment, and with good reason. This fear of abandonment begins around the age of six months, as soon as the child is able to perceive itself to be an individual, separate from its parents. For with this perception of itself as an individual comes the realization that as an individual it is quite helpless, totally dependent and totally at the mercy of its parents for all forms of sustenance and means of survival. To the child, abandonment by its parents is the equivalent of death. Most parents, even when they are otherwise relatively ignorant or callous, are instinctively sensitive to their children’s fear of abandonment and will therefore, day in and day out, hundreds and thousands of times, offer their children needed reassurance: “You know Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to leave you behind”; “Of course Mommy and Daddy will come back to get you”; “Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to forget about you.” If these words are matched by deeds, month in and month out, year in and year out, by the time of adolescence the child will have lost the fear of abandonment and in its stead will have a deep inner feeling that the world is a safe place in which to be and protection will be there when it is needed. With this internal sense of the consistent safety of the world, such a child is free to delay gratification of one kind or another, secure in the knowledge that the opportunity for gratification, like home and parents, is always there, available when needed.

Select people find themselves early on in life, while other people undergo painful stages of vast changes. Some people never exhibit a centralizing persona and they tend to undergo a series of crisis throughout their lives. I observed some friends, family members, and other acquaintances at various stages in their lives and they seem virtually the same person years later. I am a person who cyclically turns himself inside out after crashing and burning, failing, and then reassembling the seeds of defeat into new victories, only to run aground again. I mentally and emotionally resist change and must consciously force a personal metamorphosis. Could I radically change again? Did I possess the internal reserves to weather a period of reconstitution and then make myself over into a new prototype? Can I will myself to becoming the person I aspire to be? Can I take advantage of human consciousness to broker a way out of self-defeat and a misery-ridden life?

The opposite of alienation is integration, a psychological sense of connection and wholeness.[1] People whose identities are integrated can see a through-line connecting the many selves they have been across various times and places. Every human being changes over time, of course, and alters their behavior depending on the situation or setting they’re in. There is no static “true self” that stops adapting and changing. To a masked Autistic person, this fact can be really disturbing, because we may lack a consistent “story” to tell ourselves about who we really are. Our personalities are just means to an end, externally motivated rather than driven by some internal force or desire. Someone with an integrated identity isn’t disturbed by change and variance, though, because they see a connection that endures across the many people they have been: core values that persist across their life span, and a narrative of personal growth that explains how they moved from the person they once were, to who they are today.[2]

Culture and civilization are two inseparable aspects of the lifestyle of a community, country, or nation. A man may be considered cultured if he dresses nicely and then presents himself before others—but this does not necessarily make him a civilized person. Civilization refers to the way a nation thinks and feels; to its development of ideals such as non-killing, compassion, sincerity, and faithfulness. Culture is an external way of life. Culture is a flower, while civilization is like the fragrance of the flower. A man may be poor and yet be a civilized person. A cultured man, without civilization, who may be successful in the external world is not helpful for society, because he lacks the inner qualities and virtues which enrich the growth of the individual and the nation. Culture is external, civilization is internal. In the modern world the integration of these two is necessary. Indian civilization is very rich, but its culture has become a pseudo-English culture which still creates problems in India today.

What are the health effects of the choice between austerity and stimulus? Today there is a vast natural experiment being conducted on the body economic. It is similar to the policy experiments that occurred in the Great Depression, the post-communist crisis in eastern Europe, and the East Asian Financial Crisis. As in those prior trials, health statistics from the Great Recession reveal the deadly price of austerity—a price that can be calculated not just in the ticks to economic growth rates, but in the number of years of life lost and avoidable deaths. Had the austerity experiments been governed by the same rigorous standards as clinical trials, they would have been discontinued long ago by a board of medical ethics. The side effects of the austerity treatment have been severe and often deadly. The benefits of the treatment have failed to materialize. Instead of austerity, we should enact evidence-based policies to protect health during hard times. Social protection saves lives. If administered correctly, these programs don’t bust the budget, but—as we have shown throughout this book—they boost economic growth and improve public health. Austerity’s advocates have ignored evidence of the health and economic consequences of their recommendations. They ignore it even though—as with the International Monetary Fund—the evidence often comes from their own data. Austerity’s proponents, such as British Prime Minister David Cameron, continue to write prescriptions of austerity for the body economic, in spite of evidence that it has failed. Ultimately austerity has failed because it is unsupported by sound logic or data. It is an economic ideology. It stems from the belief that small government and free markets are always better than state intervention. It is a socially constructed myth—a convenient belief among politicians taken advantage of by those who have a vested interest in shrinking the role of the state, in privatizing social welfare systems for personal gain. It does great harm—punishing the most vulnerable, rather than those who caused this recession.

Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 of the Big Five Extinctions: the End-Permian and the End-Triassic. And quite possibly it was a major factor in a third, the End-Cretaceous. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis—many plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels—and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous. Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers. (The term calcifier applies to any organism that builds a shell or external skeleton or, in the case of plants, a kind of internal scaffolding out of the mineral calcium carbonate.)... Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to organisms that build shells or exoskeletons. Imagine trying to build a house while someone keeps stealing your bricks. The more acidified the water, the greater the energy that’s required to complete the necessary steps. At a certain point, the water becomes positively corrosive, and solid calcium carbonate begins to dissolve. This is why the limpets that wander too close to the vents at Castello Aragonese end up with holes in their shells. According to geologists who work in the area, the vents have been spewing carbon dioxide for at least several hundred years, maybe longer. Any mussel or barnacle or keel worm that can adapt to lower pH in a time frame of centuries presumably already would have done so. “You give them generations on generations to survive in these conditions, and yet they’re not there,” Hall-Spencer observed.

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making: the internal shutdown of vulnerability. From the Latin word vulnerare, “to wound,” vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child’s prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,” wrote the American novelist Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March; “if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.” Intuitively, we all know that it’s better to feel than not to feel. Beyond their energizing subjective charge, emotions have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us and offer us vital information. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see or hear or taste or sense heat or cold or physical pain. Emotional shutdown is similar. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are. They make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful and meaningful. When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness described above. The wondrous power of a drug is to offer the addict protection from pain while at the same time enabling her to engage the world with excitement and meaning. “It’s not that my senses are dulled — no, they open, expanded,” explained a young woman whose substances of choice are cocaine and marijuana. “But the anxiety is removed, and the nagging guilt and — yeah!” The drug restores to the addict the childhood vivacity she suppressed long ago.

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.