Level Tapping Quotes

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

With a chaste heart With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty Holding the leash of blood So that it might leap out and trace your outline Where you lie down in my Ode As in a land of forests or in surf In aromatic loam, or in sea music Beautiful nude Equally beautiful your feet Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound Your ears, small shells Of the splendid American sea Your breasts of level plentitude Fulfilled by living light Your flying eyelids of wheat Revealing or enclosing The two deep countries of your eyes The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of Burnished gold Fine alabaster To sink into the two grapes of your feet Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises Flowering fire Open chandelier A swelling fruit Over the pact of sea and earth From what materials Agate? Quartz? Wheat? Did your body come together? Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills The cleavage of one petal Sweet fruits of a deep velvet Until alone remained Astonished The fine and firm feminine form It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body Yet suffocate itself So much is clarity Taking its leave of you As if you were on fire within The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

You're apprentice Rangers,' he said. 'And the important word there is "Rangers".' He tapped the silver oaklead amulet around his neck. 'As a wearer of the Silver Oakleaf, I might expect obedience and some level of difference from you. But I do not expect you to call me sir. My name is Will and that's what you call me. You'd call my friend Gilan and my former master Halt, if he were here. That's the Ranger's way.

(Nykyrian spun about at the sound, his blaster leveling at the body in the doorway.) Whoa. Friend! (He tapped his chest twice.) Really good guy. ‘Member me? (Syn)

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

I wish I was gay,” he says ruefully. A snicker pops out. “Uh-huh. Go on. I’m willing to follow you down this rabbit hole and see where it leads.” “Seriously, Gretch, I love him. I have a boner for him.” Morris sighs. “If I’d known he existed, I wouldn’t have asked you out in the first place.” “Gee, thanks.” “Oh, shut up. You’re awesome, and I’d tap that in a second. But I can’t compete with this guy. He’s operating on a whole other level when it comes to you.

In the high school classroom you are a drill sergent, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw.

God made no mistakes when He created you. You were uniquely designed for success in your purpose. When you align your life with your strengths—those innate qualities you were gifted with—you will tap into a level of grace that empowers you to achieve things you could never accomplish in your strength alone.

Although you can’t go back in time and alter your natural level of potential, you can determine how much of that ability you tap into, exploit and develop for the future.

If you’re afraid of intensity (i.e. depth of sensuality/passion) you’re missing out on new levels. Levels are opportunities to grow and to tap into deeper and more soul-nourishing experiences than most people will ever have in their lifetime.

She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write ...” She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. But why different, and how different? she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr Bankes saying, “The vegetable salts are lost.” All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretence that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.

We never really die; we merely change our levels of consciousness. Because our loved ones are immortal too, we are never really separated from them. This realization of our true spiritual nature is a powerful healing force.

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Every story reads on multiple levels to convey a greater, more intricate message, and it's the reader's role to tap into that.

Peaceful heart, peaceful mind.

While decisions tap our willpower, the food we eat is also a key player in our level of willpower.

And yet Branson (a notorious risk addict with a penchant for crash-landing hot air balloons) is far from the only one willing to stake our collective future on this kind of high-stakes gamble. Indeed the reason his various far-fetched schemes have been taken as seriously as they have over the years is that he, alongside Bill Gates with his near mystical quest for energy “miracles,” taps into what may be our culture’s most intoxicating narrative: the belief that technology is going to save us from the effects of our actions. Post–market crash and amidst ever more sinister levels of inequality, most of us have come to realize that the oligarchs who were minted by the era of deregulation and mass privatization are not, in fact, going to use their vast wealth to save the world on our behalf. Yet our faith in techno wizardry persists, embedded inside the superhero narrative that at the very last minute our best and brightest are going to save us from disaster.

We have then walked, played, or worked " enough," so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed.

Well, fuck a duck,” comes Morris’s delighted voice. I jerk in surprise, then spin around to glare at him for sneaking up on me from behind. Judging by the amusement dancing in his eyes, it’s obvious he peeked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of the photo I’d been drooling over. “I was wondering how he’d pull that one off,” Morris remarks, still grinning like a fool. “Shouldn’t have doubted him, though. That dude is an unstoppable force of nature.” I narrow my eyes. “He told you about the picture?” “About the whole list, actually. We hung out last night—Lorris is close to taking over Brooklyn, by the way—and he was moaning and groaning about not being able to track down a red velvet couch.” Morris shrugs. “I offered to throw a red blanket on the sofa in my common room and take some pictures, but he said you’d consider that cheating and deprive him of your love.” Stifling a sigh, I shove the phone in my purse, then walk over to the mini-fridge across the room and grab a bottle of water. I twist off the cap, doing my best to ignore the sheer enjoyment Morris is getting out of this. “I wish I was gay,” he says ruefully. A snicker pops out. “Uh-huh. Go on. I’m willing to follow you down this rabbit hole and see where it leads.” “Seriously, Gretch, I love him. I have a boner for him.” Morris sighs. “If I’d known he existed, I wouldn’t have asked you out in the first place.” “Gee, thanks.” “Oh, shut up. You’re awesome, and I’d tap that in a second. But I can’t compete with this guy. He’s operating on a whole other level when it comes to you.

It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon for categorically unnecessary purchases: portable-earplug music instead of the radio; extra-fast Internet for leisure use; heavy vehicles to transport light loads; name-brand clothing instead of plainer gear. "Economizing," as applied to clothing, generally means looking for discount name brands instead of wearing last year's clothes again. The dread of rearing unfashionable children is understandable. But as a priority, "makes me look cool" has passed up "keeps arteries functional" and left the kids huffing and puffing (fashionably) in the dust.

Malinda moved so we were eye-level. "Forget the people who've hurt you. You don't have them anymore, but you have two others that'll do anything to you. Mason and Logan would move mountains for you. I see how you are with them. You love them, but you're scared to let yourself be happy. Why? Because that's when they'll leave? Is that what you think? You've got it all wrong. Those two will never leave you." She tapped my chest. Once. Twice. "You. You're the one that's going to hurt them. You have that power, and you don't know it. You could rip those two apart in a second, and they're the ones who are scared of you. Not the other way around. You need to recognize the real situation.

It is the mind’s job to protect and take care of you, to solve your problems and make sure you’re safe. So, if you feel a surge of emotional upset, it moves into action, trying to help, looking for the source of the upset—for the problems—and generating solutions. Under these conditions, the key to getting the mind to go on standby—to stilling the mind’s compulsive thinking—lies in recognizing, accepting, and working with the emotional upset. Once you address the emotional undercurrent, once it is no longer churning inside you, the mind can switch off and quite literally leave you in peace.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

Sometimes family hurts you more than they could ever love you. That’s a truth a lot of people don’t want to hear, but sometimes people get the opposite. They get the families that love you more than they could ever hurt you. Those people are the luckiest in the world. You know what pisses me off? Is that they probably don’t even know it. They don’t know how lucky they are, but, Sam, you’re one of them.” I sucked in a breath. That ache was a stabbing pain now. She leaned forward. Some of her long hair fell forward, but she ignored it as she grasped my shoulders. Malinda moved so we were eye-level. “Forget the people who’ve hurt you. You don’t have them anymore, but you have two others that’ll do anything for you. Mason and Logan would move mountains for you. I see how you are with them. You love them, but you’re scared to let yourself be happy. Why? Because that’s when they’ll leave? Is that what you think? You’ve got it all wrong. Those two will never leave you.” She tapped my chest. Once. Twice. “You. You’re the one that’s going to hurt them. You have that power, and you don’t know it. You could rip those two apart in a second, and they’re the ones who are scared of you. Not the other way around. You need to recognize the real situation.

If I was feeling like a challenge, I'd kick out the plug, turn the taps on and see if I could maintain the exact water level. It was a bit like balancing the clutch in an old Mini Metro. Although tricky at first, by the time I checked out I could find the bath's biting point within three minutes. Satisfying? Just bit.

God created you to leave your mark on this generation. You have gifts and talents that you have not tapped into. There are new levels of your destiny still in front of you. But break out starts in your thinking. As you put these keys into action, making room for increase, expecting shifts of God’s favor, praying bold prayers, and keeping the right perspective, then God will release floods of His goodness that will thrust you beyond barriers of the past into the extraordinary life you were designed to live.

The complex tactile movement of writing by hand stimulates our mind more effectively than typing. It activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, thereby imprinting what we learn on a deeper level. As a result, we retain information longer than we would by tapping it into an app.18 In one study, college students who were asked to take lecture notes by hand tested better on average than those who had typed out their notes. They were also able to better retain this information long after the exam.

Belittling leaders who are limiting repel people easily. They can't tap into the unlimited potential of their people. They can't take them to the next level...

He often says that you need to have a darkness inside you to compete at a high level in any sport. If you can’t tap into that dark side, you’ll quickly come unstuck.

There is a subconscious, emotional level that informs playing, and since I’m the kind of person who carries his baggage around internally, nothing has ever helped me tap into my feelings more.

The undocumented community in Flint has been affected by the water crisis in disturbingly specific ways. Flyers announcing toxic levels of lead in the Flint waterways were published entirely in English, and when canvassers went door-to-door to tell residents to stop drinking tap water, undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities.

what does help the person who has been raped is to chew it up and then spit it the hell out. And by chew it up I mean talk about it, write about it, paint it, make a movie about it, and then be done with it and move on. Because here’s the truth about rape: you do not have to be victimized by it forever. You can take this awful, bottomless horror the rapist has inflicted on you, and you can seize it and recycle it into something wonderful and helpful and useful. You can, in this way, transform what was “done” to you into something that was “given” to you in the form of brutally raw material. You can, in other words, accept this hideous thing and embrace it and take complete control of the experience and reshape it as you please. This is not to deny the experience and how devastating it is; it is to accept the experience on the deepest level as your own possession now. An experience that is now part of you. Instead of allowing it to be a tap that drains you, you can force it into duty in service to your creative or intellectual goals. Many

Religion can hardly revive, because it cannot decay. To put the matter bluntly on the lowest level, it is not to anybody’s interest that religion should disappear. If it did, many compositors would be thrown out of work; the audiences of our best-selling scientists would shrink to almost nothing; and the typewriters of the Huxley Brothers would cease from tapping. Without religion the whole human race would die, as according to W. H. R. Rivers, some Melanesian tribes have died, solely of boredom. Every one would be affected: the man who regularly has a run in his car and a round of golf on Sunday, quite as much as the punctilious churchgoer.

Maybe I didn’t make myself clear when I tattooed your name across my fucking throat. This”—I tap the letters—“is so everyone knows who I belong to.” I’ve never given someone this sort of claim over me, and it feels fantastic. “And inking the last words of my vow to you above my fucking dick.” I reach down and cup my hand over the front of my pants. “That’s all for you, Angel. So when you’re ready to wrap those lips around my cock and take me into your throat, you’ll be eye level with my promise to you. Even on your knees, I’ll still be yours.

That a charlatan could find her way into enough parlors of upstate New York and Western Massachusetts in the early years of the twentieth century to provide a comfortable living, was not, in itself, remarkable. Anastasia, however, was, in the spectrum of spirit rappers, table turners, and ectoplasmic spinners, a practitioner of such ability that on some level, she decided, what she did was a kind of magic of its own. She’d come to the profession by way of her sister, who had correctly sensed that the pale, wide-eyed girl possessed a certain affinity for the extraordinary, and had brought her to a séance, where Edith, perceiving that the medium had affixed a scrap of iron to her boot to tap out the spirits’ “answers,” decided, in a moment of pique, to out-channel the star, tossed herself upon the carpeted table, and arching her back and tearing at her bodice, cried out in the voice of a Roman emperor named Augustus Titus.

To become comfortable in silence may be the first step in becoming comfortable with death because, on the most basic biological level, death and silence are the same. Conversely, being comfortable in the silence may be the first step in pursuing life. As I would come to learn, death may not be so horrible after all. In fact, death may be the most beautiful thing about this human experiment. But I believe we can only see the positive in death when we learn to accept the silence. When we're able to tap that reservoir of bravery and lay aside all our words against death, and sit, not as the teacher of death, but as the student, listening to what death has to say in the silence, this is the first step.

Instead of your goals, success from their perspective is usually defined in the form of low-level “engagement” goals, as they’re often called. These include things like maximizing the amount of time you spend with their product, keeping you clicking or tapping or scrolling as much as possible, or showing you as many pages or ads as they can. A peculiar

If your CEO has enough good ideas to fuel the company’s growth objectives in perpetuity, maybe you don’t need to tap into the reservoir of talent at other levels of the organization. But the most innovative companies in the twenty-first century have transitioned from command-and-control organizations to a participatory approach that involves collaboration and teamwork.

I read a postelection blog post by the great Ursula K. Le Guin that said that we should stop using the metaphors of war. We should not think in terms of enemies and battles, because such thoughts, in themselves, change who we are. We need to be like water, she wrote. Water can be "divided and defiled, yet continues to be itself and to always go in the direction it must go." The water metaphor takes me many places. It takes me to the melting Arctic ice and the rising sea levels. It takes me to the Gulf of Mexico and Deepwater Horizon. It takes me to the toxic tap water of Flint, Michigan, and Corpus Christi, Texas, and Hoosick Falls, New York. It takes me to the water cannons used against you. But it also takes me to you, oh water protectors!

I don’t believe souls are split down the middle before they’re stuffed into our bodies, or that it’s our life’s goal to hunt down the missing half of ourselves, if that’s what you mean.” He tapped his tongs against the fryer. “I do believe that sometimes—whether it’s fate or accidental—we cross paths with someone who shatters us on a fundamental level and remakes us into a better version of ourselves.

I would forget my own beating heart, my own trembling body, my own sense of inexpiable degradation. I got up and started to throw off my things. Then the door opened and Jake came into the cabin. I did not want to look at him at first. I turned my back and fumbled with the tap of the basin. He did not say anything either. I whistled a tune under my breath. I wished he had been drunk, or laughing, or cursing, or in some way dragging himself down to my level.

Just because your baby can tap a touch screen to change a picture does not mean that he should, that it is a developmentally useful or appropriate activity for him. In fact, research suggests that the process of tapping a screen or keypad and engaging with the screen activity may itself be rerouting brain development in ways that eliminate development of essential other neural connections your child needs to develop reading, writing, and higher-level thinking later.

Our culture is obsessed with eliminating struggle. There are parents whose goal is that their kids want for nothing. But what if they’re handicapping them instead? Our fear of failure for the next generation is creating people primed for mediocrity at best and crippled at worst, in comparison to their potential. Experiencing repeated failure and lack of resources forces you to develop deep levels of grit, intellectual creativity, and resourcefulness others have never tapped into.

The Soviet Union was in effect an enormous prison, incarcerating more than 280 million people behind heavily guarded borders, with over a million KGB officers and informants acting as their jailers. The population was under constant surveillance, and no segment of society was more closely watched than the KGB itself: the Seventh Directorate was responsible for internal surveillance, with some 1,500 men deployed in Moscow alone. Under Leonid Brezhnev’s inflexible brand of Communism, paranoia had increased to near Stalinist levels, creating a spy state pitting all against all, in which phones were tapped and letters opened, and everyone was encouraged to inform on everyone else, everywhere, all the time. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the resulting spike in international tension, had intensified KGB internal scrutiny. “Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition of the Soviet citizen,” writes Robert Conquest.

And Seth . . . I didn’t even know what was up with Seth, who he was going to be when he woke up. The Seth who made horrible mistakes but wanted to do better? The Seth who’d stood in the bedroom, vulnerable and nearly broken as he apologized? Or the Seth who had leveled all of us, including Atlas? He hadn’t just tapped into my aether. He’d gotten all of us, something none of us had known he could do, and deep down, I honestly didn’t believe Seth had even realized he could do that until he’d done it.

The existence of reservoirs of energy that habitually are not tapped is most familiar to us as the phenomenon of “second wind.” Ordinarily we stop when we meet the first effective layer, so to call it, of fatigue. We have then walked, played or worked “enough,” and desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction, on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a new level of energy. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth “wind” may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own—sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.37

Defining the very earliest music and still prominent in many cultures, this musical sound stresses beat over melody, and may in fact include no melody at all. One of the reasons for the popularity of rhythm-only music is that anyone can immediately play it at some level, even with no training. Kids do it all the time, naturally. The fact that I often catch myself spontaneously tapping my foot to an unknown beat or lie in bed just a bit longer listening contentedly to my heartbeat is a testament to the close connection between life and rhythm

Many of us who have observed our own behavior don't need science to prove that technology is altering us, but let's bring some in anyway. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter that records certain experiences in our brain (typically described as pleasurable) and prompts us to repeat them, plays a part not only in sex and drugs, but also the swiping and tapping we do on our smartphones. Scott Barry Kaufman--- scientific director of the Imagination Institute...gave me the straight dope on dopamine. "It's a misconception that dopamine has to do with our feelings of happiness and pleasure," he said. "It's a molecule that helps influence our expectations." Higher levels of dopamine are linked to being more open to new things and novelty seeking. Something novel could be an amazing idea for dinner or a new book. . . or just getting likes on a Facebook post or the ping of a text coming in. Our digital devices activate and hijack this dopamine system extremely well, when we let them. ...Kaufman calls dopamine "the mother of invention" and explains that because we have a limited amount of it, we must be judicious about choosing to spend it on "increasing our wonder and excitement for creating meaning and new things like art--- or on Twitter.

Suppose a researcher were to tap you on the shoulder and ask you to write down what, according to cultural lore, males and females are like. Would you stare at the researcher blankly and exclaim ‘But what can you mean? Every person is a unique, multifaceted, sometimes even contradictory individual, and with such an astonishing range of personality traits within each sex, and across contexts, social class, age, experience, educational level, sexuality and ethnicity, it would be pointless and meaningless to attempt to pigeonhole such rich complexity and variability into two crude stereotypes’? No. You’d pick up your pencil and start writing.

A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space between two mirrors gorged with reflections. Because, I suppose, Cynthia wished to be the youngest in the room, the women she used to invite, married or single, were, at the best, in their precarious forties; some of them would bring from their homes, in dark taxis, intact vestiges of good looks, which, however, they lost as the party progressed. It has always amazed me - the capacity sociable weekend revelers have of finding almost at once, by a purely empiric but very precise method, a common denominator of drunkenness, to which everybody loyally sticks before descending, all together, to the next level. The rich friendliness of the matrons was marked by tomboyish overtones, while the fixed inward look of amiably tight men was like a sacrilegious parody of pregnancy. Although some of the guests were connected in one way or another with the arts, there was no inspired talk, no wreathed, elbow-propped heads, and of course no flute girls. From some vantage point where she had been sitting in a stranded mermaid pose on the pale carpet with one or two younger fellows, Cynthia, her face varnished with a film of beaming sweat, would creep up on her knees, a proffered plate of nuts in one hand, and crisply tap with the other the athletic leg of Cochran or Corcoran, an art dealer, ensconced, on a pearl-grey sofa, between two flushed, happily disintegrating ladies. At a further stage there would come spurts of more riotous gaiety. Corcoran or Coransky would grab Cynthia or some other wandering woman by the shoulder and lead her into a corner to confront her with a grinning imbroglio of private jokes and rumors, whereupon, with a laugh and a toss of her head, he would break away. And still later there would be flurries of intersexual chumminess, jocular reconciliations, a bare fleshy arm flung around another woman's husband (he standing very upright in the midst of a swaying room), or a sudden rush of flirtatious anger, of clumsy pursuit-and the quiet half smile of Bob Wheeler picking up glasses that grew like mushrooms in the shade of chairs. ("The Vane Sisters")

My darling wife,” he murmured softly, “ ’tis probable that I shall be most heavily set upon within the next few moments. The front door, as solid as it is, cannot be properly defended, and they will come before long to ram it down. ’Twould please me much if you…” Erienne’s head was already shaking before he finished. Strangely she experienced no fright, no fear. She was in her home, and a grim determination lay beneath her composed exterior. “I will stay with you.” She tapped the pistol with the tip of her finger and informed him bluntly, “The man who harms you will not live out the day. I will see to that.” There was a level sternness in her gaze that made Christopher glad she was his wife and not a foe. -Christopher & Erienne

horizontal division between clearness and opacity, but were imbedded in an elastic body of a monotonous pallor throughout. There was no perceptible motion in the air, not a visible drop of water fell upon a leaf of the beeches, birches, and firs composing the wood on either side. The trees stood in an attitude of intentness, as if they waited longingly for a wind to come and rock them. A startling quiet overhung all surrounding things—so completely, that the crunching of the waggon-wheels was as a great noise, and small rustles, which had never obtained a hearing except by night, were distinctly individualized. Joseph Poorgrass looked round upon his sad burden as it loomed faintly through the flowering laurustinus, then at the unfathomable gloom amid the high trees on each hand, indistinct, shadowless, and spectre-like in their monochrome of grey. He felt anything but cheerful, and wished he had the company even of a child or dog. Stopping the horse, he listened. Not a footstep or wheel was audible anywhere around, and the dead silence was broken only by a heavy particle falling from a tree through the evergreens and alighting with a smart rap upon the coffin of poor Fanny. The fog had by this time saturated the trees, and this was the first dropping of water from the overbrimming leaves. The hollow echo of its fall reminded the waggoner painfully of the grim Leveller. Then hard by came down another drop, then two or three. Presently there was a continual tapping of these heavy drops upon the dead leaves, the road, and the travellers. The nearer boughs were beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men, and the rusty-red leaves of the beeches were

EXCITED was not the right word. Stevie NEEDED to go back and she WANTED to go back, but the accompanying emotion was anxiety. Anxiety and excitement are cousins; they can be mistaken for each other at points. They have many features in common - the bubbling, carbonated feel of the emotion the speed, the wide eyes and racing heart. But where excitement tends to take you up, into the higher, brighter levels of feeling, anxiety pulls you down, making you feel like you have to grip the earth to keep from sliding off as it turns. This was the sympathetic nervous system at work, her therapist had told her. To work with anxiety, you had to let it complete its cycle. Steve tapped her foot against the SUV floor, telling the cycle to get a movie on. What was she anxious about? Going back to the case, going back to her friends, going back to her classes, going back...

I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious. Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know. Science fiction primarily uses the medium of physics and mathematics. It tells us how things work, or could work. Horror taps into the darker imagery of the psychology, telling us what we should fear. Fantasy, magic and myth, however, tap into the spiritual potential of the human life. Their medium is symbolism, truth made manifest in word pictures, and they tell us what things mean on a deep, internal level. I have always been a meaning-maker. I have always been someone who strives to make sense of everything and perhaps that is where my life as a storyteller first began. Life doesn't always make sense, but story must. And so I write stories, and the world comes right again.

In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of consciousness, " and other suprahuman entities. On occasion subjects also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality. In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number. The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. "After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues' jokes, had they found out, " says Grof. "I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.

However, if we keep living in survival and we are overly sexual, over-consuming, or overstressed by living our lives from the first three centers, we keep drawing from this invisible field of energy carrying information that surrounds the body, and we are consistently turning it into chemistry. The repetition of this process over time causes the field around the body to shrink. (See Figure 4.5.) As a result, we diminish our light and there is no energy that carries a conscious intention moving through these centers to create the correlated mind in each. Essentially, we’ve tapped our own energy field as a resource. That limited level of mind with its limited amount of energy in each center will send a limited signal to the surrounding cells, tissues, organs, and systems of the body. The result can produce a weakened signal and a lower frequency of energy carrying vital information to the body. Therefore, the lowering frequency of the signals creates disease. We could say that from an energetic level, all disease is a lowering of frequency and an incoherent message.

So you have no faith in the gods?’ Jiang asked. ‘I believe in the gods as much as the next Nikara does,’ she replied. ‘I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses. But not as things that I truly trust are real. Not as things that hold actual consequence for the universe.’ She said this with a straight face, but she was exaggerating. Because she knew that something was real. She knew that on some level, there was more to the cosmos than what she encountered in the material world. She was not truly such a skeptic as she pretended to be. But the best way to get Jiang to explain anything was by taking radical positions, because when she argued from the extremes, he made his best arguments in response. He hadn’t yet taken the bait, so she continued: ‘If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?’ ‘But if nothing is divine, why do we ascribe godlike status to mythological figures?’ Jiang countered. ‘Why bow to the Great Tortoise? The Snail Goddess Nüwa? Why burn incense to the heavenly pantheon? Believing in any religion involves sacrifice. Why would any poor, penniless Nikara farmer knowingly make sacrifices to entities he knew were just myths? Who does that benefit? How did these practices originate?’ ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Rin. ‘Then find out. Find out the nature of the cosmos.’ Rin thought it was somewhat unreasonable to ask her to puzzle out what philosophers and theologians had been trying to answer for millennia, but she returned to the library. And came back with more questions still. ‘But how does the existence or nonexistence of the gods affect me? Why does it matter how the universe came to be?’ ‘Because you’re part of it. Because you exist. And unless you want to only ever be a tiny modicum of existence that doesn’t understand its relation to the grander web of things, you will explore.’ ‘Why should I’ ‘Because I know you want power.’ He tapped her forehead again. ‘But how can you borrow power from the gods when you don’t understand what they are?

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag. p237

MT: But you are. You are justifying it. RG: I'm trying to show that there's meaning at precisely the point where the nihilistic temptation is strongest today. I'm saying: there's a Revelation, and people are free to do with it what they will. But it too will keep reemerging. It's stronger than them. And, as we have seen, it's even capable of putting mimetic phenomena to work on its behalf, since today everyone is competing to see who is the most “victimized.” Revelation is dangerous. It's the spiritual equivalent of nuclear power. What's most pathetic is the insipidly modernized brand of Christianity that bows down before everything that's most ephemeral in contemporary thought. Christians don't see that they have at their disposal an instrument that is incomparably superior to the whole mishmash of psychoanalysis and sociology that they conscientiously feed themselves. It's the old story of Esau sacrificing his inheritance for a plate of lentils. All the modes of thought that once served to demolish Christianity are being discredited in turn by more “radical” versions of the same critique. There's no need to refute modern thought because, as each new trend one-ups its predecessors, it's liquidating itself at high speed. The students are becoming more and more skeptical, but, and above all in America, the people in power, the department chairs, the “chairpersons,” as they say, are fervent believers. They're often former sixties' radicals who've made the transition to administrative jobs in academia, the media, and the church. For a long time, Christians were protected from this insane downward spiral, and, when they finally dive in, you can recognize them by their naïve modernist faith. They're always one lap behind. They always choose the ships that the rats are in the midst of abandoning. They're hoping to tap into the hordes of people who have deserted their churches. They don't understand that the last thing that can attract the masses is a Christian version of the demagogic laxity in which they're already immersed. Today, it's thought that playing the social game, whether on the individual or the group level, is more indispensable than thinking…it's thought that there are truths that shouldn't be spoken. In America, it's become impossible to be unapologetically Christian, white, or European without running the risk of being accused of “ethnocentrism.” To which I reply that the eulogists of “multiculturalism” place themselves, to the contrary, in the purest of Western traditions. The West is the only civilization ever to have directed such criticisms against itself. The capital of the Incas had a name that I believe meant “the navel of the world.

After a week or so, Puzzle and Jake have clearly got it. Door now means 'the-closest-exit-outside-no-matter-where-we-are." Door also means "and-make-sure-the-human-gets-there-too." I feel a little bad about the Poms, the tragic little overlooked, underestimated Poms, and now that Jake and Puz seem assured about the command, I decide to invite any Pomeranian that wants in on the action to have a go. We'll have a little fun. "Door," I say in my bedroom, armed with a pocketful of treats. Jake and Puzzle race to the back door and sit, and I follow them readily, but the Poms at first follow me, because I have the treats. I start with them the way I started with Jake and Puzzle. Door means a treat when you get there, not before. A couple of them (Jack and Smokey) figure it out quickly and are happy to run to the door and sit for a treat. On of them (Mr. Sprits'l) would rather scold me from ankle level all the way there. One of them (Mizzen) is a natural. She races to the door and back to me again, there and back to me again, there and back. Hoor! she says, tap-dancing across the wood. She can get to the door and seems to know what the word means, but it's all so exciting she can hardly contain herself. Hoor! Here's the door! Aren't you here yet? Hoor! Let me come back to you! Hey! Look! Over here! Hoor! Here's the door! She is thrilled with Door. She is thrilled with the knowing. She is thrilled with the treats. Mizzen-monkey makes me a little dizzy.

So what, then"-his voice deepened, softened, the suave tones sliding over her skin-"will it take to convince you that you should-indeed, ought to-marry me?" He let her look into his eyes, for once didn't keep his mask between them. Let her see he was in earnest, sincere in wanting to know. She drew in a long breath, then looked back at the river and let out a long, slow sigh. Wondered why she was bothering. If he truly didn't know... Perhaps she should tell him. "Very well. As you're so determined to hear them, these are my reasons." She'd never voiced them before, not all of them, yet if Catriona was right and he might be her hero...it behooved her to try to find the words. "I long ago decided that the one element I would never agree to marry without was true...affection." Recalling Catriona's views, she substituted the less specific, less, for men, frightening word. "An affection strong enough to last the years, powerful enough to guide and inform, deep and broad enough to be the foundation of a shared life. I want passion and laughter, interest and inclusion, a partnership at least on a practical level, and something even deeper on the personal. "I want...to be wanted, to feel necessary and needed, to know I feel a role that only I can fill." She paused, then forced herself to go on. "But even more that that, I want that depth of affection to be offered to me, Heather Cynster, not because I am Heather Cynster, well-connected heiress and"-she flicked a glance his way-"considered by some to be more than passably attractive, but because I'm me." She tapped her chest, felt the pendant beneath her bodice. "I want to be wanted, needed-and married-because of who I am, not what I am." Suddenly seeing the parallel, she caught his gaze. "In light of your query regarding your birth, you should understand how I feel-how important to me it is to be valued for myself, and to know it.

As long as she lived Stephen never forgot her first impressions of the bar known as Alec's—that meeting-place of the most miserable of all those who comprised the miserable army. That merciless, drug-dealing, death-dealing haunt to which flocked the battered remnants of men whom their fellow-men had at last stamped under; who, despised of the world, must despise themselves beyond all hope, it seemed, of salvation. There they sat, closely herded together at the tables, creatures shabby yet tawdry, timid yet defiant—and their eyes, Stephen never forgot their eyes, those haunted, tormented eyes of the invert. Of all ages, all degrees of despondency, all grades of mental and physical ill-being, they must yet laugh shrilly from time to time, must yet tap their feet to the rhythm of music, must yet dance together in response to the band—and that dance seemed the Dance of Death to Stephen. On more than one hand was a large, ornate ring, on more than one wrist a conspicuous bracelet; they wore jewellery that might only be worn by these men when they thus gathered together. At Alec's they could dare to give way to such tastes—what was left of themselves they became at Alec's. Bereft of all social dignity, of all social charts contrived for man's guidance, of the fellowship that by right divine should belong to each breathing, living creature; abhorred, spat upon, from their earliest days the prey to a ceaseless persecution, they were now even lower than their enemies knew, and more hopeless than the veriest dregs of creation. For since all that to many of them had seemed fine, a fine selfless and at times even noble emotion, had been covered with shame, called unholy and vile, so gradually they themselves had sunk down to the level upon which the world placed their emotions. And looking with abhorrence upon these men, drink-sodden, doped as were only too many, Stephen yet felt that some terrifying thing stalked abroad in that unhappy room at Alec's; terrifying because if there were a God His anger must rise at such vast injustice. More pitiful even than her lot was theirs, and because of them mighty should be the world's reckoning.

There is a show tonight in the Highwood, John. There will be all sorts of people to play music there. We must go tonight to the Highwood, john. we'll breathe in the music and the cold-starred air. * And Cornelius has taken down the moon - hasn't he? - with gleam-of-eye and giddying snout and his touch on the wheel is delicate as the spring, here a soft tip, there a glanced tap for each swerve of the road as it runs the country and turns. Oh this is the knack of it - John can see clearly now - the carefree life, and he envies him the spring. And before we know it, John? The summer proper will be in on top of us and the woods will be whispering. Fuck the whispering woods, Cornelius. Just get me to my fucking island. But he is snagged again; he turns helplessly. How'd you mean, about the woods? Cornelius beams - There are things we can't describe, he says. Go on? What we see around us is only at the ten per cent level, John. Of? The reality. And what's the leftover? Unseen. How'd you mean? Well, he says. The way sometimes you'd walk across a field and a sense of elation would come over you. Are you with me? Okay... You're half risen from the skin. the feet are not touching the stones. The little heart is about to hop out of your chest from the sheer fucken joy. And the strange thing about it? Go on. That patch of happiness could be floating around the field for the last ten years. Or for the last three hundred and fifty years. Out of love that was had there or a child that was playing or an old friend that was found again after a long time lost. Whatever it was, it caused a great happy feeling and it was left there in the field. You're after walking into it. And for half a minute you're lifted and soaring but then you're out the far side again and back into your own poor stride and woes. You'd find a sadness just the same? Or an evil, John. Or a blackness. Or terror, John, or fucken terror, because there's plenty of terror in the world. Always was and has been. A soft whisper - I mean take a look out the window. A sweep of the arm for the greys and sea-greens of the moonful hills, the pale night as they pass by - I mean why'd you think I've the fucken foot down, John?

Raphael pulled out a paperback and handed it to me. The cover, done back in the time when computer-aided imagine manipulation had risen to the level of art, featured an impossibly handsome man, leaning forward, one foot in a huge black boot resting on the carcass of some monstrous sea creature. His hair flowed down to his shoulders in a mane of white gold, in stark contrast to his tanned skin and the rakish black patch hiding his left eye. His white, translucent shirt hung open, revealing abs of steel and a massive, perfectly carved chest graced by erect nipples. His muscled thighs strained the fabric of his pants, which were unbuttoned and sat loosely on his narrow hips, a touch of a strategically positioned shadow hinting at the world’s biggest boner. The cover proclaimed in loud golden letters: The Privateer’s Virgin Mistress, by Lorna Sterling. “Novel number four for Andrea’s collection?” I guessed. Raphael nodded and took the book from my hands. “I’ve got the other one Andrea wanted, too. Can you explain something to me?” Oh boy. “I can try.” He tapped the book on his leather-covered knee. “The pirate actually holds this chick’s brother for ransom, so she’ll sleep with him. These men, they aren’t real men. They’re pseudo-bad guys just waiting for the love of a ‘good’ woman.” “You actually read the books?” He gave me a chiding glance. “Of course I read the books. It’s all pirates and the women they steal, apparently so they can enjoy lots of sex and have somebody to run their lives.” Wow. He must’ve had to hide under his blanket with a flashlight so nobody would question his manliness. Either he really was in love with Andrea or he had a terminal case of lust. “These guys, they’re all bad and aggressive as shit, and everybody wets themselves when they walk by, and then they meet some girl and suddenly they’re not uber-alphas; they are just misunderstood little boys who want to talk about their feelings.” “Is there a point to this dissertation?” He faced me. “I can’t be that. If that’s what she wants, then I shouldn’t even bother.” I sighed. “Do you have a costume kink? French maid, nurse . . .” “Catholic school girl.” Bingo. “You wouldn’t mind Andrea wearing a Catholic school uniform, would you?” “No, I wouldn’t.” His eyes glazed over and he slipped off to some faraway place. I snapped my fingers. “Raphael! Focus.” He blinked at me. “I’m guessing—and this is just a wild stab in the dark—that Andrea might not mind if once in a while you dressed up as a pirate. But I wouldn’t advise holding her relatives for ransom nookie. She might shoot you in the head. Several times. With silver bullets.

Thirty-Nine Ways to Lower Your Cortisol 1 Meditate. 2 Do yoga. 3 Stretch. 4 Practice tai chi. 5 Take a Pilates class. 6 Go for a labyrinth walk. 7 Get a massage. 8 Garden (lightly). 9 Dance to soothing, positive music. 10 Take up a hobby that is quiet and rewarding. 11 Color for pleasure. 12 Spend five minutes focusing on your breathing. 13 Follow a consistent sleep schedule. 14 Listen to relaxing music. 15 Spend time laughing and having fun with someone. (No food or drink involved.) 16 Interact with a pet. (It also lowers their cortisol level.) 17 Learn to recognize stressful thinking and begin to: Train yourself to be aware of your thoughts, breathing, heart rate, and other signs of tension to recognize stress when it begins. Focus on being aware of your mental and physical states, so that you can become an objective observer of your stressful thoughts instead of a victim of them. Recognize stressful thoughts so that you can formulate a conscious and deliberate reaction to them. A study of forty-three women in a mindfulness-based program showed that the ability to describe and articulate stress was linked to a lower cortisol response.28 18 Develop faith and participate in prayer. 19 Perform acts of kindness. 20 Forgive someone. Even (or especially?) yourself. 21 Practice mindfulness, especially when you eat. 22 Drink black and green tea. 23 Eat probiotic and prebiotic foods. Probiotics are friendly, symbiotic bacteria in foods such as yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi. Prebiotics, such as soluble fiber, provide food for these bacteria. (Be sure they are sugar-free!) 24 Take fish or krill oil. 25 Make a gratitude list. 26 Take magnesium. 27 Try ashwagandha, an Asian herbal supplement used in traditional medicine to treat anxiety and help people adapt to stress. 28 Get bright sunlight or exposure to a lightbox within an hour of waking up (great for fighting seasonal affective disorder as well). 29 Avoid blue light at night by wearing orange or amber glasses if using electronics after dark. (Some sunglasses work.) Use lamps with orange bulbs (such as salt lamps) in each room, instead of turning on bright overhead lights, after dark. 30 Maintain healthy relationships. 31 Let go of guilt. 32 Drink water! Stay hydrated! Dehydration increases cortisol. 33 Try emotional freedom technique, a tapping strategy meant to reduce stress and activate the parasympathetic nervous system (our rest-and-digest system). 34 Have an acupuncture treatment. 35 Go forest bathing (shinrin-yoku): visit a forest and breathe its air. 36 Listen to binaural beats. 37 Use a grounding mat, or go out into the garden barefoot. 38 Sit in a rocking chair; the soothing motion is similar to the movement in utero. 39 To make your cortisol fluctuate (which is what you want it to do), end your shower or bath with a minute (or three) under cold water.

Archangel Raphael This is the realm of healing Love. As natural healers from the heart, you who carry this realm innately project blue healing rays through your hands. As a Raphaelite, the way your Soul emanates its gifts is through this healing energy. You don’t need to do anything outwardly for healing Love to be radiated to others. Raphaelites have a tendency to overexert this healing influence unnecessarily. It works on the level of being, not doing. In essence, healing naturally occurs wherever the frequency of Love is present. You Raphaelites can overextend yourselves based on your feeling that everything needs healing, feeling that it’s your job to bring that healing Love wherever it is lacking. That is an endless, exhausting, fruitless task. Love is the same energy as life force. You are here to help us to return to the natural state of wholeness through the power of healing Love. You are always present with understanding and care. You are loving individuals who have a tendency to deplete yourselves by attempting to fill the seemingly endless needs of others. Your challenge is to discern who is part of your Soul plan to extend your energy toward and how to do it in a way that does not leave you depleted. You are here to show people that Love is an infinite commodity universally available. It is not yours to personally give to others. When a Raphaelite feels the need to personally give the divine Love they inherently feel connected to, to another, as though it belongs solely to them, it can become a caretaking exchange, which is disempowering to both people. This caretaking level of love is different than the frequency of divine Love. Healing as Love is not meant to be at the level of caretaking. It is not for you to say, “I’ll give all I have to you, because it feels so natural to do so, and it doesn’t matter if I get anything in return.” This state can lead to the expectation for others that you are here to fill their needs for Love. The Raphaelite is here to remind us that divine Love is the healing force moving through everyone. You must visualize or feel an umbilical cord from your heart to the source of divine Love. This is how Love, in fact, feeds us all. The channel from our Creator to our heart is filled with divine Love. When we feel thanksgiving for the eternal presence of Love, it ignites the miracle of healing that hasn’t held a place for Love. We can co-create as Love with those around us freely and appropriately from this place and this place alone. Remember, healer, to heal yourself first in this way and you will have much to give and will be rewarded joyously in return for that gift. The Raphael realm can be tapped into any time by anyone requesting the healing balm of Love that is vital to our life nourishment. We are designed to know this healing Love as a natural flow of our heart’s expression.

In addition to day-to-day energy levels, you also need to take care of what’s known as your “surge capacity.” The human adrenal system is designed to withhold a bit of energy just in case of an emergency – encountering a sabre-toothed tiger or living through a world-wide pandemic, just as examples. But if you tap your surge capacity repeatedly without a break and without replenishing it, the crash will be even more dramatic and be harder to recover from.

It is hard to exaggerate the utility of muscle. We have more than six hundred muscles in our body, some of them under voluntary control—our skeletal muscles—and some of them smooth muscles, the autonomic staff. Muscles allow us to move, of course. They stand between us and dissipation, apathy. But muscle tissue helps us even when we are immobilized by illness. In sickness, the body loses its power to tap the caloric reserves of fat. If you’re fasting, intentionally or otherwise, but you are healthy, your insulin levels fall and your body begins to call on its fat reserves for energy. But when you’re sick, with either an acute infection or a chronic illness, your insulin levels rise. Because insulin levels also rise when you eat, your body grows confused. It thinks it is fed, so it won’t tap its stored fat for calories. Your body still needs energy, though, and if you’re too sick to eat, it will begin breaking down its muscle for fuel. Muscle has fewer calories to offer: the average woman stores only about 20,000 calories in her muscle tissue, compared to the 180,000 or so in her fat. An acutely ill person who cannot eat will starve to death in ten days rather than forty. (Cachexia, the wasting of lean mass seen in people with cancer or AIDS, occurs more gradually than that, but it too is caused by a disruption of the body’s ability to burn fat and its fallback tendency to cannibalize its muscle.) The more muscle you have, then, the better your chances are of withstanding illness. Young people survive an acute disease more readily than the old do in part because they have more muscle in escrow.

Buildings are the unavoidable art, whether the high art of the architectural masterpiece or the rich vernacular heritage of villages, towns and cities. Their forms and details are absorbed mostly on the nonconscious level, yet they weave their spell on the mind without our consent. They influence mood and demeanour, especially when they tap in to the subterranean currents of archetypal symbolism. On this level they can transmit subliminal messages of reassurance. // At the level of aesthetics per se , can we justify the belief that there is a social value which extends beyond merely offering transient pleasure?

Buildings are the unavoidable art, whether the high art of the architectural masterpiece or the rich vernacular heritage of villages, towns and cities. Their forms and details are absorbed mostly on the nonconscious level, yet they weave their spell on the mind without our consent. They influence mood and demeanour, especially when they tap in to the subterranean currents of archetypal symbolism. On this level they can transmit subliminal messages of reassurance.

The ladder is much higher than the climber, who remains committed to the lower rungs. It’s one thing to tap into a higher level; quite another to actually live there! And the same thing can happen with spiritual experiences. People can temporarily access some very high rungs in the ladder or circle of awareness, but they refuse to actually live from those levels—they won’t actually climb up there. Their center of gravity remains quite low, even debased

Natural intelligence does not require we do anything to achieve it. Natural intelligence imbues us with all we need at this exact moment to manifest the highest form of ourselves, and we don't have to figure out how to get it. We arrived on this planet with this source material already present. I am by no means implying that the work you may have done up to this point has been useless. To the contrary, I applaud whatever labor you have undertaken that has gotten you this far. Survival is damn hard. Each of us has traversed a gauntlet of traumas, shames, and fears to be where we are today, wherever that is. Each day we wake to a planet full of social, political, and economic obstructions that siphon our energy and diminish our sense of self. Consequently, tapping into this natural intelligence often feels nearly impossible. Humans unfortunately make being human exceptionally hard for each other, but I assure you, the work we have done or will do is not about acquiring some way of being that we currently lack. The work is to crumble the barriers of injustice and shame leveled against us so that we might access what we have always been, because we will, if unobstructed, inevitably grow into the purpose for which we were created.

There’s only one activity that stimulates the brain to produce all seven at the same time, and that’s the ecstatic state of flow. The shortest way there is deep, alpha-driven meditation. When you blend all seven into a single cocktail, the result is euphoria. Let’s see: What might a combination of the first letters of each drug look like? Serotonin, Oxytocin, Norepinephrine, Dopamine, Anandamide, Nitric oxide, and Beta-endorphin? Just for fun, let’s combine them, and call our cocktail’s special blend SONDANoBe. This is the magic formula that, produced inside our own bodies in the proper ratios, bathes the brain in the chemicals of ecstasy. GETTING HIGH ON YOUR OWN SUPPLY When I meditate, I can feel the moment when each drug in the cocktail kicks in. First, I use EFT tapping and release any and every negative thought, emotion, and energy. This drops my level of cortisol, along with suppressing the high beta brain waves of stress. I now have a molecular substrate in my brain upon which I can build a deep and focused meditative experience. Next, I close my eyes and focus. Dopamine kicks in as I anticipate the delicious hormone and neurotransmitter drug cocktail I’m about to be rewarded with. The dopaminergic reward system of my brain fires up and the “body learning” of how to meditate—stored in my basal ganglia, which memorize frequently performed actions—comes online. Ingredient one. My mind starts to wander. My email inbox. The morning’s first meeting. The laugh line of the movie I watched last night. An overdue deadline. Damn, I’m way out of the zone already, cortisol rising, and I haven’t been meditating more than 5 minutes. Dopamine brings me back to focus, aided by norepinephrine. I’m motivated. I want Bliss Brain more than I want an endless loop of the Me Show. I return to center. Cortisol drops. Ahhh, I’m back. Norepinephrine stimulates my attention. Ingredient two. Then I realize that my body is uncomfortable. I have a twinge in my right knee. My lower back hurts. My tummy’s rumbling because it’s empty. I consciously shift my wandering mind back into focus. Back in sync, my neurons secrete beta-endorphin, which masks the pain. The discomfort drops away, and being in a body feels wonderful. Ingredient three. I tune in to each of the archetypal strands that guide me. Mother Mary. Kwan Yin. Healing. Strength. Beauty. Wisdom. I imagine myself meditating in a field of a million saints. I’m lost in Bliss Brain, as serotonin, the satisfaction drug, kicks in. Ingredient four. I feel one with the universe. Oxytocin starts to flow, as I bond with everything. Ingredient five. That releases nitric oxide and anandamide. Ingredients six and seven.

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag... His conditioning was clearly off the charts, and I'm not talking about the physical aspect alone. Being a physical specimen is one thing, but it takes so much more energy to stay mentally prepared enough to arrive every day at a place like Air Assault School on a mission to dominate. The fact that he was able to do that told me it couldn't possibly have been a one-time thing. It had to be the result of countless lonely hours in the gym, on the trails, and in the books. Most of his work was hidden, but it is within that unseen work that self-leaders are made. I suspect the reason he was capable of exceeding any and all standards consistently was because he was dedicated at a level most people cannot fathom in order to stay ready for any and all opportunities. p237

Blood acid levels are measured on a pH scale from 1 to 14. Ideally, your blood should be slightly alkaline at 7.4. A soda, for example, has a pH of 2 and is highly acidic, whereas tap water has a pH of 8.4, which is very alkaline.

If you are called to roll with a jiu-jitsu instructor, rolling means rolling. He may toy with you. He may decline to tap you. But he expects you to do your best to defend yourself and to attack him. When an instructor’s body can no longer do what his mind tells it to, then he does not roll with students in this way, but provides wisdom and leadership appropriate to his rank and age. Students also adjust their intensity level appropriately to the training context. It is not inconceivable that a strong young blue belt could tap Helio Gracie out in 1999. He would pay a high and painful price for the glory of doing it however. There is a reason for age, weight, belt, and gender categories in competitions.

Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike. Some people find this idea repulsive, because it seems to relegate the artist to the level of trickster, manipulator, and deceiver—a kind of self-justifying onanist. They would prefer to see music as an expression of emotion rather than a generator of it, to believe in the artist as someone with something to say. I’m beginning to think of the artist as someone who is adept at making devices that tap into our shared psychological makeup and that trigger the deeply moving parts we have in common. In that sense, the conventional idea of authorship is questionable. Not that I don’t want credit for the songs I’ve written, but what constitutes authorship is maybe not what we would like it to be. This queasiness about rethinking how music works is also connected with the idea of authenticity: the idea that musicians who appear to be “down-home,” or seem to be conveying aspects of their own experience, must therefore be more “real.” It can be disillusioning to find out that the archetypical rock and roll persona is an act, and that none of the “country” folk in Nashville really wear cowboy hats (well, except during their public appearances and photo shoots).

In July 2014, Ted tapped Brian Wright, a senior vice president at Nickelodeon, to lead young adult content deals. (Brian’s first Netflix claim to fame is signing the deal for a show called Stranger Things just a few months into the job.) Brian tells this story about Ted receiving feedback publicly on Brian’s first day at Netflix: In all my past jobs, it was all about who’s in and who’s out of favor. If you gave the boss feedback or disagreed with her in a meeting in front of others, that would be political death. You would find yourself in Siberia. Monday morning, it’s my first day of this brand-new job, and I’m on hyperalert trying to find out what are the politics of the place. At eleven a.m. I attend my first meeting led by Ted (my boss’s boss, who is from my perspective a superstar), with about fifteen people at various levels in the company. Ted was talking about the release of The Blacklist season 2. A guy four levels below him hierarchically stopped him in the middle of his point: “Ted, I think you’ve missed something. You’re misunderstanding the licensing deal. That approach won’t work.” Ted stuck to his guns, but this guy didn’t back down. “It won’t work. You’re mixing up two separate reports, Ted. You’ve got it wrong. We need to meet with Sony directly.” I could not believe that this low-level guy would confront Ted Sarandos himself in front of a group of people. From my past experience, this was equivalent to committing career suicide. I was literally scandalized. My face was completely flushed. I wanted to hide under my chair. When the meeting ended, Ted got up and put his hand on this guy’s shoulder. “Great meeting. Thanks for your input today,” he said with a smile. I practically had to hold my jaw shut, I was so surprised. Later I ran into Ted in the men’s washroom. He asked how my first day was going so I told him, “Wow Ted, I couldn’t believe the way that guy was going at you in the meeting.” Ted looked totally mystified. He said, “Brian, the day you find yourself sitting on your feedback because you’re worried you’ll be unpopular is the day you’ll need to leave Netflix. We hire you for your opinions. Every person in that room is responsible for telling me frankly what they think.

The potential for your artistry when truly tapped, will evoke certain specific reactions in the body, such as temperature change, a flight or fight response and even a change in saliva production. If you can commit to your craft this deeply, the level of specificity and authenticity of your performance will scale new heights.

When your dog is becoming more aware of your modeling, create communication opportunities within your routines When you see your dog noticing your modeling or noticing the buttons, turn your routine interactions into language-facilitating opportunities. The greatest cue we can provide is a long, silent pause to give the AAC user a chance to process what is happening and try exploring her words. When you see your dog communicate through a gesture or vocalization, stay quiet for at least ten to fifteen seconds. At the end of fifteen seconds, if your dog looks like she might be walking toward her buttons or is looking at them, continue staying quiet. If you have not seen an indication that she might try saying a word, add the next level of naturalistic cueing. Add naturalistic cues if necessary After you have already tried staying silent, you can try standing next to your dog’s buttons or pointing at them. Dogs respond to human gestural social cues as early as six weeks old! If pointing or standing near the buttons does not work, you can try tapping it with your finger or foot, not pushing it to activate it. You can also try adding an open-ended verbal prompt such as, “What do you want?” Avoid telling your dog exactly what to say or forcing your dog to push a button with their paw. This can cause prompt dependency and keep your dog from learning how to use words independently. If none of these prompts encourage your dog to try saying a word, simply model it again verbally and with the button, and carry on with the appropriate action.

manifesting is defining an intention such that it gets embedded into our subconscious, which functions below the level of consciousness. By doing so, we activate brain networks associated with goal orientation that make an intention important, salient, or noteworthy. In practice, this means that regardless of whether or not that intention is present on a conscious level, brain mechanisms that remain focused on the goal are activated around the clock. Our inner intention now guides our life. By using our inner power to tap the vast resources of our own brain, we gradually decrease the impact of our external environment and begin living from our deepest intentions.

It likes safe, of course. When your brain feels safe, it can operate at its most sophisticated level. You’re more subtle in your thinking, better able to see and manage ambiguity. You assume positive intent of those around you, and you’re able to tap collective wisdom. You’re engaged and you’re moving forward.

If you have been overweight or obese for a long time, if you suffer from PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), if you are prediabetic, or if you have type 2 diabetes. If this describes you, then it is likely that your body is severely insulin resistant (and if you have been diagnosed as prediabetic or with type 2 diabetes, then this is definitely going to be true for you). The key is going to be getting your insulin down over time so your body can heal. While fasting is wonderful for lowering insulin levels, you may also need a more structured dietary approach to lower insulin even more. Remember that we need to have lower levels of circulating insulin to tap into our fat stores for fuel during the fast. This is where a low-carb or keto plan can make a positive difference. You may not have to follow a lower-carb plan forever; a combination of low-carb eating and intermittent fasting can reverse your insulin resistance over time, and you may find that you can tolerate more carbs as time goes on and your body heals.

Chain letters—yes, the type you still occasionally get via email, or see on social media—have their roots in snail mail, first popularized in the late 1800s. One of the most successful ones, “The Prosperity Club,” originated in Denver in the post-Depression 1930s, and asked people to send a dime to a list of others who were part of the club. Of course, you would add yourself to the list as well. The next set of people would return the favor, sending dimes back, and so on and so forth—with the promise that it would eventually generate $1,562.50. This is about $29,000 in 2019 dollars—not bad! The last line says it all: “Is this worth a dime to you?” It might surprise you that in a world before email, social media, and everything digital, the Prosperity Club chain letter spread incredibly well—so well, in fact, that it reached hundreds of thousands of people within months, within Denver and beyond. There are historical anecdotes of local mail offices being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of letters, and not surprisingly, eventually the US Post Office would make chain letters like Prosperity Club illegal, to stop their spread. It clearly tapped into a Depression zeitgeist of the time, promising “Faith! Hope! Charity!” This is a clever, viral idea (for its time), and I will also argue that this is an analog version of a network effect from the 1800s, just as telephones and railways were, too. How so? First, chain letters are organized as a network, and can be represented by the list of names that are copied and recopied by each participant. These names are likely to be friends, family, and people in the community, furthering the Prosperity Club’s credibility, thereby increasing the engagement level. It follows the classic definition of network effects: the more people who are participating in this chain letter, the better, since you are then more likely to receive dimes. And it even faces the Cold Start Problem: if enough people aren’t already on the list and playing along, then it will fail to grow.

Over the years, Facebook has executed an effective playbook that does exactly this, at scale. Take Instagram as an example—in the early days, the core product tapped into Facebook’s network by making it easy to share photos from one product to the other. This creates a viral loop that drives new users, but engagement, too, when likes and comments appear on both services. Being able to sign up to Instagram using your Facebook account also increases conversion rate, which creates a frictionless experience while simultaneously setting up integrations later in the experience. A direct approach to tying together the networks relies on using the very established social graph of Facebook to create more engagement. Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, describes how Instagram built off the network of its larger parent: Tapping into Facebook’s social graph became very powerful when we realized that following your real friends and having an audience of real friends was the most important factor for long-term retention. Facebook has a very rich social graph with not only address books but also years of friend interaction data. Using that info supercharged our ability to recommend the most relevant, real-life friends within the Instagram app in a way we couldn’t before, which boosted retention in a big way. The previous theory had been that getting users to follow celebrities and influencers was the most impactful action, but this was much better—the influencers rarely followed back and engaged with a new user’s content. Your friends would do that, bringing you back to the app, and we wouldn’t have been able to create this feature without Facebook’s network. Rather than using Facebook only as a source of new users, Instagram was able to use its larger parent to build stronger, denser networks. This is the foundation for stronger network effects. Instagram is a great example of bundling done well, and why a networked product that launches another networked product is at a huge advantage. The goal is to compete not just on features or product, but to always be the “big guy” in a competitive situation—to bring your bigger network as a competitive weapon, which in turn unlocks benefits for acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Going back to Microsoft, part of their competitive magic came when they could bring their entire ecosystem—developers, customers, PC makers, and others—to compete at multiple levels, not just on building more features. And the most important part of this ecosystem was the developers.

archetypal” level, all dreams speak a universal language of metaphor and symbol.

But all of that silent, solitary time running, riding, or swimming—becoming comfortable with discomfort, persisting despite all of his biological impulses telling him to slow down or tap out—had remodeled his psyche. “Endurance sports gave me some understanding of what it was to push to deeper levels and find new layers within myself,” he told me. “When I stopped doing triathlons, I still had this sense of adventure. This need to explore those edges where I’d find a new, better part of myself.

And to be more acute about it, our capacity to expand our impact is limited by our ability to grow. If you are doing things well; if you are creating value for others, a meaningful place of employment, challenging work, or innovative products; if you view your products and offerings as a service to the world that positively impacts people’s lives; and if, at the end of the day, you are sending employees home as better family members, then growth naturally should be part of your equation. If you’re doing something with a positive impact, it’s natural to want to do more of it. Additionally, the ability to expand and amplify your voice, to reach more people, to serve more broadly are all a function of the ability to grow. Growth—at an organizational level and an individual level—is about fulfilling potential. There is something deeply meaningful about this as it taps into all the talents, strengths, and gifts we have, individually and collectively.

A tool. A compass. A key that leads to other things.” “What other things?” Ishqa was terrible at this. What was it about six-hundred-year life spans that made one so frustratingly bad at communication? “You are aware of how magic works,” he said. “That it is like rivers running beneath our world, different streams of different substances. Solarie magic, Valtain magic, and our Fey magic.” “And the deeper levels beneath them,” I added. Ishqa nodded. “Yes. The deep magic that is still connected to you, even if that connection had been severed and stitched over. The very same magic that your lover drew from, that… Reshaye drew from.” He rarely spoke of Reshaye—of Aefe—by name. He never seemed to know which term to use. “But,” he went on, “magic is far more complicated than those four levels. None of us know how many different streams lurk beneath the surface of our world, or what they are capable of. Even the extensive modifications that humans and Fey have done to tap into deeper streams merely allow us to reach a fraction of what exists. And for many years—millennia—the Fey had no interest in learning more about those powers. The humans, at least, always strove to innovate. We… thought such things were blasphemous and unnatural. That is, until Caduan took power. He saw how we could use magical innovations to strengthen our civilization and help our people—end hunger, cure illness, even advance art and music.

For every company, you see a gazillion pieces of information on tap: revenue growth, profit growth, debt level, margin profile, stock price movement, analysts’ views, bond ratings, Twitter commentary, shareholder information, top management résumés, conference call transcripts, annual reports, quarterly filings, media coverage, competitor profiles, shares bought or sold by senior management, receivable and inventory levels, CEO statements, Reddit threads, hedge fund ownership, and so much more. And all this is just at the company level.

Got it.” She pulled her phone out from her cleavage and started tapping the screen.

Church folks acted like discernment was only reserved for them. That was not at all the truth. I believed everyone had a level of discernment. Some just didn’t tap into it as much as others, if at all. “Thank you, babe. One day, this is going to be yours, too.

If we were to make a list of the goals that are most important in life, surely the desire for close relationships, success in life (e.g., a career), and power would make most people’s short list. There is a long tradition in personality psychology of studying these three motives; indeed, psychologists such as H. A. Murray and David McClelland have argued that people’s level of needs for affiliation, achievement, and power are major components of human personality. There is growing evidence that these motives are an important part of the personality of the adaptive unconscious. Murray and McClelland assumed that these basic motives are not necessarily conscious and must therefore be measured indirectly. They advocated the use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), in which people make up stories about a set of standard pictures, and these stories are then coded for how much of a need for affiliation, power, or achievement people expressed. Other researchers have developed explicit, self-report questionnaires of motives, with the assumption that people are aware of their motives and can freely report them. A controversy has ensued over which measure of motivation is the most valid: the TAT or self-report questionnaires. The answer, I suggest, is that both are valid measures but tap different levels of motivation, one that resides in the adaptive unconscious and the other that is part of people’s conscious explanatory system. David McClelland and his colleagues made this argument in an influential review of the literature. First, they noted that the self-report questionnaires and the TAT do not correlate with each other. If Sarah reports on a questionnaire that she has a high need for affiliation, we know virtually nothing about the level of this need that she will express, nonconsciously, on the TAT. Second, they argued that both techniques are valid measures of motivation, but of different types. The TAT assesses implicit motives, whereas explicit, self-report measures assess self-attributed motives.

Truce curled two fingers inside of me then put the tip of his tongue in my ass. He took his freaky shit to the next level, and I loved to match him. Arching my back, I gave him a better angle while tapping the head of his dick against my tongue and stroking him.

The solution to this epidemic of perfection is to get out of our heads and into our bodies. When we connect with ourselves at a core level, we begin to value what we think more than what other people think.

If you want to lead a fulfilling and inspiring life, you have to begin by restoring your normal levels of serotonin, dopamine, and cortisol, the three hormones that are most essential to thinking and feeling your best. Making some remarkably simple changes will allow you to rebalance your brain chemistry and tap into your inner reserves of power, joy, and purpose.

Necromancy is wrong on two levels,” Lintz said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “The first is that it taps into a school of magic which is devoted to ripping the magical essence out of another person. The second is that it involves the removal of a person’s life magic.” He shook his head. “The outside world, it has these notions that necromancy is something you do to a corpse, but it’s not like that. You kill your target, and then their ghost—the remnant of their life magic—becomes your thrall, your slave, bound to your will.

same with him again. The door opened. Nykyrian spun about at the sound, his blaster leveling at the body in the doorway. Syn held up his hands as the red dot lay steady on his forehead. “Whoa. Friend!” He tapped his chest twice. “Really good guy. ’Member me?

But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years—that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be catastrophic. But climate scientists believe it will keep getting hotter. If so even drought-resistant plants will die, reservoir levels will continue to fall, crop production will drop. Worse, as vegetation withers, it will no longer be able to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change. And now to this precarious and combustible mix we have decided to add fracking. We have chosen to do this not with caution but on a massive scale, and to do it right next to our precious rivers, right smack in the middle of aquifers. We go into these places and use, mixed with the millions of gallons of water, a secret recipe of chemicals, many of them poisonous to humans, which we then force into fissures of rock with high-powered blasts to flush out the fuel we are seeking. The man in the bar had warned about earthquakes, but fracking is, in essence, a small seismic event, designed to blast out minerals. We have decided to inject poisons into the ground, then shake that ground, in a region where potable water is more precious than gold. But not, we have decided, more precious than oil. One thing is crystal clear. Though fracking is unproven technology, we are not treating it that way. Instead we are conducting a vast experiment all over the country, from the hills of Pennsylvania to the deserts of Utah. Since we are moving into unfamiliar territory you would think, if we were wise, that we would carefully monitor any and all results. We are not. When people in the fracked area complain that their water is fizzling out of their taps in a foamy mix, smelling of petroleum, the companies are quick to offer other water sources, like cisterns, but not quick, of course, to question the enterprise itself. In fact, the corporate response to the contaminated water supplies and groundwater has been consistent. They tell the landowners and anyone else who complains that they are concerned but that they will not slow down until there is conclusive proof that what they are doing is dangerous and poses a health risk. This is standard operating procedure in today’s world, but it is also, to anyone with a dollop of common sense, an ass-backwards way of doing things. “Despite the troubles people are having, we’ll keep going full-speed ahead until someone proves to us the trouble is real,” they tell us. Never, “Maybe we should slow down until we learn the facts.