Misleading Relationship Quotes

You can't quantify love, and if you try, you can end up focusing on misleading factors. Stuff that really has more to do with personality-the fact that some people are simply more expressive or emotional or needy in a relationship. But beyond such smokescreens, the answer is there. Love is seldom-almost never-an even proposition.

I still think I love him more. It's one of those things you never know for certain because there's no way to enter all the relationship data in a computer and have it spit out a definitive answer. You can't quantify love, and if you try, you wind up focusing on misleading factors.

Don’t destroy yourself over somebody else’s foolishness. I know they betrayed you. I know they lied on you. I know they talked behind your back and told all of your business. I know they hurt you to the core. I know they turned their back on you. I know they cheated on you. I know they mislead you. I know, I KNOW. In spite of it all, you have to know that you are worth more than what they dished out to you. You will survive! You will make it through! Remember who YOU are and know YOUR self-worth!

By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium. The fault lies with art, not life. Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories – stories that don’t dwell so much on the beginning, that don’t promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalise our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love.

While deeply admiring and affirming past prophets, the Qur’an casts a critical eye on human misapplication of their revelations. “Our prophetic guides came to them with clarifying signs, yet many among them soon lapsed, spreading disorder in the land” (5:32). The perpetual dynamic of monotheistic values revived by prophets only to be subsequently squandered by humans is what concerns the Qur’an. It diagnoses a range of repeated failures, including: losing a close relationship with the Divine and reverting to idolatry; debating minutiae as an excuse to avoid bold action; imposing dogma not found in scripture and turning petty disputes over dogma into deadly violence; and elites selfishly abusing their leadership positions to mislead and manipulate.

Don't try to be the missing key in my life, and I won't be the unmatched lock, that doesn't let you in.

I think timing is better left up to God to decide then religious leaders. I once met a man that brought his wife flowers in the hospital. They held hands, kissed and were as affectionate as any cute couple could be. They were both in their eighties. I asked them how long they were married. I expected them to tell me fifty years or longer. To my surprise, they said only five years. He then began to explain to me that he was married thirty years to someone that didn’t love him, and then he remarried a second time only to have his second wife die of cancer, two years later. I looked at my patient (his wife) sitting in the wheelchair next to him smiling. She added that she had been widowed two times. Both of her marriages lasted fifteen years. I was curious, so I asked them why they would even bother pursuing love again at their age. He looked at me with astonishment and said, “Do you really think that you stop looking for a soulmate at our age? Do you honestly believe that God would stop caring about how much I needed it still, just because I am nearing the end of my life? No, he left the best for last. I have lived through hell, but if I only get five years of happiness with this woman then it was worth the years of struggle I have been through.

You can't quantify love, and if you try, you can wind up focusing on misleading factors. Stuff that has really has more to do with personality- the fact that some people are simply more expressive or emotional or needy in a relationship. But beyond such smokescreens, the answer is there. Love is seldom- almost never -even proposition. Someone always loves more.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like “nation,” “society,” and “culture” name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding.

Oooh, and I should check if Fletch is around.” “Fletch?” “Kyle Fletcher, but I call him Fletch,” she says absently. “Ex-boyfriend.” My head swivels toward her. “You’re making plans with your ex-boyfriend?” “Retract those claws, missy. Fletch is still a good friend of mine.” I can’t fight my curiosity. “How long were you together?” “Three years.” I whistle softly. “And then three and a half more with Sean…You’re a nester, huh?” “No, I’m not,” she protests. “Babe, that’s almost seven years of your life spent in a serious relationship. And you’re only twenty-two.” “Twenty-one. I’m a Christmas baby.” “For real? Your birthday’s the twenty-fifth?” “The twenty-fourth. I guess that makes me a Christmas Eve baby. Sorry.” “You better be sorry. How dare you mislead me like that?

The nurse looked surprised. 'You're a bit high on the totem pole to be taking statements.' Carol debated momentarily how to describe her relationship with Tony. 'Colleague' was insufficient, 'landlord' somehow misleading and 'friend' both more and less than the truth. She shrugged. 'He feeds my cat.

You might be too enmeshed with the other person, or “codependent,” and you must learn to set better “boundaries.” The basic premise underlying this point of view is that the ideal relationship is one between two self-sufficient people who unite in a mature, respectful way while maintaining clear boundaries. If you develop a strong dependency on your partner, you are deficient in some way and are advised to work on yourself to become more “differentiated” and develop a “greater sense of self.” The worst possible scenario is that you will end up needing your partner, which is equated with “addiction” to him or her, and addiction, we all know, is a dangerous prospect. While the teachings of the codependency movement remain immensely helpful in dealing with family members who suffer from substance abuse (as was the initial intention), they can be misleading and even damaging when applied indiscriminately to all relationships.

But as soon as we grasp this—and I appreciate it takes quite a bit of latching onto for people who have spent their whole lives thinking the other way—we see that if salvation is that sort of thing, it can’t be confined to human beings. When human beings are saved, in the past as a single coming-to-faith event, in the present through acts of healing and rescue, including answers to the prayer “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and in the future when they are finally raised from the dead, this is always so that they can be genuine human beings in a fuller sense than they otherwise would have been. And genuine human beings, from Genesis 1 onward, are given the mandate of looking after creation, of bringing order to God’s world, of establishing and maintaining communities. To suppose that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!), and for our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven (misleading though that is!) is like a boy being given a baseball bat as a present and insisting that since it belongs to him, he must always and only play with it in private. But of course you can only do what you’re meant to do with a baseball bat when you’re playing with other people. And salvation only does what it’s meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.

We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents' relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst.

It would be easy, but misleading, to see the rise of terrorism expertise as simply a response to an increase in political violence. This simplistic empirical approach neglects the reflexive relationship between experts and their objects of knowledge. Others have suggested that we view terrorism expertise as a product of political propaganda by governments seeking to demonize their enemies and draw attention away from their own use of violence. But this “critical” approach (see, for example, Chomsky 2001; Herman and O’Sullivan 1989), which argues that terrorism experts constitute an “industry,” funded and organized by the state and other elite interests, neglects the agency and interests of the experts themselves, and the ways in which these interests may either harmonize or clash with those of the state, the media, and the “terrorists” themselves.

Vaclav Havel was talking about when he said . . . The relationship to the world that modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality, and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia, completely alienating man as an observer from himself as a being. Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, yet it increasingly seems that they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structures, and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose, and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique “self.”18

Practice makes perfect,” is misleading. When practicing, many people do the behavior by rote—without thinking about what they’re doing. But this kind of practice does not make perfect. Quite the opposite. Instead of leading to perfection, rote practice tends to make permanent the current less-than-desirable level of ability.

In the aftermath of events such as Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, people want to know whether they were caused by climate change. These are bad questions and no answer can be given that is not misleading. It is like asking whether when a baseball player gets a base hit, it is caused by his .350 batting average. One cannot say “yes,” but saying “no” falsely suggests that there is no relationship between his batting average and the base hit.

First, Jesus was going to take us to be with him in heaven. There are different ways people have imagined this happening, but the message is still the same. Somehow, the good news in the past (what Jesus did two thousand years ago) points forward to one particular piece of good news about the future (he will take us to heaven). This completes the new relationship with God that is for many the sole focus of the good news. And this is seriously misleading.

Ancel Keys conducted research on the diets of people from 22 countries to observe the relationship between cholesterol intake and cardiovascular disease. He started publishing results as of 1955. In his findings however, he only presented data from 7 countries that proved a linear relationship (apparently causal) between the two parameters.                 When other researchers started accessing the same databases that Keys did, and when they plugged-in the data from all 22 countries, they observe no relationship between cholesterol intake and heart disease whatsoever [70]. But it was too late at that point, because the harm was made. Keys gained a lot of influence and may have participated in the fat phobia that emerged once his misleading study was out.

genuine human beings, from Genesis 1 onward, are given the mandate of looking after creation, of bringing order to God’s world, of establishing and maintaining communities. To suppose that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!), and for our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven (misleading though that is!) is like a boy being given a baseball bat as a present and insisting that since it belongs to him, he must always and only play with it in private. But of course you can only do what you’re meant to do with a baseball bat when you’re playing with other people.

First, while the church shouldn’t affirm homosexual activity (or adultery, idolatry, or greed, for that matter), it should welcome anyone—gays included—to discover who God is and to find his forgiveness.5 Lots of people wear WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelets and T-shirts, but they don’t treat homosexuals as Jesus would. He wouldn’t react in fear or avoid them; he would welcome them, sit with them, and tell them of God’s deep interest in them. Many churches treat homosexuals as modern-day lepers—as outcasts; but Jesus came to heal, help, and set all people free to live for God. Surely churches can welcome gays without condoning their lifestyle—just as they can receive adulterers and alcoholics. As my pastor, Bill Stepp, regularly says, “God accepts you the way you are, but he loves you too much to leave you as you are.” It’s strange that professing Christians single out homosexual activity as the most wicked of sins. Often those who claim to be saved by God’s grace are amazingly judgmental, hateful, and demeaning (calling homosexual persons “fairies” or “faggots”) rather than being compassionate and embracing. Professing Christians are often harder on homosexuals outside the church than they are with the immorality within the church (cf. 1 Cor. 5:9–13). New Testament scholar Bruce Winter writes with a prophetic voice, “The ease with which the present day church often passes judgment on the ethical or structural misconduct of the outside community is at times matched only by its reluctance to take action to remedy the ethical conduct of its own members.”6 Second, the Bible doesn’t condemn homosexual inclinations, but rather sexual activity outside of a marriage relationship between husband and wife. In fact, no writers of antiquity, including biblical ones, had any idea of “sexual orientation”; they talked about sexual behavior. When the Scriptures speak against immoral sexual relationships, the focus is not on inclinations or feelings (whether homosexual or heterosexual).7 Rather, the focus is on acting out those impulses (which ranges from inappropriately dwelling on sexual thoughts—lusting—to carrying them out sexually). Even though we are born with a sinful, self-centered inclination, God judges us based on what we do.8 Similarly, a person may, for whatever reasons, have same-sex inclinations, but God won’t judge him on the basis of those inclinations, but on what he does with them. A common argument made by advocates of a gay lifestyle is that the Bible doesn’t condemn loving, committed same-sex relationships (“covenant homosexuality”)—just homosexual rape or going against one’s natural sexual inclination, whether hetero- or homosexual. Now, “the Bible doesn’t say anything about ——” or “Jesus never said anything about ——” arguments can be tricky and even misleading. The Bible doesn’t speak about abortion, euthanasia, political involvement, Christians fighting in the military, and the like. Jesus, as far as we know, never said anything about rape or child abuse. Nevertheless, we can get guidance from Scripture’s more basic affirmations about our roles as God’s image-bearers, about God’s creation design, and about our identity and redemption in Christ, as we’ll see below.

Now you are ready to greet the client. This moment is important. Although it may vary slightly depending on how many people are involved and the circumstances under which you are seeing the client, there are a few basic principles intended to transmit courtesy, interest, and a clear message that this is a professional rather than a social relationship. If at all possible, you should always go out and meet the client rather than having her sent to your office by a receptionist. Opinions vary on whether you should introduce yourself more or less formally, e.g., “I’m Ms. Lukas” versus “I’m Susan Lukas” versus “I’m Susan.” They also vary on the issue of whether or not to shake hands with clients. Depending on her clinical outlook and the circumstances under which a client is coming for therapy, your supervisor may feel that any physical contact might transmit a misleading or potentially threatening notion about therapy. Therefore, all these questions should be discussed before the first interview. Having greeted the client, and while leading the way to your office, you should remember that the interview has already started. Listen very carefully to what the client is saying and make a mental note of your overall first impression. When you have ushered her in, pay attention to how the client reacts to your office. What does she say? Where and how does she choose to sit? (If possible, you should arrange seating so the client can sit facing you at a distance that permits her to speak in a normal voice, but is far enough away so that she does not feel you could reach out and touch her. If the client comes from a culture in which reaching out and touching another person’s arm is a sign of friendship or interest, then she can move the chair closer to you if she chooses to.) Does she wait for you to suggest that she sit down? Does she sit on the edge of the chair? Does she seem disorganized? Try to help the client to feel more comfortable. Show her where she can hang her coat if she wants to. Suggest that she might feel more comfortable in another seat. But remember: If the client chooses not to do any of these things, do not urge her to. The goal is to “start where the client is,” rather than expecting her to do it your way. You are concerned with her feeling of what is comfortable, not yours.

When we create on the conscious level, we are able to make choices. When we create on the unconscious level we cannot make choices. We often hear about how we have the “power of choice”, but that is not entirely accurate. It is misleading to say someone chooses a dysfunctional relationship, money problems, or any other negative situation in his or her life. Most of the time we are operating in the “default mode” which is based on our past conditioning. Choice implies being conscious. However, when you are unconscious, you cannot make conscious choices. You are operating in the “default mode” or on “automatic pilot.” The default mode is the survival mode. This is where the mind takes control without us even being aware of what is happening. Choice begins when you stop identifying with your conditioned patterns of the past. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious. This means you are compelled to think, feel and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. When we can make choices, we’re no longer the victim of our unconscious reactions. If our unconscious negative thinking does not support what we want, rather than trying to eliminate it, all we have to do is center on “right thinking.” “Right thinking” is a thought pattern that is based on truth. Truth by its very nature must always be “right.

From the Emergence Place: Pueblo potters, the creators of petroglyphs and oral narratives, never conceived of removing themselves from the earth and sky. So long as the human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. ‘A portion of territory they eye can comprehend in a single view’ does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being and their surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory they survey. Viewers are as much part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on. There is no high mesa edge or mountain peak where one can stand and not immediately be part of all that surrounds. Leslie Marmon Silko

Spengler's book is rich in these "morphological relationships" between dissimilar activities that prove the coherent spirit of each culture and epoch. So there was a common spirit int eh ancient Greek polis and in Euclidean geometry, as there was also between the differential calculus and the state of Louis XIV. Chronological "contemporaneity" was misleading. It should be replaced by an understanding of how different events play similar roles in expressing the culture spirit. Thus he sees his own kind of "contemporaneity" in the Trojan War and the Crusades, in Homer and the songs of the Nibelungs.

The dependent origination, or structure of conditions, appears as a flexible formula with the intention of describing the ordinary human situation of a man in his world (or indeed any conscious event where ignorance and craving have not entirely ceased). That situation is always complex, since it is implicit that consciousness with no object, or being ( bhava— becoming, or however rendered) without consciousness (of it), is impossible except as an artificial abstraction. The dependent origination, being designed to portray the essentials of that situation in the limited dimensions of words and using only elements recognizable in experience, is not a logical proposition (Descartes’ cogito is not a logical proposition). Nor is it a temporal cause-and-effect chain: each member has to be examined as to its nature in order to determine what its relations to the others are (e.g. whether successive in time or conascent, positive or negative, etc., etc.). A purely cause-and-effect chain would not represent the pattern of a situation that is always complex, always subjective-objective, static-dynamic, positive-negative, and so on. Again, there is no evidence of any historical development in the various forms given within the limit of the Sutta Piþaka (leaving aside the Paþisambhidámagga), and historical treatment within that particular limit is likely to mislead, if it is hypothesis with no foundation. Parallels with European thought have been avoided in this translation. But perhaps an exception can be made here, with due caution, in the case of Descartes. The revolution in European thought started by his formula cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) is not yet ended. Now, it will perhaps not escape notice that the two elements, “I think” and “I am,” in what is not a logical proposition parallel to some extent the two members of the dependent origination, consciousness and being (becoming). In other words, consciousness activated by craving and clinging as the dynamic factory, guided and blinkered by ignorance (“I think” or “consciousness with the conceit ‘I am’”), conditions being (“therefore I am”) in a complex relationship with other factors relating subject and object (not accounted for by Descartes). The parallel should not be pushed too far. In fact it is only introduced because in Europe the dependent origination seems to be very largely misunderstood with many strange interpretations placed upon it, and because the cogito does seem to offer some sort of reasonable approach.

The extent and character of the continuity and the differences between prophecy and apocalyptic are highly debatable. But the distinction means that the relationship between Revelation and the Jewish apocalypses has also been debated. Often the issue has been posed in a misleading way, as though John himself would have made the kinds of distinction modern scholars have made between prophecy and apocalyptic. This is very unlikely. The book of Daniel, which was one of John’s major Old Testament sources, he would certainly have regarded as a prophetic book. If he knew some of the post-biblical apocalypses, as he most probably did, he will have seen them as a form of prophecy. The forms and traditions which Revelation shares with other works we call apocalypses John will have used as vehicles of prophecy, in continuity with Old Testament prophecy.

Circumstances will discourage you. People will disappoint you. Emotions will lie to you. Relationships will mislead you. Imagination will deceive you. Life will mistreat you. Human strength will fail you. But God has anointed you for a high calling

Circumstances will discourage you. People will disappoint you. Emotions will lie to you. Relationships will mislead you. Imagination will deceive you. Life will mistreat you. Human strength will fail you. But God has anointed you for a high calling that rises above all of these things.

No matter how long he's known the woman or how casually they have met, if he's strongly attracted to her, he immediately starts thinking of marriage. Frightened by even the thought, he ends it, right there. A man such as this may know that he can't make a permanent commitment, and be really sincere about not wanting to use or mislead a woman by allowing a relationship to develop further.

Pelosi’s wariness seemed confirmed on March 22, 2019, when Mueller flubbed the unveiling of his team’s report on Trump’s ties to foreign governments. Although the report was devastating, Mueller’s initial silence allowed Attorney General William Barr to issue misleading characterizations that overshadowed the report’s details. Barr claimed that the report “exonerated” the president. The actual report documented a number of extremely problematic relationships between the president’s campaign and Russian officials. Mueller, who did not believe he had the authority to call for impeachment since the independent counsel law had expired, then made things worse by faltering in congressional testimony.

But assessing correlations between a policy and some outcome may lead to faulty policy conclusions if they are interpreted as a causal relationship without thinking hard about the mechanisms or other variables that might drive the results. In the case of COVID-19, assessing lockdowns’ effectiveness by looking at crude death numbers might be misleading if lockdowns were introduced because death numbers were expected to rise, or if we ignore major changes in behavior.

Moreover, there was a striking lack of relationship between [fascism's] material and numerical strength and its political effectiveness. The very term "movement" was misleading since it implied some kind of enrolment or personal participation of large numbers. If anything was characteristic of fascism, it was its independence of such popular manifestations. Though usually aiming at a mass following, its potential strength was reckoned not by the numbers of its adherents but by the influence of the persons in high position whose good will the fascist leaders possessed, and whose influence in the community could be counted upon to shelter them from the consequences of an abortive revolt, thus taking the risks out of revolution.

[Love Wasn’t as They Said] Love wasn’t as they said… It didn’t last forever as they claimed… It is fleeting moments only recognized By those with sight and insight… And perhaps only captured By those patiently waiting as if to see a lightning in the sky… And, like lightning perhaps, we never know Where love goes after it strikes… And perhaps the only love that lasts Is one that know when to stay and when to walk away… ** Love wasn’t synonymous with honor As they defined honor... It is often the awareness that falls upon us After betraying or letting down the loved ones… Love wasn’t holding hands forever, It is boring afternoons spent together With no words And no activities… It wasn’t lifetime sexual attraction As many claimed… It is the companionship that remains After the hormonal fires are put out, When the noises of immaturity go silent, And after the childish quarrels and squabbles stop… It is the home that remains erected Long after getting erectile dysfunction… It that appetite for life after the last egg from the last period… It is that strange feeling of elation That may come after what is mistakenly called a “midlife crisis”, To fill that frightening gap between hope and reality… ** Love a widow brushing her hair, On a bus or in a public place, Unbothered by onlookers or passersby, As she opens her shabby handbag And takes out an apple to bite on With the teeth she has left… Love is an eye surrounded with wrinkles But is finally able to see the world Sensitively, insightfully, and more realistically, Without exaggerated embellishment or distortion… ** Love is shreds of joy Interspersed with long intervals Of boredom, exhaustion, reproach, and disappointment… It’s not measured with red flowers, bears, and expensive gifts in shiny wraps, It is who remains when the glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol numbers are high… It’s those who stay after the heart catheterization and knee replacement surgeries… Love gets stronger after getting osteoporosis And may move mountains despite the rheumatism… ** Love is the few seconds when our eyes cross with strangers Who awaken in us feelings we hadn’t experienced with those living with us in years… Or perhaps it’s rubbing arms and shoulders with a passenger On a bus, in a train, or on a plane… It is that fleeting look from a passerby in the street Convey to us that they, too, have understood the game, But there’s not much they can do about it… ** Love wasn’t as they said It wasn’t as they said… It is not 1+1=2… It is sometimes three or more… At other times, it grows at point zero or lower, In solitude, in loneliness, and in seclusion… Isn’t it time, I wonder, to demolish everything falsely, unfairly, and misleadingly attributed to love? Or is it that love burns and dies Precisely when we try to capture it in our hands? [Original poem published in Arabic on October 27, 2022 at ahewar.org]

[Love Wasn’t as They Said] Love wasn’t as they said… It didn’t last forever as they claimed… It is fleeting moments only recognized By those with sight and insight… And perhaps only captured By those patiently waiting as if to see a lightning in the sky… And, like lightning perhaps, we never know Where love goes after it strikes… And perhaps the only love that lasts Is one that know when to stay and when to walk away… ** Love wasn’t synonymous with honor As they defined honor... It is often the awareness that falls upon us After betraying or letting down the loved ones… Love wasn’t holding hands forever, It is boring afternoons spent together With no words And no activities… It wasn’t lifetime sexual attraction As many claimed… It is the companionship that remains After the hormonal fires are put out, When the noises of immaturity go silent, And after the childish quarrels and squabbles stop… It is the home that remains erected Long after getting erectile dysfunction… It that appetite for life after the last egg from the last period… It is that strange feeling of elation That may come after what is mistakenly called a “midlife crisis”, To fill that frightening gap between hope and reality… ** Love is a widow brushing her hair, On a bus or in a public place, Unbothered by onlookers or passersby, As she opens her shabby handbag And takes out an apple to bite on With the teeth she has left… Love is an eye surrounded with wrinkles But is finally able to see the world Sensitively, insightfully, and more realistically, Without exaggerated embellishment or distortion… ** Love is shreds of joy Interspersed with long intervals Of boredom, exhaustion, reproach, and disappointment… It’s not measured with red flowers, bears, and expensive gifts in shiny wraps, It is who remains when the glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol numbers are high… It’s those who stay after the heart catheterization and knee replacement surgeries… Love gets stronger after getting osteoporosis And may move mountains despite the rheumatism… ** Love is the few seconds when our eyes cross with strangers Who awaken in us feelings we hadn’t experienced with those living with us in years… Or perhaps it’s rubbing arms and shoulders with a passenger On a bus, in a train, or on a plane… It is that fleeting look from a passerby in the street Convey to us that they, too, have understood the game, But there’s not much they can do about it… ** Love wasn’t as they said It wasn’t as they said… It is not 1+1=2… It is sometimes three or more… At other times, it grows at point zero or lower, In solitude, in loneliness, and in seclusion… Isn’t it time, I wonder, to demolish everything falsely, unfairly, and misleadingly attributed to love? Or is it that love burns and dies Precisely when we try to capture it in our hands? [Original poem published in Arabic on October 27, 2022 at ahewar.org]

THE ILLUSORY SELF The word I embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth, depending on how it is used. In conventional usage, it is not only one of the most frequently used words in the language (together with the related words: me, my, mine, and myself) but also one of the most misleading. In normal everyday usage, I embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. This illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only in to the reality of space and time but also into human nature, referred to as an optical illusion of consciousness. That illusory self then becomes the basis for all further interpretations, or rather misinterpretations of reality, all thought processes, interactions, and relationships. Your reality becomes a reflection of the original illusion.

In the cloudy swirl of misleading ideas surrounding public discussion of addiction, there’s one that stands out: the misconception that drug taking by itself will lead to addiction — in other words, that the cause of addiction resides in the power of the drug over the human brain. It is one of the bedrock fables sustaining the so-called “War on Drugs.” It also obscures the existence of a basic addiction process of which drugs are only one possible object, among many. Compulsive gambling, for example, is widely considered to be a form of addiction without anyone arguing that it’s caused by a deck of cards. The notion that addiction is drug-induced is often reinforced. Clearly, if drugs by themselves could cause addiction, we would not be safe offering narcotics to anyone. Medical evidence has repeatedly shown that opioids prescribed for cancer pain, even for long periods of time, do not lead to addiction except in a minority of susceptible people. During my years working on a palliative care ward I sometimes treated terminally ill cancer patients with extraordinarily high doses of narcotics — doses that my hardcore addict clients could only dream of. If the pain was alleviated by other means — for example, when patient was successfully given a nerve block for bone pain due to malignant deposits in the spine — the morphine could be rapidly discontinued. Yet if anyone had reason to seek oblivion through narcotic addiction, it would have been these terminally ill human beings. An article in the Canadian Journal of Medicine in 2006 reviewed international research covering over six thousand people who had received narcotics for chronic pain that was not cancerous in origin. There was no significant risk of addiction, a finding common to all studies that examine the relationship between addiction and the use of narcotics for pain relief. “Doubts or concerns about opioid efficacy, toxicity, tolerance, and abuse or addiction should no longer be used to justify withholding opioids,” concluded a large study of patients with chronic pain due to rheumatic disease. We can never understand addiction if we look for its sources exclusively in the actions of chemicals, no matter how powerful they are.

While this signifier can be difficult to pin down with precision, it can clearly be heard in the records of Duane Eddy and many other guitarists of the period. It usually involves a relatively nondistorted electric guitar timbre articulated with a strong attack and a melody played on the lower strings. Reverberation is ubiquitous, and almost equally common were echo, amplifier tremolo, and use of the guitar’s vibrato bar. This overall guitar sound is often called a Fender sound, but that is a bit misleading, since Gretsch guitars were equally specialized for the purpose, and many other brands were also used. What makes the twang guitar interesting in topical terms is that it not only signified the western topic but also was key to a linked set of genres that intersect one another in complex ways: western, spy, and surf. Because these were all signified by overlapping musical features and in turn resemble one another in some of their broader connotations, we could speak of a twang guitar continuum: a range of topics that coalesced only shortly before psychedelia and were cognate with it in a variety of ways. Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida point out that the twang guitar, often in a minor mode with a flat seventh, was a common factor between spaghetti western and Bond/spy scores in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I would add surf guitar to the list, with its sonic experimentation and general relationship to fun, escape, and exoticism: “[The twang guitar] probably owes some of its immediate success as a spy sound to its similarity with various pre-rock ‘Viennese intrigue’ sounds like Anton Karas’s Third Man zither licks (1949). But in the 1962–64 period that produced The Virginian (1962), Dr. No (1963) and Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), steely Fender guitar was well on its way to becoming an all-purpose excitement/adventure timbre” (Tagg and Clarida 2003, 367).

Words such as receptive, feminine, yielding or mother can be misleading as we tend to understand them as poles with opposites. However, they hint at what lies beyond them, so we need to consider them in a different way if we are to grasp what the 2nd Siddhi really means. This is something that can only be grasped intuitively. Thus when the One externalises itself as a manifestation in form, it has not created a duality, but a trinity. Every duality is really a relationship, and every relationship is really a three — there is a man, a woman and instantly there is also a couple — the relationship itself. In Divine mathematics, the number two is always an illusion — it cannot logically exist. If you can say anything at all about the number two you might say it is a bridge — a dynamic process that is instantaneously transmuted before it is even born. These are concepts that cannot be approached with ordinary logic. Just like the quantum particles in physics that avoid our definition because they appear to be linked to our very perceptual apparatus, oneness cannot be comprehended, only lived. Enlightenment is not an experience. This is a sentence to meditate upon like a Zen koan. If you see oneness as an experience to be attained or that may one day happen to you, then you are caught within that straight line between two points. The third thing is transcendence. It does not occur to you — rather it negates you. Ironically, transcendence does not take you away from life, as its name might suggest — it places you right in the heart of life, where you have always been. It unifies all opposites, ends all riddles, leaves all mysteries just as they are and brings a sense of trust that cannot be described. One cannot even really use a word like trust to describe the Siddhi of Unity because trust suggests duality again — that there is somehow a truster and a trustee. This is the wonderful dilemma of the siddhic state.

While the teachings of the codependency movement remain immensely helpful in dealing with family members who suffer from substance abuse (as was the initial intention), they can be misleading and even damaging when applied indiscriminately to all relationships.

Twin flames that run away will often come back, sometimes more than once. You may be entering a phase of your union filled with separations and reunions. No one knows what will happen, but they will return if they are your true twin flame. The term chaser can be misleading. After all, you shouldn't physically chase them because they decide when to return.

Weakness of will can be a misleading metaphor, for there is no will, consequently there are neither strong nor weak wills. The multiplicity of the impulses and their disarray, the want of system in their relationships with one another, is what results in a 'weak will'; their coordination, under the hegemony of a single impulse, results in a 'strong will': in the first case vacilation and a lack of emphasis, in the second, precision and a clear direction.